Poor Little White Boy Fights The Power

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/nyregion/at-princeton-privilege-is-a-commonplace-b-misunderstood-or-c-frowned-upon.html?hpw&rref=education

It is a familiar phrase on college campuses, often meant to serve as conversational kryptonite, the final word in an argument to which there is no response.

“Check your privilege.”

But Tal Fortgang, a Princeton freshman from Westchester County, had a response.

After class recently, he was explaining to a classmate his views on welfare and his concern about the national debt, when he was told — not for the first time, he said — to check his privilege.

He thought about the phrase, what it meant and last month penned a pointed essay in a conservative campus publication, The Tory.

“The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laserlike at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung,” he wrote.

His essay touched a nerve.

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There's already a thread about this: https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=191933.0

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Are we supposed to find those tweets offensive?

Yes? Well the first one less so; that's just funny because he's one of the stereotypical "not letting white people use the n-word is the real racism" idiots.

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"Check your privilege" is an awful phrase, yes. Even worse is comparing being told to your check your privilege to being killed by a drone missile. Though the fact that this Tal fellow would even think that is an acceptable comparison is, incidentally, a wonderful example of white privilege. So I guess it comes full circle.

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Yes, telling people to keep in mind the advantages they have had in life and put in the effort to try and understand the viewpoints of historically marginalized groups is going to lead to some sort of queer matriarchal communist tyranny if we don't have more brave rich white men summon the courage to speak truth to feminists and gay activists and black student groups.

Also, "this viewpoint" is being articulated constantly. Arguing that racial and gender disparities don't exist in America, completely ignoring historical context and its continuing impact on social and economic conditions in this country, telling marginalized groups that their views and demands are too radical, these have been a thing for a long time. Random Princeton freshman who is calling for genocide of Palestinians and decrying the oppression foisted on white kids who can't say the n-word in his free time is not the first person to say that America is a meritocracy and if you disagree you have a victim complex.

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Simfan is entirely detached from reality.

Yes, this "ghetto culture is the reason that black people are poor" stuff is classist garbage.

Also apparently Jay Z isn't a successful black person lol.

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It's funny how the anti-racists are in favor of the n-word and treating people different on account of their race.

Anti-racists are doing neither.

As to Simfan's thing, some people believe that the position of black people in this country is because they listen to rap music, call each other a word, and wear baggy pants. Other people believe it's because of centuries of oppression that persists in structural and systemic inequality. One of these views is just the latest in a long line of rich people attacking poor people for living in poverty, essentially victim-blaming; the other is actually supported by historical and contemporary evidence.

edit: It's just insane to me, that anyone could look at the history of this country, of centuries of slavery (which is literally one of the worst things mankind has ever done); the wholesale destruction of culture and familial structures that went along with; hundreds of years of systemic social and cultural degradation of a people, which continues to this day with enduring stereotypes and media portrayals; countless and routine incidents of organized and state-sanctioned violence and terror; years of segregationist social engineering, that has consigned urban blacks to the worst housing, the worst jobs, the worst schools, the worst infrastructure, the worst police presence, etc., etc. that still exists today; racial beliefs that lead to blacks being incarcerated, denied jobs, denied loans at rates far higher than other ethnicities, even controlling for income, and come to the conclusion that no, the problem must be that they are wearing baggy pants and listening to hip hop and calling each other the n-word. Maybe there are problems with black culture (though there are problems with every culture, and it seems that it's only blacks that we seem to lecture at...), but their effect on black poverty is so infinitesimally small compared to the burden of hundreds of years of history.

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Anyway, people should as always read Ta-Nehisi Coates, who says this stuff more eloquently than anyone can.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/05/how-the-obama-administration-talks-to-black-america/276015/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/other-peoples-pathologies/359841/