Privilege-Checking in a World on FireBy David A. Eisenberg
15 Mar 2022
Privilege is a sham mark of opprobrium—those who decry the privilege of others tend to want more of it for themselves. The dissemblance is all the more distasteful given that the detractors of privilege typically possess, comparatively speaking, an abundance of it. One need not be conversant in history to realize as much. It is enough to simply survey the present. To deplore the unearned structural advantages maintained by white males at a time when Ukrainian cities fall and casualties rise reflects not only poor taste, but poor judgement. It bespeaks an insensitivity or obtuseness that today’s self-designated and self-righteous victims routinely ascribe to those the system is reputed to benefit.
No doubt there are beneficiaries. All societies are comprised of those who are advantaged and those who are not—an enduring reality of human existence, as the egregious inequalities that persisted in every society devoted to stamping them out attest. But to suggest that in America, privilege is parceled out neatly on the basis of skin color and chromosomal composition is ill-considered at best. It ought to suffice to allude to Appalachian whites, Indian Americans, and a growing gender gap favoring women in higher education to give the lie to the duplicitous platitudes that masquerade as incontrovertible truths in the present day.
But it is when one turns one’s gaze from America to the so-called global community that the narrow-mindedness of those who obsess about privilege becomes most glaring. Anyone with the luxury to fret about microaggressions in a world riven by macroaggressions is privileged. Anyone with the liberty to assign himself idiosyncratic pronouns, oblige others to adopt them, and punish those who do not comply knows a good deal of privilege. Everyone who has never had his city shelled; never been forcibly displaced from his home; never had to take up arms to defend his life against an invading army is, as current events make plain, tremendously privileged.
It is an especially blinkered and self-absorbed individual who fails to appreciate as much; the sort of person who petulantly demands that his views not only be heard but validated. (Another privilege retained by those who stridently lament their lack of it: the license to expunge from history those deemed to be on the wrong side of it. The power to rewrite the past and the rules of grammar with it! Have underprivileged people with so much privilege ever before roamed the earth?) That education in America is bent on breeding such minds—minds ill-equipped to contemplate the human condition and comprehend the complexities (moral, political, material, etc.) that attend life in every era—must be ranked one of its greatest failings. If only minds so ill-prepared to judge were not so quick to do so. Alas…
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/03/15/privilege-checking-in-the-shadow-of-war/
