privilege as a meme

even here, on thought catalog, she can find no peace, no respite

Don't Hate Me Because I Work
• 9 minutes ago

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I'm pretty sure you can be humble without pretending to be. I also have baby boomer parents. I also wear expensive clothes purchased with my own income. I also am debt free. So let your Gucci freak flag fly. Just remember, no matter how much pity you have for yourself and props you give to yourself for assuming that natural climb to upper-middle class, you're still a terrible human being and they are judging you as a person rather than your belongings.

I weep for those who will reflexively "like" such a thing.

Ach, the woman just sounds like an old-school preppie - and they don't spend money on anything but private tuition fees, anonymous charitable donations and real estate. The car will be an old beater of quality, a Volvo or Saab, and obviously they'll never go hungry or want for much. They're not materialistic because they don't use clothes or other portable possessions to signal status, but that in itself is a status an it's irritating to many observers.

An old college friend is from that background; her parents simply wrote a check for the entire four years' tuition in one go. At Sarah Lawrence, they offer parents the chance to pay for four years at a reduced price if you can swing the funds; the discount is arrived at by 4x the student's first-year tuition, which obviously goes up each year for the others. She claims all her college friends were financial aid recipients; hanging out with the obvious/nouveau rich kids was not her thing.

An old-school preppie such as you describe would never expose herself to such ridicule for the sake of saying what she only takes for granted.

A pro would have kicked off with a dubious anecdote about a strawman being mean to her at a party.

they don't spend money on anything but private tuition fees, anonymous charitable donations and real estate. The car will be an old beater of quality, a Volvo or Saab, and obviously they'll never go hungry or want for much

I'd never realized it, but this describes one of my childhood friends' parents to a t. Really nice architecturally interesting home in a well-regarded old neighborhood, used to have older volvos and I think in retirement actually started restoring _really_ old volvos, and generally not ostentatious.

it describes quite a few people i've known!

Then the kids move into squatter houses and start punk rock bands.

nah, the kid went to Harvard and works in business strategy for startups or something. blargh

*thinks about thirty-year-old Volvo my dad drives, is nonplussed by squatter house ventilation*

i didn't earn any of this shit that i have fwiw

hi-five, crut

also bruneau otm

I don't know any kids like that! All the ones who squatted in houses and played in punk bands either had really modest upbringings or had relatively non-ostentatious but generic suburban lives

An old-school preppie such as you describe would never expose herself to such ridicule for the sake of saying what she only takes for granted.

She's seriously breaching the code. This should merely be fuel for some self-deprecating humor over a good glass of wine, instead she's gone full-blown Millenial and bored us all publicly online. Her parents are probably rolling their eyes and chuckling.

Yeah, but the gulf between rich and poor hasn't been this wide since the Great Depression; her parents will have grown up in a more egalitarian time with less guilt and less oversharing generally. Also, if what went down in The Group is in any way accurate, back then, people who had money politely left paid employment to people who actually needed to work for a living. I wish the fuckers would do the same now - they're even richer.

uh i don't think she's nec /that/ rich

also i think inequality is increasing mostly because of hyperconcentration in the very top income shares (why you hear ppl talk about not just 1% but .01%) so even if they all gave up their jobs it's not that many jobs

My favorite part in that whole article for me was when she talked about the (pretty obviously imagined) look on her doorman's face when she received J. Crew packages in the mail (but they're "for work," if he only knew!) As though J.Crew is the Lamborghini countach of clothing, so unbelievably beyond the imagination of a simple doorman that he is embarrassed even to hold the package -- the first time he has ever even seen such a thing, of course.

she's probably always a jerk to her doorman and that's why he looks at her like a jerk

at the same time, I'm sort of annoyed that I even read the article, which I only know about because of Gawker, and which is just some dumb thought catalog piece

ding ding ding

the question I have for her, is, how much does she tip

Yes, they always leave that out, and its p important as a true indicator of wite ppl's inner guilt imo

dmac, how much do you tip

Exceedingly generously for here tbf, depending on the service and the race or gender of the server

ps will u check the last link i posted in the irish politics thread, id be curious for yr thoughts on the piece tbr

she tips the j crew deliveryman in paranoid asides

You're one to talk about dicks raining on the parade

wt actual fuck, posted that to whats happening our borad?

It was funnier in that context crut i promise

haha i thought it was otm though!!

careful now

This phone i fuckin swear

you do, regularly

I post, without immediate comment, the rant of someone named Y@sm1n N@1r (via D0ug H3nw00d):

My new good friend Yasmin Nair writes:

I am done with the douchebags who've taken too many queer theory/race theory classes taught by incompetent professors whose only method of grading is to affirmatively count the number of times the words "homonormative" and "white supremacy" appear on your papers. I'm done with the Tim-Wise-cock-sucking (not in a good way) jerks who blather on about white privilege while never pondering the fact that talking about white privilege has made a very well-paid career for a white man, and several POCs, who appropriate the work of people who actually produce work and analyses.

You ignore the fact that millions of white people come from families that have been cut out of access to basics like education for generations, and that many of them have no clue how to navigate labyrinthine university systems, or how to use networks of power to which you have gained access. Instead, you demean and ostracise them because, OMG, they used the wrong ethnic term or misgendered your queer friend insisting on seeing racism and malice where there might be none. You scream "racist" and even evoke the dreaded call of "rapist" without bothering to check your facts because all that matters to you is that you get to be the ones who beat up on that white dude.

You ignore structural problems around class and access because you wouldn't know them if they hit you on the head and because all you've ever been taught in those template-driven classes is how to apply check marks to people. You live in a world where white=racist, and the rest of your work is built upon little more than a constant call to echo white guilt, and nothing else matters.

You choose to ignore the fact that several of your South Asian/Latino friends come from massive amounts of privilege, and that privilege extends far beyond the money they might have, and that their privilege shields them in ways that you would never recognise or simply choose not to recognise. You insist on seeing every Latino as the progeny of sad, poor migrants, even as their social and cultural privilege is made clear, and you insist on calling every Black man "brother" and "man" and insist that he must manifest signs of knowing his "hood" because heaven help the Black man who will not dance to your tune of authenticity. You boast of how many POCs/queers you've fucked, and actually think that fucking is part of some revolutionary act.

You are, more often than not, white, but several of you are also self-identified, self-aggrandising POC douchebags who have crafted entire careers and lives based on doing nothing more than being the assholes who spend their entire lives pointing out how everyone who is white is a racist/anti-queer/homonormative/insert fashionable term here.

Don't bother disagreeing with me here, really. Those who know me and what just happened offline and what I have been talking about know what this is about. I am filled with rage and anger, the breadth of which you cannot understand. I am sick and tired of seeing my friends being maligned by assholes who don't do a lick of work in the revolutions they have claimed as their own.

I am fucking done with the "anti-racist" industry that has sprung up on the graveyard of the shoddy intellectual claptrap that still persists in calling itself radical - queer theory, the white studies bullshit, the anti-PIC critiques that only beat the drum of racism without bothering to think of how neoliberalism has cleverly made it impossible for us to think about the structural violence that simply uses identity to its own ends and to jail millions whom we ignore.

I am done, done, done. You want identity, motherfuckers? I will fucking use my own to expose your racist anti-racist bullshit. I'm so sick of this bullshit. Prepare to be taken down. Hard.

Yes, because you can take up the plight of white people with poor access to education or you can call out racism. Can't do both.

I am fucking done with the "anti-racist" industry that has sprung up on the graveyard of the shoddy intellectual claptrap that still persists in calling itself radical - queer theory, the white studies bullshit, the anti-PIC critiques that only beat the drum of racism without bothering to think of how neoliberalism has cleverly made it impossible for us to think about the structural violence that simply uses identity to its own ends and to jail millions whom we ignore.

Breath in, breath out.

Lady, the word you're looking for is heteronormative.

She seems not to have received the memo about intersectionality - a pretty simple concept, if you ask me. Also I feel like I worked through the issues she describes 25 years ago, when I was a heavily subsidised white undergraduate surrounded by many different shadings and vintages of privilege.

I really don't think the concept of intersectionality is lost on her, nor does she believe that discussing problems white people face or discussing racism is an either/or thing. Teasing out and dealing with her individual grievances is pointless as well. This is nothing other than the rant of woman (of color!) interested in academia, activism & social justice issues, who really hates her friends. These are sentiments that not a few people involved in various lefty causes, secretly believe and feel and some have probably written something similar, but instead of pressing delete like they do, she pressed send.

I'm not up on my terminology. Is there a take on, or understanding of the Social Justice/Activist class from a Marxist perspective?

so many Marxisms, you could range from a simple "this is all an illusory product of the class system" thru to something less boneheaded

wonder if anybody's still touting Engels' line on sexuality?

the jab at "homonormative" is abt strawman anti-assimilationist queers, she def meant that and not heteronormative

was gonna say

1staethyr, I know what she was on about but I've yet to find the queer person who's definitively one or the other.

Around 15 years ago I wrote A Thing (foreword for a book of short stories by women) where I said that I was a kamikaze feminist, working toward a world where different factions were not divided and ruled by the classism, racism and sexism of people who were beneficiaries of the status quo - and finding a way to make various oppressions history. We have to find a way of doing that without getting personal and therefore getting sidetracked.

Maybe in London it's easier to identify or find examples of post-colonial privilege: the rich Nigerians who are nevertheless treated like shit on the street by lower-class white overseer types; the Bengali Brahmin feminist who looks down her nose at the Punjabi Jat feminist because of caste and doesn't expect her white friends to clock that because LOOK OVER THERE AT THESE MEN; the countless people in academia from political families (a bunch of my friends come from developing world ruling-class backgrounds where family members are either in jail or in power, depending on the year) who affect a certain amount of solidarity with working class people until they go home and shut the door...

So often in political and academic discourse, we are guilty of minimising the good in the search for the perfect, and this woman is no exception.

my initial takeaway was to lol at the ineffective googleproofing

I'll have more substantial thoughts later once I work through how I feel about publicly ranting about an event that you don't want to give any details about.

Dear Yasmin Nair,

Once you've taken down (hard) all the people who actually fit your rather florid descriptions, plz take some time to walk back to the beginning and figure out what the numerous more sensible ones, who don't fit your descriptions but are addressing the issue rationally, are driving at.

All that matters to me is getting to be the one who beats up on that white dude tbh

Get in line tbh