Princeton Freshman Wants You to Know He Shouldn’t Have to Check His Privilege

Luke O'NeilMay 3rd, 2014, 3:41 pm
 

While it’s always fun to mock the self-satisfied obliviousness of haplessly privileged college kids, there can be a counter-productive boomerang effect. Our collective sneering today will probably turn out to be the origin story for a future conservative super villain; every day teen Republican bitten by a radioactive Twitter owning. But screw it, let’s do it anyway. It’s unlikely we’re going to find a better candidate for a ideological stoning than Tal Fortgang, of the New Rochelle Fortgangs, who courageously struck out against the oppressive climate of basic cultural awareness and bare minimum human decency that has despoiled college campuses everywhere by penning a whinging invective against the concept of “checking your privilege” in The Princeton Tory. The piece was republished by Time, and a profile of the Rosa Parks of Ivy League white guys was published by The New York Times yesterday, something that always happens to people without privilege.

Fortgang, as many Ivy League students often do in their first few months on campus, found himself being challenged by a concept from outside of his hermetic culture bubble, when classmates began telling him to “check your privilege.” Also like most entitled white guys, upon finding himself on the opposite end of the entire world’s fawning approval, he started crying about it.

“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.”

Fox News and other conservative outlets, perhaps reeling from the vacuum created by the Cliven Bundy-shaped hole in their hero narrative, picked up the story as well.

Instead of stopping to consider why so many people around him had begun suggesting he may want to question where some of his opinions come from, Fortgang tap-danced through a series of aggrieved conservative cliches, practically reaching Reverse Racism Bingo before the end of his second paragraph.

I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive. Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that;” check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.”

Because it wouldn’t be a proper white whine without playing his own victim card in a textbook example of Maybe You’re the Real Racist game, Fortgang went on to explain the struggles of his distant ancestors.

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

Unless you count considering Palestinians and Muslims in general inhuman scum, for example. Many of his critics on Twitter promptly dug up some of his past tweets, like this gem:

I’m not racist, in other words, but my really shitty political opinions are.

Looking through the rest of Fortgang’s timeline you’ll find many other caustic clichéd opinions you’d expect from a young, clueless, aggressively aggrieved conservative. Actually, feminists are the ones with the discriminatory problem, seems to be a common theme.

The cognitive dissonance is just too good to pass up. Sure, my father became a successful businessman, he says, but what does that have to do with me? His father before him didn’t have it so great.

I’m pretty sure almost every person of privilege could say the same. I come from a relatively comfortable background, but if you go back a few generations my ancestors were shitting in holes in the ground, so therefore everything I think and say is good.

What follows in the rest of the piece is a detour into the greatest hits of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mythologizing. Maybe if people moaning about privilege simply worked harder and stopped worrying about what other people have, then they’d be in a position of privilege, like me!

Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color,” he writes. “My appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, and to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting. While I haven’t done everything for myself up to this point in my life, someone sacrificed themselves so that I can lead a better life. But that is a legacy I am proud of.

I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing.

Nor would anyone expect you to. Thankfully, there are plenty of people out here willing to give you a hand.

Watch the segment from Fox below:

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>> Luke O’Neil is a journalist and blogger in Boston. Follow him on Twitter (@lukeoneil47).

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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