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.
