privilege as a meme

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

i hereby nominate this to the terribly writing hall of fame

*terrible, also i nominate myself

Tal Fortgang, a freshman at Princeton University

I am imagining David Spade in PCU

http://i.imgur.com/CLQefpS.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/nyregion/at-princeton-privilege-is-a-commonplace-b-misunderstood-or-c-frowned-upon.html?_r=0

All the attention he has received since then has been somewhat surprising, Mr. Fortgang said, adding that he was not always happy with the kind of people who have rallied around him.

“I am sure there are some really racist white supremacists who point to me as a hero on the college campus,” he said. “That is not me. I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”

lol

http://i.imgur.com/OSng9gj.png

Ungh everything about this is perfect

College is about the only time for anyone is going to tell this guy to "check his privilege" unless he, like, decides to attend occupy meetings or actively seeks out leftist bloggers. So it's especially whiny and shortsighted. His checkbox multicultural lit class may involve a lot of privilege checking, but his privilege will be toasted rather than checked for most of the rest of his life.

Tal Fortgang is a sweet name.

true

ahem it means, roughly, 'valley of progress' auf deutsch

“I was in shock because it said ‘checking my privilege,’ and I concluded after reading that he had been ultimately unsuccessful in examining his own privilege,” said Briana Payton

lol

haha

awesome

the generational piggybacking is pretty weak also -- grandson of survivors/son of cuny-system grad is really not the equivalent of a disadvantage in the contemporary world.

i have heard 'check your privilege' once in a year of teaching ivy league seminars and the idea that there is too much introspection on this in the student body is lol

what i don't get is if he's sincere why doesn't he have access to a smart princeton friend who could have pointed out he doesn't even understand the concept of privilege that is being used against him, did he just fire that puppy off to 'the tory' w/o double-checking or what

i have heard 'check your privilege' once in a year of teaching ivy league seminars and the idea that there is too much introspection on this in the student body is lol

― caek, Sunday, May 4, 2014 11:33 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah dude is basically a prince to the pea of privilege

http://thoughtcatalog.com/anonymous/2014/04/im-not-allowed-to-have-feelings-or-opinions-because-im-white/

Tagged Censorship, Culture & Art, race, Racism, Reverse Racism, SJW, The Internet, Tumblr, White Privilege

the internet is a joy some days

Is this a thread about rich kids????

at least the author of the thought catalog piece was savvy enough to publish it anonymously. tal took his half-baked skepticisim about structural inequality to the national stage.

What if instead of a bunch of white people writing articles about white privilege they just published more diverse writers?

lol who, the tory or thought catalog?

what i don't get is if he's sincere why doesn't he have access to a smart princeton friend who could have pointed out he doesn't even understand the concept of privilege that is being used against him, did he just fire that puppy off to 'the tory' w/o double-checking or what

mistaking "hey this discussion might be more productive if you just took a quick quiet second to think about history" for "APOLOGIZE TO ME ABOUT THE NATIVE AMERICANS RIGHT NOW MOTHERFUCKER" is pretty textbook whiteboy tho; i'm sure he has a whole support network that thinks similarly.

sorry i guess that's his failure to understand the concept of checking. there are other problems too.

He checked back as far as his grandfather. So he's ignored the entire history of the world before 1900.

Also, yeah, at the end he says he has check his privilege, but not once did he explain how he got into Princeton, how he is paying for his education, and how he got his writing published by Time magazine.

Oh wait it's his inherited "legacy". He was destined to just have all this stuff given to him.

He checked back as far as his grandfather. So he's ignored the entire history of the world before 1900.

not to defend his essay but pretty sure the jews have had it rough since before 1900

http://gawker.com/conservative-money-front-is-behind-princetons-white-pr-1571826318

So has insisting/suggesting that someone check their privilege been successful since people started doing it? Are there testimonies where privileged people talk about how they looked into it, realised there was stuff they weren't thinking about when they gave opinions on an issue?

Annoyingly, I can't remember who said it, but I'm fairly sure there's a body of wisdom literature with many aphorisms along the lines of 'If you would be wise, first establish what you don't know', etc. Is telling someone to check their privilege a class-conscious version of this idea?

I ask this because I was recently told to check my privilege

Are there any articles on this written by POC? All I've seen so far is white ppl talking white privilege.

(and while I've often nodded along when reading articles saying that ppl should check their privilege but ... wow, actually being told to do so does not produce the desired effect, at least for me, this time)

Who told you this and what is the context?

In what context were you told to check yr priv? If you feel comfortable opening up about that.

Only irl conversation I've had about this has been w 2 other white people, one of whom was just drunkenly boasting his awareness of his privilege.

i think it's reputed only to work in 'safe spaces'

like twitter

lol at that image xp

godspeed yall

^

In what context were you told to check yr priv? If you feel comfortable opening up about that.

This was an IRL conversation with a friend of a friend (not someone I knew very well).

The issue under discussion was a recent event where: feminists in a town petition strip club to close down, it eventually shuts down for lack of custom, crazy twitter trolls start sending to death threats to the homes of people who'd organised the petition.

I started to think out loud about wtf is going on in the mind of the death-threaters; I was told this was trivia and to stop saying what about the men (those exact words) and trying to talk about mental illness without having qualifications, and ultimately 'check your privilege' (those exact words). I didn't think I was doing this, but the other people did. Quite possibly I was.

I felt rather as if I'd been identified pre-emptively as an anonymous badster with a twisted agenda, like we meet online frequently, which felt very uncomfortable in a face to face, non professional, social conversation.

I was told this was trivia and to stop saying what about the men (those exact words)

just so i follow right: you were told to check your privilege in a context where you were bringing up the thought process and potential mental illnesses of threatening people online?

hoos, stop focusing on the purported (white male) victim of privilege checking.

Hoos: yeah. And no, I have no qualifications to talk about mental health or thought processes of people who threaten others online, but neither did the other person in the conversation.

(NB it obviously doesn't matter very much if someone used a phrase to cardamon and it was awkward - that's hardly evidence that 'check your privilege' as a meme should be abandoned)

(Also this is in the UK, which complicates things seeing as the phrase is American in origin iirc)

regardless of anything else (i'm not rly getting it) just cause neither of you are qualified doesn't mean one of you can't bring up the point that neither of you are qualified

'questioning' mental health of people u don't know kinda a dick move anyway? fwiw i've said or at least thought things like "burn in hell" or "fuck off and die" or "we hope that you choooooke" etc and people like to call those sorts of things death threats so like

the flaw in this "meme" for me is that very often in practice (and outside those "safe spaces" where I imagine its use is more specific) it basically becomes yet another jargon of authenticity.

I think the safe spaces thing is probably crucial

yeah its unclear to me whether the privilege you're being invited to check here is
- in relation to focusing on the Threatener as opposed to the Threatened
- over the mental health aspect of the story
- invisible because there's even a privilege-based blind spot in the retelilng( i say that meaning well!), or
- maybe this was an invocation of the term that didn't quite fit
- or something else