My Privilege
As a descendant of indentured servants and a child of a fiercely independent, strong, southern woman who grew up in extreme rural poverty in the South Carolina backcountry (a Scots-Irish/English sharecropper - a cotton-picking cracker who worked alongside black people in the fields until she was a teenager) I know I sure as hell haven't inherited anything of value from any slaveholder or evil oppressor.
The neo-Marxist activist-oriented "critical race theory" (CRT) described above rests on the sweeping generalization that straight, white men in modern day America receive enormous unearned benefits from "an invisible knapsack of privileges." The past 20 years of exposure to this scholarship and people who uncritically endorse it has inspired me to thoroughly "check my privilege." Modest by contemporary American standards but remarkable by world and historical standards, I've reached a conclusion unintended by purveyors of CRT dogma.
Much to the chagrin of my intersectional socialist opponents, I have, in fact, awakened to the realization that many of my alleged privileges (e.g., adhesive bandages that approximate my skin tone, hotel shampoo that supposedly does wonders for my hair, the fact that I am part of a historically dominant majority group, that I don't have to live in an unsafe, dysfunctional neighborhood, and other luxuries of being a straight, white male in 2020 America) unlikely derive from "systemic oppression."
Surely my arrival at an unorthodox conclusion must be due to my intersecting identity groups' unique susceptibility to psychological pathology, hateful prejudice, emotional fragility, moral ineptitude, desperate but futile efforts to hold on to ill-gotten gains from wanton oppression and appropriation of others' infinitely valuable cultural products.
It simply has to be the case that my melanin deficiency and inherently toxic Y chromosomes have prevented me from understanding my ethical and intellectual superiors' inherently valuable, valid, and authoritative, identitarian wisdom. Only a mean-spirited, willful ignorance of such an impressive body of knowledge extrapolated through inherently valid, flawless, crystal clear interpretations of 'lived experience,' 'emo-cognitions,' poetic letters, moving personal testimonies, interpretive dance, and divine revelation could possibly explain why I have fallen victim to the "implicit bias" and "false consciousness" to which every one of my particular identity groups is so vulnerable.
If you reject the veracity of anything I'm saying simply because of my "unearned privilege" due to my identity categories: straight, white (i.e., European American of German, English, Scots-Irish, and French ancestry... at least according to the National Genographic Project) man in today's "oppressive, heteronormative, white supremacist patriarchy" ...Or if you devalue the "epistemic authority" associated with my Ph.D. in a female-dominated field... Just ask (in private, of course) a random unmarried, childless woman, gay man, or immigrant from India, Nigeria, or communist China - all of whom would likely earn more money and have a higher financial net worth than me.
I am far from oppressed, but I don't feel particularly privileged in comparison to most other Americans today either. I chose my relatively low paying career in education, but I earn a decent salary and mostly enjoy the work. I have a nice house. You can tell by looking at me that I eat well. But I absolutely suck at managing money. For example, I lost years of savings from a teacher's salary naively buying fixer-uppers in crappy locations. I have a mortgage I can't afford on top of the substantive payments for over $100,000 in student loans (after 10 years of college and graduate school).
These outcomes all resulted from choices I made. I will survive. But - and it's the damnedest thing - my straight white male privilege card keeps getting declined. For just a few examples:
Thus, after a thorough cost-benefit analysis, I decided to call up the U.S. Privilege Authority, and (after 2 hours of waiting and pressing buttons) I told them that they could fucking keep the damned card. They laughed out loud and told me that it had already expired a long time ago, anyway.
The neo-Marxist activist-oriented "critical race theory" (CRT) described above rests on the sweeping generalization that straight, white men in modern day America receive enormous unearned benefits from "an invisible knapsack of privileges." The past 20 years of exposure to this scholarship and people who uncritically endorse it has inspired me to thoroughly "check my privilege." Modest by contemporary American standards but remarkable by world and historical standards, I've reached a conclusion unintended by purveyors of CRT dogma.
Much to the chagrin of my intersectional socialist opponents, I have, in fact, awakened to the realization that many of my alleged privileges (e.g., adhesive bandages that approximate my skin tone, hotel shampoo that supposedly does wonders for my hair, the fact that I am part of a historically dominant majority group, that I don't have to live in an unsafe, dysfunctional neighborhood, and other luxuries of being a straight, white male in 2020 America) unlikely derive from "systemic oppression."
Surely my arrival at an unorthodox conclusion must be due to my intersecting identity groups' unique susceptibility to psychological pathology, hateful prejudice, emotional fragility, moral ineptitude, desperate but futile efforts to hold on to ill-gotten gains from wanton oppression and appropriation of others' infinitely valuable cultural products.
It simply has to be the case that my melanin deficiency and inherently toxic Y chromosomes have prevented me from understanding my ethical and intellectual superiors' inherently valuable, valid, and authoritative, identitarian wisdom. Only a mean-spirited, willful ignorance of such an impressive body of knowledge extrapolated through inherently valid, flawless, crystal clear interpretations of 'lived experience,' 'emo-cognitions,' poetic letters, moving personal testimonies, interpretive dance, and divine revelation could possibly explain why I have fallen victim to the "implicit bias" and "false consciousness" to which every one of my particular identity groups is so vulnerable.
If you reject the veracity of anything I'm saying simply because of my "unearned privilege" due to my identity categories: straight, white (i.e., European American of German, English, Scots-Irish, and French ancestry... at least according to the National Genographic Project) man in today's "oppressive, heteronormative, white supremacist patriarchy" ...Or if you devalue the "epistemic authority" associated with my Ph.D. in a female-dominated field... Just ask (in private, of course) a random unmarried, childless woman, gay man, or immigrant from India, Nigeria, or communist China - all of whom would likely earn more money and have a higher financial net worth than me.
I am far from oppressed, but I don't feel particularly privileged in comparison to most other Americans today either. I chose my relatively low paying career in education, but I earn a decent salary and mostly enjoy the work. I have a nice house. You can tell by looking at me that I eat well. But I absolutely suck at managing money. For example, I lost years of savings from a teacher's salary naively buying fixer-uppers in crappy locations. I have a mortgage I can't afford on top of the substantive payments for over $100,000 in student loans (after 10 years of college and graduate school).
These outcomes all resulted from choices I made. I will survive. But - and it's the damnedest thing - my straight white male privilege card keeps getting declined. For just a few examples:
- when the tax man calls,
- when I observe that affirmative action has infiltrated not only college admissions, hiring, and promotion, but also ethics and epistemology,
- when every single one of my identity groups is held collectively responsible for shit I didn't do and don't benefit from,
- when I'm resented and despised by people whose relative poverty and dysfunction I allegedly caused and benefit from (still waiting for the check and all of the care-free living),
- when every single one of my identity groups is deemed by those on the Left to have no moral or epistemic standing to speak on social issues that directly affect my life and the lives of my family,
- when I find sweeping generalizations about large scale social phenomena and indictments of systems, structures, and entire groups of people on the sole basis of inaccessible "lived experiences" (for some reason) carry more epistemic and moral force than any rational and empirically warranted claims I could possibly make on the basis of intelligent analysis and 20 years of practical wisdom as a teacher and education scholar,
- when I find that nobody (other than some of my family members and close friends... depending on the day) and I mean nobody ...not straight people, not white people, not men, absolutely nobody gives two slimy snake shits about my feelings, private experiences, or subjective preferences or legitimate self and group interests - especially not more than their own, let alone more than well-warranted facts that may contradict my beliefs,
- when I observe the mainstream Left's blatant hypocrisy and double standards (e.g., their demands that I subjugate my self interests, basic democratic rights, objective needs, and subjective preferences to everyone else's, that I give others' unconditional, uncritical affirmation and endless tolerance on the one hand, and their "soft bigotry of low expectations" for the "oppressed" and their "allies," on the other),
- when, no matter how much we grovel, members of every single one of my identity groups are pathologized by the Left with a litany of -isms and -phobias, and so on.
Thus, after a thorough cost-benefit analysis, I decided to call up the U.S. Privilege Authority, and (after 2 hours of waiting and pressing buttons) I told them that they could fucking keep the damned card. They laughed out loud and told me that it had already expired a long time ago, anyway.