Fed Up Princeton Student Pushes Back at Claims of White Privilege
Tal Fortgang is a student at Princeton University who’s sick of being told his opinions don’t matter because he’s a privileged white male.
He wrote a letter which is excerpted below from The College Fix.
There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. 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.
“Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.
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.
Read it all at the link below.
Meet the Poster Child for ‘White Privilege’ – Then Have Your Mind Blown (The College Fix)
Comments
I’m sorry, but you skipped the best part, when he actually “checks his privilege” –
Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended.
And it goes on from there
Here’s the irony, one I share with him.
He’s Jewish. In the old days (and perhaps even today), the universities made a concerted effort to limit the percentage of “his kind” in their presence. As did various corporations, etc. The people who actually believe in “White privilege” do not consider him white.