A few days ago we linked to a defiant essay by a young, Jewish college student in which, having been told once too often to ‘check his privilege’, he examined the ‘privileges’ his family had enjoyed in the Holocaust, and during the struggle of its surviving members to build a life in postwar America.
Here’s some of what the author, Tal Fortgang, had to say:
I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.
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. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.
Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.
Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will””to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?’ Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.
Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most””his wife and kids””to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential. Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?
Our reader ‘Musey’ commented:
Check your privilege. That means you, not your parents or grandparents. It means now as you live with advantages that others don’t have and have no chance of enjoying. All it means is that we should give some thought to those whose lives are different to ours, and try to put ourselves in their shoes. If that had happened in the 1930”²s maybe the holocaust would never have happened.
This gave me pause. Is that all that “check your privilege” is supposed to mean? A plea for empathy and thanksgiving, and perhaps a little kindness?
Well, maybe. Given the tone and context in which I seem to hear it most of the time, though, I don’t think it’s quite as benign as that, and I don’t think ‘privilege’ means what it used to.
Words are tools for dissecting the world, and for that they work best when they have precise, sharp edges. On the battlefield, though, they’re often more effective when blunted into clubs. (See also ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’.) This now seems to be happening to ‘privilege’; its new meaning seems only to be ‘whatever you have that I covet’.
In particular we seem to be effacing the distinction between ‘privileges’ and ‘rights’. In my own understanding, ‘rights’ are intrinsic and inherent, while ‘privileges’ are contingent and external. We are born with rights, but privileges, one way or another, must be earned; they must be paid for, and we acquire them in virtue of some quality that we bear or possess not merely as members of our species, but as individual persons. (I’ve written before about the importance of this distinction.)
Daniel Dennett once wrote, in a different context, that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything.” It applies here as well, and gives us the key to understanding the meaning of “check your privilege” — which is that we are to be reduced to atoms.
Just as atoms are identical, so are we to be: in the pursuit of absolute equality, each of us is to be made so small that every distinguishing characteristic, every sin and virtue, becomes external to us. Thus reduced, with every individual quality stripped away, there can no longer be any basis for discriminations of any kind at all, and certainly not for any sort of privilege.
It doesn’t stop there: in order to achieve full equality in the here and now, the atomization of the individual must also reduce and externalize our extension in time. Our personal histories, and the heritage of our parents and ancestors, must be scraped away as well. Have you toiled for years to educate yourself, or to create a successful business, and as a result, now enjoy a measure of wealth and comfort that others do not? No, this is unjust; “you didn’t build that”. Correctly understood, you are just a lucky atom, intrinsically no different from any other, wafted to your position of privilege by warm and entirely contingent updrafts.
The point of all this shrinkage is this: if we are all atoms, and atoms are all the same, then there is no just basis for the unequal distribution of blessings in the world. But blessings there are (for now, at least), and something must be done with them — so if there is no basis for distributing them according to privilege, then a mathematically equal distribution becomes, by default, our right.
This, then, is the real meaning of “check your privilege”: if there’s still anything left of you, you haven’t made yourself small enough.
21 Comments
Or green enough (with envy and chutzpah).
Those pesky Jews — you can’t live with them; you can’t exterminate them all.
The above remarks are not racism. They’re sarcasm, from a Jew who earned the right to use it.
Actually, at the risk of disagreeing with the cleverest man on the planet, sarcasm is not what I took from the essay of a very earnest, more than a little miffed, student. In this instance, his Jewishness is completely incidental, and what he was claiming for himself was earned, not by him, but by his ancestors. Not for a moment, did I think that the man was racist. That is a distraction.
Also, what envy? Where does this come into the equation? Sorry, at this point I am confusing your post with Henry’s comment which does not make sense to me.
We are not identical atoms in pursuit of absolute equality, we are individuals from different countries and backgrounds, educated to different levels and all with our own potential, which some find easier to reach than others. It’s just that checking your privilege is acknowledging that some folks had to travel a hard road, and others got it easy. The irony of the student’s essay is that he wanted us to acknowledge the hardship that his forebears endured, while refusing to accept that, in contemporary student circles, some may have had a harder time getting where they are today, than he did.
‘Pesky Jews’ are quite alright with me. Some of my best friends are Jewish.
Musey, yousey confusey.
BTW, “Some of my best friends are Jewish” is a Jew-hating taunt.
But you already knew that …
Musey –
Perhaps you don’t get out much. I’ve yet to hear ‘Check your privilege’ in a context that means something other than “shut up”.
It’s *especially* annoying to hear it from slumming upper-middle class women and minorities, most of whom have never *ever* known any sort of adversity and have attended expensive private colleges.
Check your own damn privilege, ladies.
Wait! Musey may’ve provided us a way out of all that “reparations for past enslavement” etc.
I wonder if Al Sharpton would agree?
Hi Musey,
There is, of course, sarcasm throughout Mr. Fortgang’s essay, but it’s incidental to his more general point. I quite agree that his Jewishness is completely incidental to that point as well.
But do you really not see where envy ‘comes into the equation’? Why bang on about ‘privilege’ at all, as so many students now seem to spend their entire college careers doing, if it isn’t a matter of envy, of resentment, of redress of grievance? Merely to acknowledge, as you suggest, that some people have better circumstances than others is one thing; to make resentment of these natural inequalities your idÁ©e fixe, your polestar, your college major, your career, and the organizing principle of your worldview is quite another. Entire departments now exist in every college and university simply for the sake of establishing a foundation for cultural, racial, and sexual grievance.
You are quite right that the hardest struggle along Mr. Fortgang’s road to Princeton was his ancestors’, and not his own (although I shall assume that he worked and studied hard on his own part), but so what? Have we not the right to toil for the sake of our children? In broader terms, is it a matter of unfair and unethical ‘privilege’ when a people work to create and sustain a civilization particularly suited to their nature, in which their descendants naturally flourish?
Mr. Fortgang’s critique is a purely cultural one. Let us grant that the struggle that placed him at Princeton today was borne mostly by his ancestors, who had to endure hardship, bigotry, oppression, and asymmetries of ‘privilege’ compared to which the sufferings of a contemporary Princeton student ‘of color’ pale into utter insignificance. Yet his parents and grandparents made their way not by nurturing, obsessing over, and litigating their grievance, or by trying to get their hand on the collar of those above them, but through discipline, thrift, self-sacrifice, hard work, and a sense of responsibility — of duty — to themselves and their children yet unborn. Clearly, Mr. Fortgang thinks this is a better, a higher, way to live. He is right.
The ‘atomization’ I describe is essential if one’s ideological priority is equality. Because equality of actually existing individuals is an obvious, and even a logical, absurdity, it is necessary that those characteristics in which our differences inhere must be made external and contingent, so that they are no longer in any sense our own; in that way, any discrimination based on them becomes unfair and unjust. But to do this, to reduce us all to equal, fungible units of the human mass, everything higher — everything that distinguishes us as unique persons, each seeking self-perfection in harmony with our distinct and individual natures — must be stripped away, down to the lowest, basest commonalities of our species. And so we must externalize our heritage, our personal history, our acculturation, our habits of study and industry, and every human quality upon which the eye of Fortune might alight when measuring our fate — and stand in relation to one another not as men, but as atoms.
Oh, and thanks, I think, for “the cleverest man on the planet”. (I’d rather it had been wisdom, or insight, but I’ll take what I can get.)
First of all, yes I did know that ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish’, was a bit of a joke but I was absolutely not aware that it was a Jew-hating taunt, and that is the truth. There you have it.
Maybe I don’t get out enough, more likely I don’t move in the kind of circles where this question is likely to be asked in an aggressive way.
Nobody can separate themselves from their past and their heritage, nobody should feel that pride in what their forebears did and how they endured, is a bad thing. My own parents and grandparents had a very much more difficult life than I have enjoyed, and there is a debt there which must be acknowledged. So, I fully understand why this young man feels as he does, it’s just in this instance, with this question, it seems to me to be immediate and personal. Tal did not check his privilege, he checked the privilege of those who had heroically gone before him.
Okay, there is sarcasm through the essay, but the overwhelming message that comes through from Tal’s words are that he does not need to answer this question because his debt to society has been paid by those who have gone before. He clearly resents that his good fortune should be considered as an element in his success. That said, it was indeed his own hard work, superior ability and effort that is, to a large extent, the reason for his achievement.
Evidently the advice to ‘check your privilege’ is almost
Personally I appreciate my good luck. I do check my privilege, in an unconscious way, and I acknowledge that my life has not been difficult. When I was a child my mother used to say (if I was criticising or laughing at others) that I should be aware that not everybody had my advantages. Believe me, we were not wealthy, but neither were we poor and life was not a struggle. Others were finding life hard.
To the man who asserts that this question is almost always delivered in the context of ‘shut up’, may I point out that your response to me, here, seems to be saying exactly that.
Ooops, your editing facility is useful but can cause errors to be overlooked. I should have re-read my comment. That missing paragraph was a good one!
Anti-Semitism may be a joke to you, Musey, but it’s Jew-hatred to people with integrity.
Anti-Semitism is not a joke to me. Equally, the word black/Irish/Asian could be inserted in to that phrase and it wouldn’t be anti them either. I believe it was you, a few weeks ago, who made a crack about having a black friend, it was you who explained the reference to me. Tell me, is it quite alright for you to take offense where none is intended but others have to be held accountable? You don’t know me because if you did you would realise that I am not a hater of anybody, most particularly not because of their ethnicity.
I doubt it. One of my black friends died in 1987. Most of my current friends are WASPS. It’s basically about demographics …
But I do avoid making friends with Jew-haters. Must be because they murdered all my grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and 6 million other Jews.
Well Henry, it’s easily checked but I’m not looking back through past posts when I clearly remember what you wrote. It was some post about Thomas Sowell and you commented on how your admiration of him gave you street cred. You went on to point out to me that it was an oblique reference to ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish’ At no time did you indicate that this was an anti Semitic comment. Furthermore, while we were having our little contretemps, Malcolm alerted me as to who you were and I took him to mean, back off and show some respect, in view of your eminence. Also, I’m on a hiding to nothing, arguing the toss with a genius.
I’m sure you do avoid making friends with Jew-haters but I am not one of them. If you met me and didn’t like me, that would not be the reason. I have no doubt though that you could find many other things to dislike.
I have to work this afternoon so this is my last comment. I am now in a thoroughly bad mood and it all your fault!
African Americans call each other by the so-called N-word all the time, and that’s cool, because they are African Americans. Jews sometimes make self deprecating remarks about their Jewishness, because (wait for it) it’s OK — they’re Jews. The Irish kid each other about their whiskey drinking and the Russians about their addiction to vodka. If you had a sense of humor, Musey, you would know this.
But it is not OK for non-African Americans to use the N-word, for non-Jews to make anti-Semitic references, and for non-Irish to make fun of their drinking. If you did that in a bar you would probably get your ass kicked.
Whaaat? I’m sorry, but I think it was you who had the sense of humour failure. And thanks for letting me off for making an anti-Semitic reference, which I didn’t even know was anti-Semitic…and it came from you. And here was me, imagining that you learned people were not into political correctness. Well, that was wrong.
I know better than call anybody a nigger. It is ignorant, hateful and stupid. Obviously, I was supposed to know about ‘Some of my best friends are Jewish’ and if I had known that it was insulting I wouldn’t have said that, but I did not. I am not an American. My father was Irish, a GP in a working class town in the north of England. He took a load of flak and never gave it back. He also served as a major in the British army during the war which he had no compulsion to do. My mother was English and much more defensive about the Irish than he ever was, especially in the face of hatred.
Funnily enough, my father was a great admirer of the Jewish people and a huge advocate for their intelligence and uniqueness as a people. He did drink whiskey though, but very rarely to excess.
I don’t see what’s funny about it. I think it was mighty white of your father to be a huge advocate for Jewish people’s intelligence and uniqueness.
In point of fact, however, not all Jews are intelligent and unique. It’s primarily the Ashkenazi who are so clever with numbers. This explains why they monopolized the usury business in Europe. Also, it is no secret that they control all the major banks in the world, which is part and parcel of their plan to rule the world.
Not to be splitting hairs but atoms aren’t really indentical. Not even close.
gu,
Yes, of course. I suppose I might have specified ‘same element, same isotope’, but it would, I think, have broken the flow.
Anyway, you get the idea.
Funnily enough, I’m not surprised that you don’t see what’s funny. Also, in saying ‘funnily enough’ I am delving back in to my Yorkshire past where the expression does not precisely mean what the words suggest to those unfamiliar with the lingo, it tends to be used in the sense of, here’s another slightly interesting thing. Clearly you didn’t find interesting at all. Funnily enough that is where this whole argument started. Maybe we should all do what Eric suggests and tell everyone to ‘shut up’. There’s very little ambiguity in that.
Consider it done.
I already had.