Privileged White Boy

http://theprincetontory.com/main/checking-my-privilege-character-as-the-basis-of-privilege/

Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege

Tal Fortgang '17 / April 2, 2014




http://www.nationalreview.com/article/377483/banality-privilege-editors

MAY 7, 2014 5:00 PM

The Banality of ‘Privilege’

By The Editors

Tal Fortgang, a freshman at Princeton, has created a genuine intellectual controversy with his now-famous essay in the Princeton Tory, since republished by Time, on the subject of “privilege” and being told to “check” it by liberal enforcers of public mores. For those who may be blessedly unaware, “check your privilege” is a common command issued to those who check such demographic boxes as white, male, middle-class, in possession of physical genitals matching one’s metaphysical self-conception, etc. In the 1980s, nonconformists were advised by the liberal thought police that their ideas were “politically incorrect,” a phrase that became infamous. Today they are told “check your privilege,” but the two phrases translate into standard English identically: “Shut up.”
Mr. Fortgang, far from denying the many genuine advantages he has enjoyed in life, places those values in the context of the American experience and describes his inheritance as being defined not by maleness and whiteness but by property and values. He points out that his grandparents were Jewish refugees from the Nazis — his grandfather escaped Poland only to end up in a Siberian labor camp, his grandmother was freed from Bergen-Belsen by Allied troops — and that his grandfather, who started a modest business making wicker baskets upon arrival in the United States, was prone to observing that whatever business troubles he might encounter were kept in proper perspective by his having escaped the clutches of Adolf Hitler.

………

The responses were swift and they were angry. Mr. Fortgang was denounced as ignorant, as somebody who just wasn’t bright enough to understand what “privilege” really means, and more.

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The point of Mr. Fortgang’s essay — the part that drives the Left to rage — is that such advantages as this particular young man from suburban Westchester Countyenjoys are much more the product of the sort of family he comes from, and the opportunities that they enjoyed in the United States, than they are of ethnic and sexual features. Mr. Fortgang’s grandfather is a standing rebuke to the entire concept of white-male privilege: Imagine the sort of moral illiteracy it takes to behold a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who has arrived with no money or connections on foreign shores to live among people who did not, let us remember, universally welcome the Jewish influx, and before the Siberian frost has even been brushed off his shoulders, to point at him and cry: “Lucky you!”

The Left’s conception of “privilege” is categorical — one enjoys “privilege” if one is a member of a privileged class, regardless of one’s personal circumstances — but the facts of life are personal and particular. Educational and economic outcomes are strongly correlated with such factors as whether one’s parents were married and stayed married, their attachment to full-time employment, etc. It is indeed important to choose one’s grandparents wisely, but not in the crass way that the “privilege” analysis would have you believe. Yet the Left is religiously committed to the herd mentality, both for aesthetic reasons and for practical ones: If we start to talk and think seriously about the variables that invest some of us with significant advantages and some with significant disadvantages, then following the evidence will take us in a direction that the Left is not very much inclined to explore.
Mr. Fortgang, far from denying that he enjoys the fruit of his parents’ and his grandparents’ labor, is determined to enjoy them rather than be ashamed of them. A consciousness of the connection between our ancestors’ exertions and our current circumstances is fundamental not just to the conservative understanding of the world but to any conception of organic community. It is not only Mr. Fortgang’s inheritance that the Left wishes to make us ashamed of.

Eight Things Every White Person Should Know About White Privilege

Quote :

1.  There is more than one kind of racial bias.

2.  Racial bias is baked into America’s past.

3.  Implicit racial bias persists in America’s present.

4.  It is inherently, statistically harder to succeed in America if you’re black or brown.

5.  Pointing out racial bias doesn’t make the pointer-outer racist.

6.  Admitting racial bias in America doesn’t mean it’s your fault.

7.  Racial bias is also not the fault of people of color.

8.  Your (false) sense of solidarity in denying racial bias isn’t serving you well at all.

Yeah. Well like you, I just slapped up a link to an opinion piece, which I know from your comments that you haven't even bothered to read.  I haven't actually made any comments or shared any opinions of my own.  

So you're just wasting your time fisking it, because the opinions expressed are those of the writer of the piece, and may or may not reflect my opinion.

I put it up as an illustration of how incredibly banal it is to post an opinion piece without any meaningful (or in this case, any) personal commentary at all.  

You started this thread.  If you have something that you want to say, then just fucking say it...

I ran across this piece in the Atlantic this morning.  It's a bit long, but IMHO, it's required reading for anyone that wants to have an informed opinion about race relations and the real meaning of "white privilege" in this country.

The Case for Reparations

Quote :

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.