MR. O’REILLY: Just remember, Mr. Fawlty, there’s always someone worse off than yourself.
BASIL FAWLTY: Is there? Well I’d like to meet him. I could do with a laugh.
—FAWLTY TOWERS, “THE BUILDERS”
CHECK PLEASE!
IN THE SUMMER after graduating from high school, Noah Phillips took a job at a Washington, DC, falafel shop. After this brief stint in the pulverized-chickpea trade, he went to college.
A nice little story. Interesting, perhaps, if you’re related to Noah Phillips, or if you’re someone interested in hiring Noah Phillips for your own falafel stand, since you now know he has previous experience in that area. Yet why, one might wonder, was the story published, in 2015, in The Washington Post? And how on earth did it wind up with over a thousand comments?
Let’s try that again:
Noah Phillips, a privileged seventeen-year-old white boy, had had enough of his privilege. Eager to shed some of that privilege, and to leave the cashmere-draped, kale-infused caviar-canapé-stuffed life he’d led thus far, he decided to expose himself to the ways of the commoners by applying to work in a DC falafel shop. (“I’m hardly the first privileged young man to go looking for grit,” he wrote, while offering George Orwell as an example of what he, in applying for this job, was going for.)
Yet even there, in the sordid underworld that is life behind the falafel counter, he was unable to shed his privilege. This became evident from the mere fact that was hired in the first place, for as we all know, falafel stores only ever hire people who come from the right families. It can’t have been about his qualifications: His only previous work experience was “running high school bake sales,” evidence not that he was, you know, seventeen, but that he came from immense, almost incalculable privilege. (All your clothes were probably made by someone in Bangladesh who by seventeen would, in a just world, get to retire.) But his white privilege, his fluent-English-speaker privilege, and his socioeconomic privilege not only got him hired, but landed him the privileged position of … cashier.
An editorial note mentions that the Post contacted the falafel-shop management, presumably for fact-checking purposes, and it seems as if everyone, even the Latino colleagues Phillips found so terribly exotic, also worked the register. However, once the privileged self-flagellation has begun, its momentum is too great for it to stop over such trivialities. Everything about the falafel-salesman experience must be viewed through the lens of privilege. The fact that this would be a privilege essay was announced in what was, let’s admit, a pretty great headline: “I Tried to Escape My Privilege with Low-Wage Work. Instead I Came Face to Face with It.” But what really brought out the commenters may have been the inadvertently hilarious subhead: “The Advantages of Race and Class Are Not Easily Shed, Even in a Falafel Shop.”1
If what Phillips was looking for was further confirmation that he is, in fact, an oblivious soft, rich kid, he was in luck. Sample comment: “Writing a story about your summer job, and then getting to have it published in the Washington Post. That’s an example of white privilege. I have a suspicion that it’s the product of other types of privilege.”2 Others pointed out that hipster falafel shops are not the scrappiest work environments around, and reminisced about their own, far scrappier youthful employment. Others pointed out—redundantly, it might seem, since this was Phillips’s very point—that most people work because they need to, and not because they’re trying to learn about “blue-collar” life.
The issue for readers wasn’t Phillips’s privilege, exactly. It was that he presented his falafel-store experience not as a summer job, but as a play at being working class. Had the angle been different, the response might have gone otherwise. After all, here’s a rich kid who opted out of unpaid internships or voluntourism (that is, the trips well-off Westerners take to developing countries, ostensibly to help, but also to have some fun in the sun), and who avoided that classic rich-person fate of being one of those people who’s never worked in food service and who treats servers atrociously. Instead, he wove the experience into a “privilege” narrative. In one sense, he didn’t have to do this. Yet a bait-free, “privilege”-free version of the tale wouldn’t have been published.
It’s a truism, at this point, that where there is privilege, it ought to be checked. Thus the discussions that take place in comment threads, where participants order one another to check their privilege, or announce that someone’s privilege is visible (as in, YPIS). The route to being a decent person—and, maybe, to making the world a better place—begins with a frank and candid assessment of one’s own unearned advantages.
And yet. In his essay, Phillips is copiously, cringe-inducingly privilege aware, just not self-aware. But that’s it’s own quality, one disconnected from social-justice commitment. It’s more about having a sense of humor, I suppose, which would explain why Louis C.K.’s self-deprecating privilege riffs are so often held up as the epitome of awareness.3 What Phillips suffers from isn’t underexamined privilege, but overexamined privilege, which ends up amounting to the same thing.
THE “BEHOLD, MY PRIVILEGE” CONFESSIONAL ESSAY: A SAMPLING
PHILLIPS WAS BY no means the first young adult to beat himself up over privilege in front of an online audience, and to wind up flaunting his privilege in the process. By the time his appeared, the confessional privilege essay had already become a well-established form. Online publications regularly publish reflections from people examining their own unearned advantages.4 Thought Catalog, a site that falls somewhere between social media and a publication, is more or less a privilege-confession generator: “Confronting My Privilege,”5 “With Great Privilege Comes Great Responsibility,”6 “The Uncomfortable Privilege of Being Catcalled.”7 A site-wide search for “privilege” brings up over a thousand items, many but not all of them introspective.8
The earnest self-privilege check might seem a painful read, but more squirms still come from another branch of this subgenre: essays and blog posts by people sick of being faulted for their privilege. Months before Tal Fortgang’s privilege-denial essay went viral, Kate Menendez, the woman behind “Being Privileged Is Not a Choice, So Stop Hating Me for It”9 got the Gawker treatment: “Brave Privileged Person Speaks Out Against Anti-Privilege Privilege.”10 And way back in 2011, Jezebel reposted a hand-wringing Advocate essay by Zack Rosen, “a white, cisgender gay man,” who couldn’t help but wonder: “Can a nontrans, white gay man ever truly leave the comforts of his own identity without having to make frequent and loud apologies for the crimes of his ilk?”11 Oddly enough, writing a defensive essay about one’s own privilege never seems to have the intended effect.
If Rosen had had enough of being alerted to his privilege, perhaps offering up his navel-gazing to Jezebel wasn’t the best idea: “Thank you, sir, for that perfect demonstration of exactly WHY privileged people get called out for their privilege,” wrote one commenter. Another: “Oh my God, a white dude made other people’s identity issues ALL ABOUT HIM? Alert the media, I’m shocked. Snark over, here’s the deal; this article REEKS of privilege.” There were plenty more along those lines. Anyone looking for concrete examples of the phenomenon Rosen was describing could simply go to the comments and take their pick.
Yet the tone-deaf privilege-confession essay probably hit its peak with a massively viral xoJane one, whose title went as follows: “There Are No Black People in My Yoga Classes and I’m Suddenly Feeling Uncomfortable with It: I Was Completely Unable to Focus on My Practice, Instead Feeling Hyper-aware of My Skinny White Girl Body.”12 Actually, that wasn’t quite the whole thing. Technically the headline began with the series name, “It Happened to Me,” one that, in context, made it seem as if the arrival of “a young, fairly heavy black woman” in the author’s yoga class was something the author felt had happened to her. After all, merely seeing a fat black woman do yoga apparently caused the author to cry.
In all fairness, the point of the essay, as best as I can tell, was that seeing a heavyset black woman doing yoga (and, in the author’s opinion, struggling) set forth, in the author, a stream of consciousness about yoga as cultural appropriation; the unfair advantages of being thin and flexible; and the systemic injustices revealed by the fact that her particular yoga studio doesn’t have a lot of black customers. It was this moment of self-righteous awakening that her black classmate inspired—and not the fact of having a black classmate—that caused the tears to flow: “I got home from that class and promptly broke down crying. Yoga, a beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments in over six years of practice, suddenly felt deeply suspect.” The tears were for a lost innocence. Whichever seal had thus far sheltered the author to life’s unfairness had been broken.
Apart from the striking absence of the word “privilege,”13 the essay had all the elements of a privilege confession, most notably, an attempt at demonstrating awareness gone massively awry. The entire Internet weighed in on the author’s obliviousness. (Over three thousand comments to the post itself, and enough outraged and mocking responses from other sites to merit a “5 best responses” roundup.14)
If the yoga and falafel examples teach us one thing, it’s this: Examination of one’s own privilege, unless done really deftly, reads as conceited—conceited, and presumptuous. When, exactly, had the black student in the author’s yoga class asked for her sympathy? Privilege awareness asks that a white, skinny woman enumerate the unearned advantages that these qualities provide her with (i.e., white privilege, thin privilege, able-bodied privilege, etc.). This articulation of one’s own advantages is, at its very essence, the point of the privilege project—that where there is privilege, it should be owned. Yet when that articulation actually takes place, it ends up reading as an unsolicited pity-fest directed at someone whose life probably isn’t as tragic as all that. Writer Teju Cole points out the “false” and “condescending” aspects of that self-deprecating reflex in a takedown of the “first world problems” meme, noting that Nigerians, too, fuss about cellphones, and adding, “All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country.”15 The line between admirable self-awareness of advantage and oblivious exaggeration of others’ disadvantage is thinner than a self-flagellating white girl in a yoga class. Even if in theory, or in private, it’s good to contemplate your privilege, in practice, in public, it’s not.
If, however, these essays get to teach us two things, the second would be that “privilege” sells. It can’t be terribly expensive—even by personal-essay standards—to publish navel-gazing musings of young people who, by their own admission, aren’t hard up for cash. (Since universities ask for such essays in their applications, every privileged young person has one hanging around.) And the payback is huge. The more tone-deaf a piece is, the more viral (and virulent) the response. Yet because “privilege awareness” is this supposedly noble goal, publications get to churn these out in good conscience, and to pretend surprise when, time and again, an author of one of these essays attracts a pile-on.
Granted, not all privilege introspection is quite so painful to read. However, even the professional version of this genre gets called out in much the same terms. In a 2015 New York Times Magazine piece, “White Debt: Reckoning with What Is Owed—And What Can Never Be Repaid—For Racial Privilege,” the writer Eula Biss explored her own white privilege with sentences such as, “Our police, like Nietzsche’s creditors, act out their power on black bodies.” Reflecting on a time when, as a college student, she’d failed to get in more serious trouble for illicit poster distribution, she writes:
The word “privilege,” composed of the Latin words for private and law, describes a legal system in which not everyone is equally bound, a system in which the law that makes graffiti a felony does not apply to a white college student. Even as the police spread photos of my handiwork in front of me, I could tell by the way they pronounced “tagging” that it wasn’t a crime invented for me.16
Writing in The Daily Beast months prior to Biss’s essay, the linguist and commentator John McWhorter expressed doubts about this sort of exercise: “Nominally, this acknowledgment of White Privilege is couched as a prelude to activism, but in practice, the acknowledgment itself is treated as the main meal.”17 More recently, in The Washington Post’s “Post Everything” section, writer Freddie deBoer offered similar disillusionment with the model: “[I]t’s unclear what asking people to identify their racism or white privilege actually accomplishes. Presumably, acknowledging white privilege comes before some substantively anti-racist action, but specific definitions of such action remain elusive.”18
Indeed, as with the other, more obviously silly privilege essays, it’s never spelled out what Biss has done, or will do, thanks to her awareness of her own privilege. She acknowledges that giving up white privilege is functionally impossible, sharing multiple anecdotes demonstrating just that notion. One Times commenter responded, not unfairly, “As a black guy, this ain’t doing anything for me. Her existential hand-wringing is her own, it doesn’t uplift anyone else really.”19 Another commenter calls out Biss’s privilege, if indirectly: “This obsession with ‘white privilege’ seems to be confined to elite universities and tiny wealthy portions of major cities. In the real world, none of us are privileged enough to feel guilty about it.”20
Biss’s essay reads like an eloquent version of the “criming while white” hashtag, which involved white people flagging instances of police giving them a pass. The idea was for white people to demonstrate their awareness of racial bias in policing, and in doing so, to model that awareness for others. In practice, as the feminist writer Jessica Valenti explained in The Guardian, it didn’t sit right:
White people acknowledging white privilege is important, but in the midst of national tragedies, tweeting about how you got away with criminal acts feel[s] like a performance of awareness that you are privileged rather than what we really need—a dismantling of the power obtained through that privilege.21
Given the steady stream of news about horrific deaths of black Americans at the hands of police, there isn’t all that much lag between “national tragedies” of this sort. There’s no particularly good moment to weigh in along these lines.
To her credit, Biss lays out—perhaps a bit too persuasively—the problems with the introspective approach to anti-racism:
Guilty white people try to save other people who don’t want or need to be saved, they make grandiose, empty gestures, they sling blame, they police the speech of other white people and they dedicate themselves to the fruitless project of their own exoneration.
True. Then she goes on: “But I’m not sure any of that is worse than what white people do in denial. Especially when that denial depends on a constant erasure of both the past and the present.” Her case for white guilt—and for the privilege framework—isn’t a promise that self-flagellation will lead to activism, but rather a claim that it might: “[W]hy not imagine guilt as a prod, a goad, an impetus to action? Isn’t guilt an essential cog in the machinery of the conscience?” The “essential” bit is key. Across contemporary progressive rhetoric—in Biss’s analysis, and even in Valenti’s takedown of “criming while white”—there’s a pervasive sense that personal enlightenment must precede efforts to improve the world. There’s also a dangerous ignorance of the ways the ritual can make things worse.
THE HUMBLEBRAG OF THE PRIVILEGE NONCONFESSION
PRIVILEGE CONFESSION HAS now become, paradoxically, the default way to speak about one’s own disadvantage. That sort of essay is the self-awareness sweet spot. It’s a way of discreetly announcing the obstacles you’ve endured, while not seeming self-pitying or like you’re trying to win at Oppression Olympics. Or, to put it more generously, it’s the natural self-expression of the sensitive. In a Slate piece called “I’m a Butch Woman. Do I Have Cis Privilege?” writer Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart lays out why she’d resisted the idea that she did—“Heck, I’m a butch lesbian living in Tennessee, for goodness’ sake”—only to conclude that yes, as someone who can readily correct those who call her “young man,” she is in fact cis-privileged.22 Along the same lines, in a massively viral piece, “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person,” Huffington Post contributor Gina Crosley-Corcoran explains that as someone who “came from the kind of poor that people don’t want to believe still exists in this country,” the sort that involves “making ramen noodles in a coffee maker with water you fetched from a public bathroom,” she’d initially balked when called “privileged” online, only to learn about intersectionality and see the light: “I know now that I am privileged in many ways. I am privileged as a natural-born white citizen. I am privileged as a cisgender woman. I am privileged as an able-bodied person.”23 This pops up in the political realm as well. There was that time when Marco Rubio explained that he came “from extraordinary privilege” because he had a loving childhood, albeit, you know, not a wealthy one.24 If you’re going to confess to privilege, his is the way to do it.
Yet even these privilege nonconfessions don’t always hit the right note for all audiences. Once you use the word “privilege” in reference to yourself, you’ve introduced the meme of your privilege. You’ve planted the idea, and thus invited the accusation. Urquhart’s willingness to admit that she, a gender-nonconforming gay woman in a red state, doesn’t have it the absolute worst was still an insufficient admission of privilege as far as Claire-Renee Kohner, at the Web site Planet Transgender, was concerned: “Does Vanessa Vitiello Urquhart have cis privilege? Yeah, I’m just not sure she knows how much privilege she actually has.”25 Kohner interprets the following sentence from Urquhart’s piece—“Occasionally, to my shame, I’ve even argued on the Internet about whether it makes any sense to say a butch like me has cis privilege”—to mean that Urquhart “feels she doesn’t have cis-privilege,” which would seem to be the very opposite of what it means when someone expresses “shame” for past behavior.
“PRIVILEGE” AS CONTENT
THE PRIVILEGE SELF-ASSESSMENT essay only makes sense in the context of the massive online conversation about privilege, one that overlaps with, but is ultimately distinct from (and detrimental to), online conversations about wealth inequality, racism, sexism, and other specific forms of injustice. These privilege-themed personal essays are all, in one way or another, attempts at deflecting or preempting accusations of unexamined privilege. The privilege turn is intricately tied up with social media and online journalism, with anonymous interactions and with posts that can’t exceed 140 characters. “Privilege”-themed content of all kinds—essays, quizzes, cartoons—is a central part of the viral-content marketplace. Where the initial privilege checklists, from Peggy McIntosh onward, encouraged quiet self-reflection,26 the newer ones are part of that whole online-identity-curating apparatus. Your every facet of privilege must be shared, without privacy settings, on social media. Thus the interactive checklists, like the “What Is Privilege?” BuzzFeed video exercise, which is currently at close to three million views,27 and all those this-is-what-“privilege”-means videos, the ones that high school classmates keep posting to Facebook. On social media, you can share not just which forms of privilege you possess, but also—more importantly—the fact that you’re privilege sensitive, privilege aware. The way that politicians must always say the right thing, and must avoid not just outright gaffes but also subtle comments that could potentially alienate some constituency, everyone with any kind of public presence, however slight, must take now care along these lines.
YPIS IN ACTION
YPIS, IN ITS classic form, is about educating the inadvertently insensitive. If you, a progressive, say something that reveals your personal lack of familiarity with a particular form of oppression, you’ve let your ignorance slip. Such slipups matter, according to the rules of YPIS, regardless of whether anyone was actually offended. There’s a clever and accurate description of the dynamic in a column by British journalist Hugo Rifkind, involving a self-declared feminist being asked by online left-wing detractors, “‘But have you canvassed the views of Somalian refugees who are weekending female impersonators in Anglesea?’”28 Rifkind got taken to task in the comments for having gone with a fictitious example. If this sort of thing really happened, why did he have to invent?29 A fair point; the below list are an array of the sort of real-life examples he might have chosen:
A Chow.com post referred to a $20 “Thanksgiving feast” from Walmart as “a disturbingly long list of edible features for a disturbingly low price.” The first commenter, which set the tone for some subsequent commenters wrote: “I’m guessing that for some, this is a far cry from disturbing and simply a godsend right now. Your privilege is showing, and it might indeed be disturbing.”30
From a Bitch magazine comment thread on punk, one commenter starts off, “Ideally, white women should just realize their privilege and step in a[nd] do something that actually matters. However, our ignorance into what it is like being POC [people of color] prevents a lot of us from even realizing our privilege. Without people in the scene pointing out my privilege and opening up discussion on this topic, I would not, and I still do not fully, realize my privilege.” This same commenter then refers to the original post as “bitter” and not feminist. Another responds: “Hey, you said you wanted people to point out your privilege. Your privilege is showing with this comment.” And another: “You’re right about one thing: you haven’t fully checked your privilege. It’s not the responsibility of POC to attempt to force themselves into spaces they feel are hostile to them. It’s our responsibility as white people to try to eradicate that hostility.” Further discussion switches to whether the term “sisterhood” is offensive to trans women.31
A Book Riot blog post takes a Huffington Post writer to task for saying there’s no point in having libraries in New York now that everything’s online: “Watch out, Mr. Rosenblum, your privilege is showing! Might want to cover that up. Look, I understand that people have access to wonderful things these days in terms of technology … but these things are NOT easily accessible to EVERYONE. It’s not as simple as clicking a button for many, many people in NYC.”32
The above list are but three examples of YPIS (approximately 3,640 results in a Google search of the spelled-out expression), and that’s not even starting on “check your privilege” (363,000), although many of these are discussions of the phenomenon. Searches on either expression on Twitter, however, tend to bring up examples of the phenomenon in action.
YPIS tends to crop up when someone with a history of making call-outs writes something worthy of one. When the self-righteous slip up, they can be accused of hypocrisy. Plus, it’s more likely that someone versed in call-out culture will care that he or she has been YPISed; someone who isn’t (or who’s simply unapologetically privileged) may not.
Peak sinkhole YPIS involves what I call YPIS cycles: One person will accuse another of unchecked privilege, only to end up accused of obliviousness for having even made the accusation. Take, for example, what happened when writer Jessica Coen wrote a post for Jezebel calling out an unnamed job applicant for putting in a cover letter that past experience working with crime victims made her a good fit for a job at a bridal salon.33 The gist of Coen’s post was that the job applicant couldn’t see the difference between bridal stress and the crime-victim variety, and was therefore, in some convoluted way, part of the wedding-industrial-complex problem. Commenters, however, weren’t convinced. Coen, who had failed to grasp that someone applying for a job, even in retail, has to put something in the cover letter that connects past experience to current qualifications, was the real oblivious one.
While the commenters were, I think, correct, everyone involved was participating full throttle in the YPIS process. That cover letter couldn’t just sit there, but had to be turned into content. And “content” is found by combing something, anything—if no sitcom or romcom is available, some random cover letter will do—for unexamined privilege. Absent the YPIS context, it would read as straightforward bullying to mock a retail cover letter. Yet once the letter has been found to contain insensitivity to a caste of marginalizeds, it becomes fair game, a “punch up.”
THE INADVERTENT HUMOR OF “PRIVILEGE”
IF YOU’RE READING this and thinking these interactions all sound ridiculous, you’d be correct, but far from the first to point this out. YPIS’s absurdity has turned “privilege” into a kind of running joke, and not just on the right, where anything that liberal academic sorts are into has been fodder for years. The Guardian accompanied a spate of privilege articles with a “handy, and not-entirely-serious, questionnaire,” allowing readers to select from grievances such as “Although born in this country, I still face constant prejudice for daring to produce unpasteurised boutique cheeses” and “My African-sounding name is invariably spelled wrong on my latte.”34 Jezebel, a site whose comments section often turns into a YPIS-fest, nevertheless called a post about cuttlefish “Check Your Vertebrate Privilege.”35 ClickHole ran a parody explainer: “This Cartoon Does a Bad Job of Explaining What Privilege Is.”36 The cartoon captioned “White Privilege in One Simple Image” depicts a white man with enormous feet, thinking about the Empire State Building but talking about the Eiffel Tower, face-to-face with a black woman with enormous hands, whose own speech bubble, in turn, contains an image of an anthropomorphized lit cigarette, sporting a top hat. (It would have been maybe a little bit more spot-on had an accompanying text not spelled out that the image was “gibberish.”)
However, Gawker’s “Privilege Tournament,” a sports-inspired, multiround extravaganza that pitted zoophiles against asexuals, gluten allergies against latex ones, and so forth, is probably the best known, and was certainly the most involved.37 While the categories themselves weren’t satirical, the project itself was a far cry from the sincere checklists it was riffing on. (From Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan’s introduction: “Privilege has its benefits, but the lack of privilege confers that sweet, sweet moral superiority.”) In the end, Gawker readers voted the homeless the least privileged group, a result that could be read as a subtle dig at the new understandings of “privilege,” all of which in one way or another amount to dismissals of the importance of material wealth.38
Those skeptical of the privilege turn are reliably (and sometimes fairly) accused of having proved their accusers’ point. After all, privilege is, by definition, the sort of invisible advantage that people deny and get defensive about. However, while some rejection of “privilege” could be attributed to defensiveness, other criticisms would be more difficult to dismiss along those lines. Even apart from the flaws of call-out culture, the privilege framework has certain important drawbacks as a progressive strategy. And while the right has its own qualms with privilege checking, some of which stem from a rejection of the very notion of systemic inequality (see chapter 5), much of the criticism of YPIS call-outs has come from the left. And while it’s possible—anything’s possible—that every single liberal critic of “privilege” is either a secret conservative or exhibiting unexamined privilege, once you look at what the criticisms are, it becomes clear that there’s substance to at least some of those criticisms.
THE FAR-LEFT REJECTION OF PRIVILEGE
Here’s an experiment for the interns, service workers, graduate students, freelancers, and temps: Think deeply about your privilege, your advantages, your family history, that some may have it better or worse off than you do. Then, forget all of it.
So wrote April Wolfe, in a 2012 Good essay called “We’re the Privileged Poor. Why Aren’t We Talking About It?”39 Wolfe was—by her own account—a well-educated but penniless creative, a genuine-article starving artist. Yet she came to see “privilege,” with its emphasis on cultural capital, as a distraction from postrecession facts on the ground:
The fact is, we can no longer tell someone’s financial reality by what they eat, how they dress, and where they grew up. While I’ve technically surpassed my parents in terms of education and advantage, I am still dependent on a restaurant job, and my peers are now considered the first generation of youths to do worse than their parents.
In the piece, Wolfe explains that she had, at one time, focused on the trappings—her knowledge of tofu, her MFA—and held off from calling herself poor. Part of what changed, it sounds like, was that this cultural capital never managed to transfer—as the privilege framework theorizes it will—into capital-capital. Yet that wasn’t all:
My first instinct: There’s no way anyone can compare the harshness of the life of an undocumented migrant worker to that of a former graduate student. But this implies both that I should pity migrant workers and that I’m too good to be associated with their class.
Two things about Wolfe’s remarks are worth noting. The first is that, as Wolfe suggests, there’s something snobbish about the choice to identify, long-term, as broke rather than poor. The “privilege” framework asks broke, young (and youngish; Wolfe mentions being “on the cusp of [her] 30th birthday”) people not to dare conflate their situation with that of more authentic poor people. Taking the penniless to task for failing to properly categorize their penury is an odd mix of well meaning (that is, sensitive to the feelings of the poor who lack even cultural capital) and condescending. Is the “broke” person holding off from identifying as poor so as not to unfairly claim a marginalized identity, or so as to avoid admitting that past a certain point, “broke” stops being a temporary situation? Is all that painstaking analysis of whether your parents took you to plays or museums about saving “poor” for those who truly merit the title, or is it a way of clinging to whichever (dubious, and financially useless) capital you do have?40
The other, more important one is that word, “class,” which Wolfe—radically—uses in reference to status within the broader economy. Rather than working through a privilege checklist to demonstrate how her situation differs from that of her food-service colleagues, who might not be as knowledgeable about soy products or creative writing as she is, she concludes that poor is poor, gesturing toward labor activism as the answer.
Given that “privilege” is about asking progressives to set aside questions of wealth inequality, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that some socialists have been dubious of the framework. Back in 2012, on the news site Socialist Worker, writer David Judd argued that a “Checking Your Privilege 101” document making the Occupy Wall Street rounds was actually a “barrier” to the movement’s goals.41 Judd considered the privilege approach sound when it came to race, but unhelpful in describing class interests, and in drawing connections between different forms of oppression. Perhaps most importantly, Judd objected to the document’s “focus on self-education to the exclusion of everything else”: “There’s a nod to ‘the root systems that give you privilege,’” he writes, “but we are called on to ‘understand’ them, not to do away with them.” The earliest version of this from-the-left critique I’ve come across in any mainstream US publication was progressive writer Courtney Martin’s 2011 piece in The American Prospect, “Moving Past Acknowledging Privilege.” Martin wrote, “The impulse to do some of the intellectual and emotional labor of calling out unchecked privilege, as a person benefiting from some version of it, is a valuable one, but it can’t end there.” Martin presented privilege awareness as a necessary first step toward activism, but found that college students especially “get sort of stuck in a muck of guilt” and don’t use their newfound awareness for anything good, or really, anything: “The question is not just about what unearned privileges we have been walking around with but also about what it would take to change the systems that gave us these privileges in the first place.” While Martin was overall quite sympathetic to these young people, she allowed that for some, “testifying to their own lack of ignorance in public spaces” is a way of sending the message, “‘I’m one of the good ones.’”42
This criticism was echoed in a 2014 post by writer Mia McKenzie on the Web site Black Girl Dangerous:
What I find is that most of the time when people acknowledge their privilege, they feel really special about it, really important, really glad that something so significant just happened, and then they just go ahead and do whatever they wanted to do anyway, privilege firmly in place. The truth is that acknowledging your privilege means a whole lot of nothing much if you don’t do anything to actively push back against it.43
Like Martin, McKenzie presents privilege acknowledgment as a well-meaning first step: “I understand, of course, that the vast majority of people don’t even acknowledge their privilege in the first place. I’m not talking to them.”
Others on the left, such as journalist Tom Midlane, have gone further, arguing that the “privilege” framework—however well-intended—ends up aiding the right. Wrote Midlane:
The kind of semantic nit-picking that “privilege” encourages is aloof thought, un-coupled from questioning or attempting to change the hegemonic order. It’s a kind of identity politics which assumes the post-ideological position as fact and embraces the idea that nothing will change beyond small shifts. Within this assumed safety net you’re given your own playspace to act out divisive and willifully [sic] obscurantist verbal games. Corporate lobbyists couldn’t invent a better system for neutralising collective action if they tried.44
However, for socialists especially, the problem with “privilege” is its focus on cultural capital, to the exclusion of capital-capital. This—and not the emphasis on racial or gender identity—is where the disagreement seems to lie, at least some of the time. (There are also the occasional racist and sexist socialists. I hear they’re active on Twitter…) In a persuasive 2016 Jacobin essay,45 contributor Kate Robinson describes how her disillusionment with privilege-centric pop-culture criticism as a means of social change wound up leading her to socialism: “While it’s undeniable that all kinds of people are capable of enacting oppression, the idea that everyone is automatically complicit in oppressive systems by virtue of living within them can have ugly implications.” This realization, she explains, left her believing that “the best way to change people’s behavior is to attack the systems that force them into competition, and that the material self-interest of the working class is a better motivating principle than concepts of sin and redemption.” While she admits the allure of a cultural approach (“I loved to analyze the ideological currents of fiction and saw pop culture as a useful source for illustrating broader issues”), she couldn’t ultimately get behind entertainment criticism as a path to actual change.
And as Connor Kilpatrick argues, also in Jacobin, in a piece with the excellent headline, “Let Them Eat Privilege,” 46 the cultural trappings that make up privilege checklists distract people from their true class interests: “[T]he one-percent concept isn’t about a lifestyle or individual consumption habits—a graduate degree and a kale smoothie do not a one-percenter make. It’s based on concrete socioeconomic relations…” Kilpatrick also makes the useful point (similar to one I’d made a few years prior, in reference to Charles Murray’s “bubble” quiz47) that the supposed giveaways that someone is upper class are often nothing of the kind. Some cues may very well announce that someone is middle class rather than poor, while others don’t much indicate anything. (If your pumpkin spice latte comes from McDonald’s, are you privileged because you are drinking a “latte” or marginalized because you purchased it from “McDonald’s”? What if you were just thirsty?)
Kilpatrick wraps up his essay with a plea: “‘Check your privilege?’ Sure. But for once, let’s try checking it against the average hedge fund manager instead of a random Whole Foods shopper.”
Now, the generous, or even just reasonable, interpretation of this would be that it’s a suggestion that activists focus on economic inequality. That’s how I read it, in any case. Yet one could always argue that we’re merely witnessing the defensiveness of a Whole Foods regular. Maybe all Kilpatrick’s efforts—the graph showing just how stark income inequality really is, the references to French economist Thomas Piketty and other experts in inequality—are nothing more than an attempt by a male writer to keep attention on the one form of injustice that affects him personally, namely that of not being among the nation’s wealthiest few. I mean, it could be that Kilpatrick has examined the evidence and found “privilege” lacking. It would certainly seem that way from the piece. Yet wouldn’t it be so much more fun to speculate about all of his privileges, real or imagined?
“[A] STANCE BASED ON PRIVILEGE”: THE CLINTON-SANDERS PRIVILEGE WARS
INITIALLY, IT APPEARED that the Hillary Clinton side had the “privilege” argument sorted out: She was the candidate of choice among many black voters,48 not to mention the first serious female contender for the presidency. However, the Bernie Sanders side fought back, countering—not entirely unfairly—that Clinton supporters are too rich to want socialism. After all, Clinton swept the posh Upper East Side in the New York primary,49 and could therefore be cast as the preferred (Democrat) candidate of those with the least to gain, and most to fear, from economic redistribution. The “privilege” criticism of Clinton was, to some degree, a takedown of her own use of the phrase and framework. A tweet from the candidate’s official account, “We need to recognize our privilege and practice humility, rather than assume that our experiences are everyone’s experiences.—Hillary,” came in for some not-entirely-unjustified YPIS of its own.50 Salon writer Ben Norton responded, “The Clintons made $140 million in the past 8 years, but @HillaryClinton is telling people to check their privilege.”51 In one sense, Norton was changing the subject; Clinton had been talking about white privilege. In another, however, he was spot-on.
Critics from the left presented Clinton as the candidate of the new, fashionable, symbolism-driven liberalism, with Sanders representing a true progressivism rooted in the fight for socioeconomic justice. On the Medium Web site, in a piece called “Please Recognize Your Privilege If You Can Afford Eight Years of Hillary Clinton and the Status Quo,” Tony Brasunas wrote, “Some people say Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are approximately the same on the issues. These people likely have a lifestyle and a level of income that is comfortable and that they’re not too worried about losing.”52 Kilpatrick, also a Sanders supporter, tweeted, “If a liberal says ‘mere *economic*’ issues, close your eyes and you can probably see the upper middle class household he or she grew up in.”53 Later, calling out a specific, older female journalist, he tweeted, “If a journalist shrugs off free college & $15 min wage, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind stating their income/assets/Manhattan zip in the DEK.”54 His fellow progressive, Freddie deBoer tweeted his criticism of Clinton’s supporters as follows: “It takes a position of incredible privilege to think you should vote based on meaningless social signaling rather than on actual policy.”55 While rejecting the frivolity of privilege rhetoric, these Sanders supporters went with another standby: the privilege critique of YPIS. Which is to say, they called out the privilege of those who’d think to make privilege arguments in the first place.
The Clinton side couldn’t exactly rebut the accusation that rhetorical progressivism was a cover for center-left policies with an insistence that their candidate was, in fact, the better socialist choice. Instead, what emerged was an argument that insistence on Sanders being the nominee was itself a sign of privilege, because it meant being able to “afford” a Republican president. Once more, from Clinton’s official Twitter account: “Some folks may have the luxury to hold out for ‘the perfect.’ But a lot of Americans are hurting right now and they can’t wait for that.”56 Quartz ran a piece called “Privilege Is What Allows Sanders Supporters to Say They’ll ‘Never’ Vote for Clinton,” by Melissa Hillman. “How privileged do you need to be,” wrote Hillman, “to imagine that it’s a good idea to risk the actual lives of vulnerable Americans because you ‘hate’ Clinton so much that you vow to stay home if Sanders doesn’t get the nomination?”57 Another headline, from The Guardian: “Bernie Sanders or Bust? That’s a Stance Based on Privilege.”58 In that piece, writer Michael Arceneaux spells out exactly whom he believed this “stance” would harm: “People who refuse to vote for a less-favored Democrat on principle are just punishing a second constituency unlikely to vote: those who know very little about the power they yield because they are so marginalized they feel their say doesn’t matter.”
Yet the prime target of pro-Clinton YPIS was one particularly enthusiastic (and unusually glamorous) Sanders supporter, the actress Susan Sarandon, who told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that she wouldn’t necessarily support Clinton over Trump, seeing as the latter might inspire a “revolution.”59 A Daily Kos headline—“Susan Sarandon: A Privileged Fool”—neatly sums up the response.60 Dan Savage, who also appeared on Hayes’s program that day, later explained on his The Stranger blog why, in his view, Sarandon’s views stemmed from her demographics:
It’s easy for white people with a lot of money to fantasize about what might happen if Donald Trump gets elected … because if Trump’s election doesn’t bring the revolution, if his election only visits misery on Mexicans, Muslims, African Americans, LGBT Americans, women who get abortions, etc., the wealthy and white can jet off to their homes in France and wait it out.61
New York Times columnist Charles Blow went with a more direct privilege accusation: “The comments smacked of petulance and privilege. No member of an American minority group—whether ethnic, racial, queer-identified, immigrant, refugee or poor—would (or should) assume the luxury of uttering such a imbecilic phrase, filled with lust for doom.”62
That Sarandon is a woman is, apparently, canceled out by her place on other axes of privilege. Meanwhile at Slate, writer Michelle Goldberg honed in on Sarandon as an individual: “Inasmuch as #NeverHillary is a phenomenon … Sarandon, a rich white celebrity with nothing on the line, is a perfect spokeswoman for it.” Goldberg concluded the piece with a most YPIS of parting lines: “No matter what happens, Susan Sarandon will be just fine.”63
While I must admit I kind of agreed with the Sarandon takedown (we all have our hypocrisies), I found this back-and-forth YPIS-fest alternately hilarious and exhausting. Permit me to quote a tweet of mine from that March: “Amused by/collecting the various ‘if you prefer Hillary/Bernie, that demonstrates your enormous privilege’ arguments.”64 I wasn’t alone in finding that line of argument frustrating: In April 2016, Hayes tweeted the following complaint: “Worst part of D primary: Privileged white ppl telling other privileged white ppl they only hold their views bc they’re privileged & white.”65
The problem with the “privilege” election analyses wasn’t that they were wrong. On the contrary, it’s that all of them were right. Privilege surely does inform political decisions, but in too many directions for it to be possible to label anyone the true candidate of the privileged. There were, I suspect, voters who went with Sanders out of misogyny or limousine-liberal obliviousness, as well as others who picked Clinton out of greed. And while the “working-class” status of Trump’s supporter base was in dispute,66 it would be tough to claim that no legitimate underdog-type grievances motivated his appeal. In a democracy, any candidate relying solely on the votes of a privileged few is screwed, so politicians do tend to make cases for themselves that appeal to a broader audience. And this doesn’t consider the phenomenon of not-rich people voting aspirationally for candidates who promise to help the rich. For all these reasons, it’s never possible to claim that support for a particular candidate, on its own, demonstrates privilege.
However, the most frustrating aspect of the political “privilege” take is its ability to derail otherwise worthwhile conversations. Rather than hearing about facts, or even opinions, about the issue at hand, one ends up neck-deep in speculation about an individual. Case in point: In Jacobin,67 political scientist and progressive activist Corey Robin tore into a New Yorker article by staff writer Alexandra Schwartz, a Clinton supporter who’d claimed that young voters were misguided for supporting Sanders.68 The missing piece in Schwartz’s article had been free college, and therefore an end to student debt—something Robin rightly pointed out.
Schwartz’s central observation—that young people are idealistic, older ones pragmatic—wasn’t especially out there, but wasn’t helped by her openness about being “a voter north of twenty-five, south of thirty,” which is to say, not old. While this made sense to note in the context of the piece—she was pointing out an intragenerational divide—this sort of assertion sets off the reader’s alarm bells: This person is under thirty and works at The New Yorker. Is life fair? Why no, it’s not.
So it’s maybe not so surprising that she met with a YPIS. Which is where Robin, after making a more substantive defense of Sanders, turns:
What really strikes the reader is just how removed Schwartz is from the experiences of her generation, how utterly clueless she is about the economic hardships so many young men and women face today.
So far, fair enough. Schwartz wrote from a first-person perspective, mentioning her age. If you dismiss economic inequality concerns as so last season, you have an “utterly clueless” coming to you.
However, Robin didn’t leave it at that. Instead, we get treated to a mini biography of Schwartz, who is, it would seem, kind of posh:
It’s true that Schwartz graduated from the tony Brearley School in Manhattan (annual tuition: $43,000) in 2005 and Yale (annual tuition, fees, and costs: $65,000) in 2009, whereupon, after a few detours, she landed a spot at The New Yorker, from which she reports on Paris (cost: priceless).
After establishing Schwartz’s fanciness (well, presumed fanciness; for all we know, she had scholarships throughout her education), he moves on to painting a broader portrait of her and her life, as he imagines it:
But does she have no friends or relatives who are struggling with student debt, low-paying or nonexistent jobs? Has she not read an American newspaper or magazine in the last twelve months? Is the cognitive divide between the haves and the have-nots that stark, that extreme?
And it’s there that he lost me. Since when is reporting on Paris for The New Yorker a luxury good? (Which is, after all, what the context—and MasterCard ad reference69—suggests.) It’s an enviable situation, but why assume it wasn’t earned?
Left unstated: Who, exactly, is Corey Robin in all of this? In the piece in question, he never says. Its voice is that of an omniscient, disembodied progressive, who forms opinions merely based on what would be the best for society’s most downtrodden. We might assume, from his remarks about Brearley and so forth, that he grew up deprived, and is nursing understandable resentments at Schwartz’s presumed trajectory.
Having once written a profile on Robin,70 I did not have to google his bio, but his publicly known, readily searchable demographic categories in this area would put him at the same scrappiness level as that of the journalist whose background he’d just gotcha’d. He grew up in Chappaqua, a posh suburb of New York (and home of the Clintons), and went to Princeton for college, Yale for graduate school. Chappaqua-Princeton-Yale is effectively the same thing as Brearley-Yale-The New Yorker.
Is Robin privileged? Yes. Is Schwartz? Yes. I say this not to YPIS them—I share their demographics—but to point out the absurdity of one YPISing the other. It doesn’t make sense to dismiss someone else’s argument on the basis of his or her identity if you, the person who thinks otherwise, share that identity.
The only YPIS here that could possibly make sense is if Schwartz had responded to Robin by noting (and forgive me for noting this) that it’s typically only female accomplishment that gets dismissed as privilege. Could it be—and here I only speculate—that the gendered dynamics of who receives privilege call-outs may have helped sway Schwartz in favor of Clinton in the first place? The Twitter shaming of journalist Jill Filipovic, who tweeted about getting accused of privilege for … reporting from abroad, provides another example.71 If referring to a man, foreign correspondent evokes swagger and a sense of adventure. Meanwhile, a woman reporting from abroad stands accused of being, in effect, on vacation.
Here’s what I, a Clinton supporter who agreed with parts of Sanders’s platform, his stance on college tuition in particular, found so frustrating: Robin could have just defended the goal of free college, the part of Sanders’s plan most relevant to his point. He could have cited the flaws in Schwartz’s argument, and noted that her claims about the “staleness” of economic-inequality rhetoric were way off. Why the need to paint the author as a brat? What does that add? Even if we had hard figures on Schwartz’s family wealth—which we don’t—who cares?
Free college is a plausible goal, at least compared with a society free of individual cluelessness. Yet Robin—elsewhere a critic of the “privilege” approach (see chapter 5)—winds up going with the cluelessness-fighting strategy, because that’s what’s done. It’s no longer enough to point out that someone is wrong, and to be—as Robin is, in this case—correct. That wrongness needs to be attributed to “privilege.”
WHEN GOOD LIBERALS GET YPISED
IN HER OTHERWISE spot-on analysis of “check your privilege,” Hadley Freeman described a trajectory according to which the accusation “stopped being a calm, thoughtful and still faintly academic phrase, and became the subject of ferocious debate.” She concluded, “Ultimately, a well-meaning reminder to listen to other people occasionally has been turned into an angry cliche through misunderstanding, mockery and overuse.”72 When, I wondered when reading Freeman’s piece, was the golden age of respectful YPIS? As I understand it, privilege once had that nuanced, reasoned use, but once checking started to enter into it—certainly once the “your” got involved—the problems with it began.
With the exception of far-left, from-the-left quibblers, liberals often embrace the privilege framework as a way to understand society, and as a tool for self-reflection. What the mainstream left is less sure about is the privilege call-out. In principle, it’s a way of telling someone to reflect on how their identity may have impacted their worldview, and to give the proverbial subaltern a chance to get a word in. In principle, YPIS increases empathy. But in practice?
According to those who support its use, YPIS is only received as an insult because people find it upsetting to confront their privilege. People don’t like hearing about their unearned advantages. That’s because everyone likes to feel self-made, so learning that you’re not can be a letdown. That, and it stings to hear that you’re benefiting from an unjust system. Yes, YPIS is criticism, and no one wants to be told they’ve said something ignorant or insensitive. Yet maybe people who’ve been ignorant and insensitive deserve to have their feathers ruffled! Why be so sensitive to the feelings of the privileged, while letting them trample on those of the marginalized? As Midlane put it, in an anti-YPIS piece in the New Statesman, “Privilege becomes an inescapable feedback loop: any attempt to critique privilege-checking is met with the retort: ‘You’re privileged enough to have the luxury not to think about privilege.’”73 The assumption, then, is that the person getting YPISed is in fact privileged, and that their resistance to YPIS is simply a matter of resistance to hearing about it.
Wounded feelings and #whitetears do, without a doubt, enter into it. Yet there are also other, more sympathetic reasons YPIS often angers its reasonably-good-person recipients. Separate even from the question of call-outs (that is, of whether there’s value in telling someone they’ve said something inadvertently bigoted), there’s the way that “privilege” obscures what, exactly, has caused offense, and to whom. There’s a specific frustration in being accused of something ambiguous. Telling someone that they’ve been sexist or racist actually points that person to the issue at hand. Activist phrases like “Black Lives Matter” inspire their share of defensiveness, but it’s tough to argue that the backlash they inspire is a result of genuine confusion over what the phrase means. (Nowhere does the expression state that other lives don’t matter.) YPIS, on the contrary, puts the burden on the person being criticized to figure out why. And even if you can guess from the context which sort of privilege is being referenced, that the accusation is “privilege” obscures what might possibly be done in response. It starts to look as if what’s being demanded isn’t something doable (switching to up-to-date identity terminology, say), but some kind of single-handed overhaul of how society operates. The framework dooms the “privileged” to fail, to say the wrong thing, and to go on doing so indefinitely. The hand-wringing, defensive, awkward response is inevitable given the nature of the accusation.
The dynamic I’ve just described assumes that the recipient of a YPIS is in fact privileged in the manner accused. Which is, alas, not always the case. In her entry to Slate’s “outrage” series, Amanda Hess told the story of a fellow journalist who went moderately viral for her alleged white privilege. Alleged, that is, because this journalist happens to be black: “With a few assumptions and a quick Photoshop job, even a black woman complaining about a white dude on the bongos can be framed as an emblem of white entitlement.”74 As Hess explains, the bongos complaint had been interpreted—willfully misinterpreted, it seems—as being from a white gentrifier who wanted black existing residents to keep the noise level down. That made for a better story, so some YPISers went with it, unmoved by this pertinent new information about the identity of the accused.
The YPIS call-out is shorthand for another: the surely-you’ve-never. The classic of these would be a “surely you’ve never worked in food service,” to someone who thinks tipping isn’t necessary.75 And one flaw of the surely-you’ve-never is that often enough, the accused actually has. Plenty of rich people have, at one point in their lives, worked as servers (or falafel cashiers). Once you get into the business of announcing, with confidence, what strangers on the Internet have and haven’t experienced, you risk being wrong. Take the case of late-April 2016’s YPISed villain, Brandon Friedman. Friedman, a CEO, tweeted the following: “Looking at intern resumes. Having college kids describe their work experience is such a waste of time. The restaurant job isn’t helping.”76 While there are more charitable interpretations possible (maybe), it seemed as if he was saying that students who need to pay their own ways through school aren’t worthy of a professional internship. The tweet got called out—and not unreasonably so—by many, including Soledad O’Brien, a journalist with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers.77 Much of the response was a painstaking attempt at getting Friedman to understand why his remark was so off the mark. However, at least one Twitter user made it personal: “Sounds like you never worked a job in college.”78 To which Friedman responded, “I worked in a scrap yard cutting copper ends off AC cooler cores with a blowtorch in 100+ degree heat in Louisiana.”79 In doing so, Friedman won a battle, but an altogether irrelevant one. The conversation should never have been about his background to begin with. It’s a problem if employers reject entry-level applicants for service-industry experience, no matter the socioeconomic origins (or selectively chosen biographical details) of those employers. YPIS allows the accused to dismiss other, more constructive criticism of his or her ideas. Rather than convincing a bad tipper to be more generous, if you reach for the surely-you’ve-never, you’re asking to lose the argument on a technicality.
Yet the surely-you’ve-never can be even more counterproductive. Offering up an accusatory guess that someone has never been seriously ill or obese, or that they’ve never had financial troubles, is a way of putting someone on the spot to reveal things they might not have wanted to. Technically, this point hasn’t been entirely absent in discussions of YPIS—online writer Flavia Dzodan made a version of it in a 2011 blog comment—but it’s not one that generally comes up.80 YPIS makes it so that all reticence reads as privilege. Silence reads as a YPIS doing its good work of making a privileged person uncomfortable. Given how often the reticence comes from the exact opposite situation, the equation of reticence with privilege is a pretty big flaw of YPIS as an activist strategy.
THE ORIGINS OF THE ANTI-YPIS CRITIQUE
TO THE BEST of my knowledge—that is, going by my blog’s archives—I first encountered (and complained about) the YPIS meme in 2008, which may have been in the prememe era, now that I think of it. I wasn’t an activist, just a left-leaning French literature grad student with a blog and maybe a bit too much time on my hands. The inspiration for my first YPIS post appears to have come from the response an earlier post I’d written, arguing that interns should be paid. An anonymous commenter had offered the following: “Poor little rich girl.”81 While there were other, more substantive comments (some from known offline quantities), that anonymous comment was the one that stuck. It may have been off-topic, but tapped into something—and that something was deeply neurotic. I wasn’t even quite sure why I was being called a poor little rich girl. The situation I was discussing was that of unpaid interns at fashion magazines. I’d never been an unpaid intern, at a fashion magazine or anywhere else. (Was I even the poor little rich girl, or was the comment a reference to the photo of a crying Lauren Conrad of The Hills that illustrated the post I’d linked to?)
Even though I owed “Anonymous” nothing, even though there exists an expression for what not to do in this situation (“Don’t feed the trolls”), I was still relatively new at these online exchanges, and was in the throes of the emotions a privilege check can elicit. So I followed up with another post, in which I not only referred to the “poor little rich girl” remark, but confessed my own privilege, specifically the privilege of having taken jobs as an undergrad not out of roof-over-head necessity (that would come after college graduation), but because I wanted pocket money. I did not—and I’m thanking my younger self as I type—go full Falafel Guy and describe my college jobs as an ethnographic exploration of “blue-collar” life (the motivation, for me, was the desire to pay for my own mochas and H&M outfits, and I was never under the impression that shelving books at the University of Chicago library made a person working class). Yet I did nevertheless a) discuss nonhardship motivations for working in one’s late teens or early twenties, and b) implicate myself. Had my post made it to a major publication, I, too, might have gone viral for navel-gazing obliviousness.
As for why “poor little rich girl” read to me at that time as a variant of “your privilege is showing,” who can say? The meme must have already been floating around. Regrettably, I did not record my first encounter with privilege as a charge, and have no reason to believe the first time I heard it, it was as a recipient.
In any case, my initial impression of YPIS was that it was a way for rich kids to hide that fact about themselves, by highlighting it in others. It seemed like an online version of how, in real life, rich people play up the scrappiness of their backgrounds, while those actually from poorer families than their peers tend not to announce this fact.82 While adolescents are almost uniformly embarrassed by their families, only poor kids will do things like not have friends over to their apartment. Rich ones, meanwhile, will happily host, but will let you know that when their parents bought the brownstone, prices in that area weren’t what they are today.
By 2011, I had a slightly different interpretation, viewing YPIS less as scrappy one-upmanship than as what I called sanctibullying—online pile-ons where the competition was over who could be the most sensitive (as demonstrated by insensitivity to the target of the moment).83 The YPIS I was talking about wasn’t a kind of activism. It wasn’t about black women alerting white feminists to intersectionality. It was about posturing and privilege denial through privilege accusation.
At that point, apart from some blog commenters who seemed to agree with me, I had little sense that there was any wider objection to this phenomenon. Then along came a post called “Online Bullying—A New and Ugly Sport for Liberal Commenters,” revised and reissued as a Guardian op-ed.84 Its author, Ariel Meadow Stallings, was the woman behind “Offbeat Bride” and other “Offbeat” lifestyle Web sites geared at the alternative-bourgeois demographic. (As in: “Two tattooed brides and an adorable California spring wedding.”85) Stallings—to my delight—lamented the phenomenon of “privilege-checking as a form of internet sport”:
Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched the rise of a new form of online performance art, where liberal internet commenters make public sport of flagging potentially problematic language as insensitive, and gleefully calling out authors as needing to “check their privilege” (admit their privileged position within society and its associated benefits).
In the piece, Stallings refers to this manifestation of privilege checking as “a kind of trolling,” one that aligns, in principle, with her politics, but that amounts to “bullying.” Some similar objections had, I’ve since found, appeared earlier still, in a 2011 Tiger Beatdown post by Flavia Dzodan.86 Dzodan had a slightly different take on this than Stallings: “Call out culture might, at times, dangerously resemble bullying. However, it is not exactly the same. It certainly shares its outcome, however, unlike bullying, call out culture is part of the performative aspect of blogging. Unlike bullying, a call out is intended for an audience.” So, in essence, the same point—plenty of bullying (the self-hating homophobic variety comes to mind) is aimed at a larger public.
More interestingly, for our purposes, Dzodan described a “privilege checklist game … wherein the blogger needs to qualify every opinion by opening up with disclaimers to constantly prove her situational lived experience to the point that they can sometimes acquire parody proportions: ‘As a White, cis gender, right handed, myopic only from my left eye, gluten intolerant, middle class double income home owner, left leaning but politically independent woman, I believe Mercedes’ performance in Glee was vastly superior to Rachel’s’.” Dzodan went on to argue—and this was in 2011!—what so many think pieces have more recently critiqued: “Call out culture, a phenomenon that casual readers might not even notice, is to me, the most toxic aspect of blogging.”
The most surprisingly viral anti-YPIS essay, “A Note on Call-Out Culture,” appeared in 2015 in Briarpatch magazine. Surprising, that is, because essays in obscure Canadian journals don’t generally get tens of thousands of Facebook shares. In the piece, Asam Ahmad made what was by then a familiar point, about how call-outs are often “a public performance where people can demonstrate their wit or how pure their politics are,” adding, “[W]hen people are reduced to their identities of privilege (as white, cisgender, male, etc.) and mocked as such, it means we’re treating each other as if our individual social locations stand in for the total systems those parts of our identities represent.” Hear! Hear! Yet why did this incarnation of the argument hit such a nerve?
While the piece made a number of fine points, the content may gave mattered less than the source. It can’t have hurt that Ahmad was identified in the piece’s bio as a coordinator of “the It Gets Fatter Project, a body positivity group started by fat queer people of colour,” and that an author photo confirmed that Asam met at least two of the three marginalized categories in question.87 That someone from the deepest reaches of the social-justice movement, an activist who was himself marginalized and not some naïve ally, saw “a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out” was pretty damning. While Ahmad wasn’t the first self-identified social-justice activist to publicly condemn YPIS—Melissa Fong had done so in the previous year—there was just something about this essay that had people thinking, “If even this dude thinks this has gotten out of hand…”88
In his remarks about “a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with,” Ahmad hinted at one of the biggest problems with YPIS, namely its exclusivity along precisely the lines it ostensibly opposes. Do you need privilege to talk privilege?
THE PRIVILEGE CRITIQUE OF “PRIVILEGE”
SINCE THE EARLY days of YPIS, critics of the phenomenon have been pointing out that you need spare time and Internet access to even have arguments on the Internet in the first place. However, not long after, more sophisticated arguments along these lines began to emerge. Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf offered one of the first privilege critiques of “privilege”: “[I]f you’re among those for whom every matter must be reduced to privilege, consider what happens when your preferred mode of conversation is so complex in its jargon and etiquette that it disadvantages everyone who wasn’t socialized into it at liberal arts school.”89 While Friedersdorf leans libertarian, similar criticisms pop up on progressive blogs as well.90 And Sharon Smith, whose anti-“privilege”-framework arguments have appeared in the Socialist Worker, has made a similar, if gentler, point: inaccessible jargon turns away would-be activists.91 While Smith doesn’t say anything about the relative class of those who might be confused and thus put off (perhaps trying, as a socialist, not to further divide labor), it’s difficult not to jump to Friedersdorf’s conclusion.
The “jargon” case against privilege is somewhat persuasive, but misses a key reason why even poor-to-middle-class people initiated in the terminology may resist it. Privileged used to mean “rich,” and to a certain extent still does. And if you aren’t the commonsense definition of privileged, the accusation is simply confusing in a way it’s not going to be if you are. As Urquhart notes in her piece about cis privilege, “The word privilege just seems to set people off, myself included. I’ve often thought that the connotation of luxury and ease, of waltzing obliviously through life while others struggle, makes it a word more likely to divide people than improve their empathy for one another.”92 I’d add that “white privilege,” far from immediately evoking the advantages held by white people regardless of socioeconomic circumstance, suggests the state of being white and privileged, that is, of a country-club milieu. Conversations about inequality that are only allowed to conclude once someone admits that they’re “privileged” have a way of getting stalled, and it’s not necessarily because people don’t like admitting to having benefited from injustice. Sometimes the word simply doesn’t seem to fit.
However, there are other, even simpler reasons why a “privilege” framework favors the already advantaged. Anyone prepared to own and reject unearned advantage probably has some to spare, and here’s a framework that asks people to cop to being haves and to give it all up. If you’re already of the mind-set that you have too much—a mind-set shared by approximately five people, and they’re all well-off nineteen-year-olds—then you’re going to be receptive to the idea that you should give up what you’ve got.93 Otherwise, you may need more convincing. “Privilege” encourages a zero-sum approach to bigotry, defining all basic rights and any bare-minimum standard of living as luxurious advantages. In doing so, it ends up appealing most to those whose money and standing in the world are already secure. A better approach would be along the lines that Jamelle Bouie has suggested: “Better to discuss the ways in which racism *hurts them [whites] too*. How their lives are made worse by racial hierarchies.”94 In 2008, President Obama acknowledged a weakness of the privilege approach, noting, “Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race.” From there, he went on to advocate for “all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.”95 It’s truly difficult to see how any approach to fighting injustice whose only reward is the promise of assuaged liberal guilt will be of use in convincing anyone other than those who start out as guilt-drenched liberals.
And on an even more basic level, there’s the fact that a prerequisite of being “privilege aware”—that thing that’s now come to define the pinnacle of sensitivity—is possessing privilege in the first place. This is why the word “narcissism” comes up in criticisms of privilege checking.96 Privilege awareness is just one more way of showing off, a kind of abstract version of noting that your green juice is organic.
Writer Maureen O’Connor elaborated on one aspect of this phenomenon in a New York magazine piece called “The New Privilege: Loudly Denouncing Your Privilege.”97 O’Connor discussed the “elite populism” of Ivy League graduates who publish books and articles denouncing the Ivy League (while surreptitiously reminding everyone that they went to these schools themselves). While the piece is mainly about elite college graduates specifically, and not “privilege” in a general sense, her point is more broadly applicable:
[W]aving away your own privilege—and looking with disdain upon those who aspire to it—is the most old-fashioned form of snobbery. It’s Edith Wharton characters with austere taste and Dutch last names sniffing with disgust at the vulgarity of new money. It’s the owners of decrepit New England family summer homes shaking their heads at encroaching McMansions.
Those at the top have long opposed the flaunting of privilege, as a way of distinguishing themselves from those on society’s slightly lower rungs. What’s new is that discretion has become the ultimate progressive ideal. It’s not just, as O’Connor (correctly) writes, that “an age of anti-elitism” has forced elites to humblebrag. It’s also that this curated stance with respect to one’s own privilege has become the highest purpose on the left. Thus “your privilege is showing.” By all means, be privileged! Just don’t let your privilege show. It’s unclear whether YPIS results in an elite broadly defined more sensitive to the feelings of all of society or whether—and this is what I suspect—it has incorporated a kind of new-media training into privilege itself. That is, a new divide is emerging between the people in whom it’s ingrained how to avoid saying something YPIS-worthy, and those who are always a few keystrokes away from putting their foot in it.
EVERYTHING IN MODERATION
IT WOULD BE a mistake to dismiss all backlash against YPIS as defensiveness. While much of it probably was, on some level, inspired by personal encounters with the accusation, there are too many substantive problems with YPIS—and “privilege”—to ignore criticism on that basis alone. Some people, however, including some prominent liberals, have conflated the excesses of YPIS with the phenomenon of peons not revering them sufficiently. Some have also arrived at what are essentially right-wing conclusions, rejecting jargon and identity politics offhand.98
A spate of books and articles (Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed; Jonathan Chait’s hit New York magazine essay, “Not A Very P.C. Thing To Say”;99 Slate’s “2014: The Year of Outrage”100; Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis’s Chronicle of Higher Education quasi manifestos101) have offered up a third way of sorts for those who identify as liberal and agree that systemic injustices should be remedied, but find much of what passes for progressive rhetoric these days off-putting and counterproductive. My own sensibilities lie with this cohort, and whenever I read one of these things, I do feel some sense of relief at having found my people. A part of me wants to host a dinner party that writers Emily Yoffe and Judith Shulevitz (both skeptics of the new sensitivity) would attend, and to just leave it there. Yet there’s something about the way these criticisms end up playing out that makes me wonder whether it’s YPIS they’re objecting to, or something else entirely.
For example, one big issue with YPIS is that it doesn’t differentiate between people who actually have some kind of significant influence—and thus whose unpleasant remarks could actually impact a lot of people—and those who don’t. When Nobel-winning biologist Tim Hunt made a public statement to rooms full of journalists widely interpreted as not thinking women should be in the workplace, this was an actual problem. Yes, the word “privilege” came up in the discussion about how he came to hold those views, and in how other men came to support him.102 But the fundamental issue wasn’t Hunt’s inner life. It was his worldly impact. Whereas with a Justine Sacco–type situation, what were the stakes of her having unchecked privilege? What matters, for the YPIS set, is identifying and calling out errors. What matters is that someone, somewhere, has unchecked privilege; if a million people learn about an incident, however minor, then a million people should by all means flag it on social media.
Unfortunately, many liberal but from-the-right critics of YPIS are imprecise in just the same way. They see outrage, they see the word “privilege,” and they immediately know that as members of Team Political Correctness Has Gone Too Far, it’s their role to defend the culture of hypersensitivity’s latest victim.103 This imprecision was especially apparent in Chait’s article, which dwelled a bit too much on examples of prominent people having their work criticized (but keeping their jobs, status, etc.), a scenario that it would be a stretch to refer to as politically correct silencing:
Two and a half years ago, Hanna Rosin, a liberal journalist and longtime friend, wrote a book called The End of Men, which argued that a confluence of social and economic changes left women in a better position going forward than men, who were struggling to adapt to a new postindustrial order. Rosin, a self-identified feminist, has found herself unexpectedly assailed by feminist critics, who found her message of long-term female empowerment complacent and insufficiently concerned with the continuing reality of sexism. One Twitter hashtag, “#RIPpatriarchy,” became a label for critics to lampoon her thesis.
He then quotes Rosin on why she now avoids being too controversial on social media: “‘The price is too high; you feel like there might be banishment waiting for you.’”
Where’s the “banishment”? Even setting aside that hashtag activism against a book may help sell copies—a benefit with no real parallel for more typical victims of social-media pile-ons—it seems a mistake to conflate criticism of ideas with criticism of an individual, to conflate criticism (which, even if you’re a famous writer and the critic is a pseudonym on Twitter with zero followers, surely always stings) with real influence. Rosin herself would later, in The Atlantic, come out against privilege checking, but also, it would seem, against Chait’s approach:
Want to avoid a debate? Just tell your opponent to check his privilege. Or tell him he’s slut-shaming or victim-blaming, or racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or transphobic, or Islamophobic, or cisphobic, or some other creative term conveying that you are simply too outraged by the argument to actually engage it. Or, on the other side of the coin, accuse him of being the PC thought police and then snap your laptop smugly.104
That symmetry is key. It’s not as if the left consists of, on the one hand, YPIS-hurling “social-justice warriors” (abbreviated by their detractors as SJW), and on the other, calm and thoughtful free thinkers. If Team YPIS performs outrage and claims to be offended by everything, Team Anti-PC makes equally hyperbolic assertions about witch hunts and pitchforks. One portion of the left finds everything “problematic,” while the other finds it problematic that established liberal journalists and academics aren’t universally revered by their younger, less-ensconced counterparts.
There was a time when only conservatives would look at jargon on the fringes of academia and the far-left blogosphere and start making apocalyptic predictions. That center-left writers are now throwing fits about university “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and other by all accounts silly but marginal phenomena may point to gains being made by the YPIS-ish extreme left. It may also, however, point to the time-honored phenomenon of people moving to the right as they get older. It’s hard to avoid thinking that the latter may enter into it when one reads about whichever latest stalwart of the left has now had his or her progressive credentials challenged.
Otherwise reasonable liberal (in one sense or another) critiques of YPIS will often segue into takedowns of the few decent things privilege politics have to offer. A Daily Kos post that starts off with several helpful points about why the term “white privilege” excludes rather than educates ends up segueing into one suggesting that white men are the real victims.105 In one follow-up to his big essay, Chait writes, “The most simplistic misunderstanding of p.c. is to imagine it as a form of victimization of white males.”106 In another, he insists that—contrary to view of many critics—he does not feel victimized as a white male, and that wasn’t the point.107 (Just the sort of protest-too-much likely to invite further such accusations.) Yet there’s one line—one argument—in the initial essay that gives credence not so much to the idea that he personally feels himself to be victimized, but that his definition of YPIS is very much about the victimization of white men: “Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing.” I’m not sure how to interpret this except as an argument that white men are being silenced. There’s a branch of anti-YPIS backlash that’s really just a complaint about identity politics, and about a new order in which previously marginalized groups have, in some very limited ways, gained more ground.108
That said, whether a particular objection to YPIS comes from the left or the right isn’t always so straightforward. It’s long been a conservative trope to complain that liberals (feminists especially) concern themselves with the relatively minor setbacks experienced by marginalized groups in the West, when the women of Afghanistan, say, have it so much worse and what about them, hmm? This has long been recognized on the left as a derailing tactic, one that’s basically about trouncing on rights at home (and justifying military interventions abroad). It has also long been a tactic, on the right, to sniff out limousine liberals. Thus a 2011 Daily Mail story about “privileged” Occupy Wall Street protestors. (“While they dress down to blend in, the youngsters’ privileged backgrounds are revealed by glimpses of expensive gadgetry or the absent minded mention of their private schools during heated political debates.”109)
Yet the privilege turn has led to a dramatic shift away from not just materialist analysis, but even commonsense discussions of injustice. “Privilege” has been broadened to encompass an ever-growing list of ever-more-subtle (or fleeting, or dubious) advantages: Average intelligence is a form of privilege with respect to “genius,” a plight a Tumblr user claims to suffer from.110 There is “monogamous privilege,” as though the voluntarily polygamous were an oppressed caste akin to, say, the poor.111 Do you really have to be a conservative to call this absurd?
I suppose what I’m getting at is that I’m not sure where, politically, I’d put a New York Observer op-ed by novelist Sandra Newman, called “Hysterical Activism,” which includes the following criticism of today’s activists: “If the outsider expresses a dissenting idea, he’s invited to ‘check your privilege,’ which has the weakness of not being an argument.”112 The subhead, “There’s Something Pathetic About the Way Social Justice Warriors Would Rather Repel Potential Supporters,” could go either way—SJW is a dog whistle, and is generally used only by activists’ right-leaning detractors. Yet in the piece, Newman complains as well that activists’ techniques are setting back causes she herself cares about. And then there’s this privilege critique of privilege, which seems fairly progressive to me:
The final, and most significant, failure of the social justice movement is in the issues they prioritize. These tend to be the concerns of highly educated people living in affluent liberal enclaves; people, that is, who have never experienced what most people think of as oppression.… Even campaigns against racism often foreground microaggressions—to such an extent that it’s understandable that a writer at Time magazine, among many others, would take it as a sign that macro racism is a thing of the past. Of course it isn’t. These are just the first world problems of the world of inequality. A million incarcerated African-Americans would love to have these problems.
It’s perhaps not the best sign about the efficacy of the “privilege” framework that it inspires otherwise progressive sorts to write quasi-reactionary think pieces. Ideologically, “privilege” has built up a kind of conservative-to-center-left coalition, united in the view that activists are Stalinist, and their jargon hilarious.
The backlash to the online “privilege” movement has, on the one hand, pointed out real problems in the discourse. The dynamics that critics of YPIS have described, where everything anyone says has the potential (however distant) of going viral for perceived obliviousness, is real. Resistance to “privilege” on the far left does not, upon examination, mirror the conservative rhetoric of focusing on the socioeconomic as a way of avoiding a discussion of racism (and, by extension, affirmative action). Rather, a group of people who agree with the overall goals and diagnoses the privilege framework purportedly addresses have found that conceptualization lacking.
On the other, YPIS’s opponents have too often objected for the wrong reasons, mistakenly conflating YPIS with identity politics or Oppression Olympics, as though YPIS were about (as in the Gawker parody version) declaring the most marginalized the winners of arguments. Are the powerful protestors against “privilege” actually bothered by the silencing of the relatively powerless (that is, fellow classmates, or strangers online), or are they just annoyed that nobodies on the Internet—or students in their classrooms—are now challenging them? It can, at times, seem as if the backlash is primarily about defending the right of important people to say the sorts of things that would get anyone else fired, without even the slightest repercussions. A chorus of tremendously loud voices, from high-up platforms, announcing that they’ve been silenced by the call-out culture is maybe not so convincing. The far stronger case against the privilege turn is the extent to which it has wound up solidifying and exacerbating existing inequalities. It’s that it has, if anything, given the powerful—the privileged, if you will—even more of a voice.