Maybe white guilt is the bigger issue here.

Gabriella Morrongiello of Campus Reform reports.

Felon, heroin aficionado attributes Ivy League degree to white privilege

To what does Keri Blakinger, a convicted felon turned Ivy League graduate, attribute her success? White privilege, of course.

In 2010, Blakinger was arrested and charged with criminal possession of a substance in the second degree after police found her carrying an estimated $50,000 worth of heroin, among other illicit drugs. At the time, Blakinger was a senior at Cornell University finishing up a degree in English.

To avoid a decade-long prison sentence, the former heroin addict and daughter of two Ivy League graduates accepted a plea deal of two-and-a-half years behind bars. She was simultaneously suspended from Cornell and banned from campus.

“I had descended from a Dean’s List student to a felon,” Blakinger wrote in a recent op-ed for the Washington Post titled “Heroin addiction sent me to prison. White privilege got me out and to the Ivy League.”

“[I]nstead of a decade behind bars and life grasping for the puny opportunities America affords some ex-convicts, I got a second chance,” she wrote. “What made my quick rebound possible? I am white.”

According to Blakinger, a freelance writing position she landed after leaving prison and her eventual readmission to Cornell were made possible because of her skin color.

“Second chances don’t come easily to people of color in the United States,” she wrote, adding that “when you are white, society offers routes to rebuild your life.”