3

THE “PROBLEMATIC FAVE”

IS IT STILL OK TO ENJOY WOODY ALLEN MOVIES?

IN MAY 2016, the humor Web site ClickHole published an item that should probably go into whatever the Internet-age equivalent is of a time capsule, as it so thoroughly sums up the then-current state of pop-culture criticism.1 The post consists of “seven of the many reasons why George Clooney is the greatest Hollywood star ever, although if he ever says anything racist, use the sliders to turn this list into seven reasons why George Clooney is a repulsive piece of shit who needs to crawl into the ocean and die.” Clooney’s purported sins are presented via seven “slider” images, where you can switch back and forth between images of Clooney, with accompanying text. So in one version, it says, “Another reason why George Clooney is absolutely flawless: that gorgeous smile!” Yet slide the “slider” to the left, and the caption now reads, “Another great reason for this racist asshole to go die in an ocean: his infuriating, shit-eating grin. No one forgets what you said, George Clooney. No one.” The point of this item wasn’t to reference any actual racism scandal involving this actor—he’s by all accounts an untarnished progressive; otherwise the joke wouldn’t have worked. Rather, it’s a play on the frequent media cycles where an otherwise likable celebrity will cause controversy for saying something offensive, or that could be taken out of context as offensive, and for this incident to dominate the “trending” news cycle for days to come.

There’s a standby on Twitter, popular among journalists and others wishing to lend an air of seriousness to their bios: RT≠endorsement.2 Its purpose is to draw a distinction between the articles someone deems shareworthy (and thus retweets) and this person’s own beliefs. It’s in many ways a silly disclaimer, both in its presumptuousness, and in the obviousness of the fact that unless otherwise specified (that is, unless prefaced with some version of, “Can you believe this idiot?”), a retweet is certainly promotion of some kind. However, what RT≠endorsement allows for, rhetorically, is a discrepancy between media consumption and presumed stance. As in, you get to be a conservative who reads the liberal news, and vice versa, without having suddenly outed yourself as being on the opposing camp. It’s a way out of the echo chamber, and, perhaps, a way to signal support for the airing of diverse viewpoints. But it’s also, in broader terms, a way out of the assumption that everything we find interesting is something we support. The disclaimer is necessary because the presumption is that these things would be identical.

What attracts us—aesthetically, intellectually, comically—isn’t necessarily what we think deserves our appreciation. Yet we live in an age where admitting this discrepancy is becoming impossible. At the very moment in time when cultural consumption has gone hyperpublic—when the enjoyment of a show or song implicitly entails the public endorsement of the same via social media—the mere act of liking something has become fraught. The great signaling question—so recently all but limited to the desire among hipsters to like things before they got cool—has gone political. Very political.

There’s a meme for this phenomenon: “your fave is problematic.”3 Comedy gets divided into that which punches up and punches down. Fashion criticism—despite the occasional pleas from experts4—has morphed into a tired conversation about cultural appropriation. (Much of this conversation hinges on the appropriateness of white British women and girls wearing Native American headdresses to music festivals … in the United Kingdom. The extent to which US-centrism enters into this is generally ignored.) Historical dramas get taken to task when they fail to live up to (often anachronistic) diversity standards. It’s not just that outright bigoted entertainment has fallen out of favor. (Except when it manifests itself as a Republican presidential nominee with a reality-show past.) Everything, even entertainment that seems to be coming from a good place, is forever hovering on the cusp of that disastrous scenario: causing controversy, or getting it wrong.

The podcast Serial, according to a piece in The Awl, was definitive “of white privilege in journalism,” because what else would there possibly be to say about a cultural product one has consumed?5 Or, for that matter, one that one hasn’t: A Guardian headline announces, headline-generator style: “Trans Rights Activists Launch Petition calling for Zoolander 2 Boycott.” The piece itself clarifies, “More than 9,000 people have now signed the Care2 petition saying they will boycott the film on the basis of the trailer’s portrayal of [Benedict] Cumberbatch’s character in the highly anticipated sequel.”6 Yes, sounds about right.

The privilege lens does not spare works from the pre-awareness era. In a 2015 essay with the (accurate) subhead, “Why Seinfeld’s Comedic Brilliance Relied on a Privileged Perspective,” in Canadian magazine Maisonneuve, film critic Adam Nayman took on the urgent question of whether one is allowed to enjoy reruns of a 1990s sitcom. The answer is, I regret to inform you, that you may not:

[W]hile critics frequently made reference to the show’s use of satire—as in its skewering of social rituals (dinner parties, workplace meetings) and public figures (George Steinbrenner, J. Peterman)—the jokes fall far short of Northrop Frye’s contention that satire is “militant” irony, exercised in the hope of instigating change.7

Alas, the only “change” Seinfeld instigated was, for approximately thirty-minute intervals, improving the lives of those who watched the show without proverbial sticks in the proverbial stick location.

THE PRIVILEGE CULTURAL CRITIQUE, AND THE BACKLASH

PRIVILEGE CHECKING, WHICH began around 2009 as a relatively straightforward way to mock ostentatious kale consumption (and oblivious posts about flying first class), has morphed into a more general privilege critique of cultural products beyond the vegetable aisle. I’m referring to the trend—no, the quasi requirement—in arts criticism that involves subjecting every book, movie, and television show to a privilege critique. By “a privilege critique,” I don’t simply mean questions of representation, like calling out Saturday Night Live for not having any black female cast members.8 I mean a full checklist: Who’s the artist? Who are his or her parents? Is the work punching up, which is to say, are powerful people (or, at least, white men) the butt of any jokes? Is the artist (or the protagonist, who may, these days, be freely conflated with the artist) sufficiently self-aware? What’s the movie/book/television show arguing, and is it flawlessly in line with an of-the-moment think piece on that topic? And are there any topics it didn’t address, and can it be faulted for not addressing them?

Because of its focus on self-awareness, representation is if anything secondary. Political correctness was—yes, was; this is something different—about diversity and slur avoidance. “Privilege” is anointing Louis C.K., a straight white male comic, a hero for privilege awareness. As TV critic James Poniewozik has argued, “The privilege-check has … been a feature of some of Louis C.K.’s most caustically funny standup.9 It’s true—he’s good! Poniewozik allowed that “in the end, we’re listening to Louis C.K., the guy who has the privilege”—a point no privilege critique can ever really avoid—but concludes that the gets-it-right-ness cancels this out. Media site Upworthy took a less subtle approach in its aggregation of the comic’s routine: “Sometimes it takes a white dude to get real about racism.”10 Does it, though?

It’s easy for conservatives to dismiss this turn in criticism. Yet even on the left, it’s now regularly lamented that there’s no longer any space for celebrating works that aren’t in line with one’s politics, or—more importantly—for ways of taking in culture that aren’t explicitly political. The complaint was perhaps best summed up in a blog post by Freddie deBoer, who, reading The Atlantic, “was struck by the degree to which I just expect all of our cultural criticism to function as a checklist for socially liberal politics—knowing when I sit down to read a piece on a movie or book or music, particularly when addressing some sort of controversy, that such a piece will undertake an obligatory exploration of the degree to which the art in question satisfies contemporary progressive political expectations.”11 He was joining a conversation already well underway. In a 2014 Observer piece, liberal journalist Lindsay Beyerstein defended Serial against the dual “privileged” and “problematic” accusations, and came to the following conclusion:

Calling a show “problematic” is a way of insinuating that it’s racist, sexist, or exploitative without actually having to argue the point. Conveniently, since everything’s problematic, there’s no need to boycott Serial. Which means the morally serious critic can keep right on listening.12

And Slate’s “2014: The Year of Outrage” roundup included an entry by (morally serious) television critic Willa Paskin, called “The Cultural Outrage Audit,” which addressed head-on the fact that “Identity politics has become an increasingly powerful lens for critiquing television (and podcasts, and pop music, and movies).”13 Paskin came out in very hesitant defense of the practice, noting that things are, at least, looking more diverse, likely because of the outragathon directed at the industry. Still, she argued, “Auditing cultural products for their treatment—or lack of treatment—of marginalized groups of people can seem like an antiseptic way of consuming culture, more head than heart.” Moreover, “sometimes, especially when you aren’t aghast yourself, all this outrage can feel like a reductive way to consume art.”

It’s tempting to say that these days, everyone is outraged—or, in more positive terms, that everyone is simply freer to express outrage than ever before. The reality is not so straightforward. This is as much a story about sensitivities as one about the state of journalism. As pop culture critic Alyssa Rosenberg wrote, in a Washington Post response to deBoer, “The problem with the current state of political art criticism isn’t really that it’s political, but that it’s predictable.”14 And that predictability can’t solely be blamed on critics themselves. For content to go viral—which is, these days, the business model—it needs to be framed as outrage. It needs to be that the author is very sad about the topic at hand. This implicit requirement drives journalists (particularly those whose identity matches up with the controversy of the moment) to produce reflections on being mildly offended, and to ramp up “mildly offended” to fury, because nuance doesn’t sell.

Moreover, nuance takes time. If your job—as it now often will be, in “journalism”—involves churning out aggregated content, maybe you could have some complex political and aesthetic response to whichever new television show, if you weren’t responding to it in quite such an assembly-line manner. Publications prompt writers to express outrage about things that they hadn’t even been thinking about, and demand “takes” that keep up with the news cycle. A mini-scandal erupted in the summer of 2015 when it emerged that the coauthor of a really out-there (even by YPIS standards) Washington Post piece15 calling comedian Amy Schumer a racist and connecting her stand-up to a recent racially motivated massacre was—lo and behold—unfamiliar with Schumer’s work, and hadn’t so much as browsed a YouTube clip before declaring the bawdy feminist comedian a white supremacist thought leader.16 Coauthor Stacey Patton, a journalist and academic, told Debra Kessler of the Interrobang that she had read about it, which was, yes, pretty weak. Yet Kessler’s more interesting revelation was that, contrary to a Post editor’s off-the-cuff claims, “Dr. Patton hadn’t ‘pitched’ the article to The Washington Post. She said it wasn’t her idea at all, and in fact she initially turned down the story, because, she thought there wasn’t much there.” So is this a story about cultural hypersensitivity? How can it be, when Schumer’s comedy hadn’t even been on Patton’s radar?

Meanwhile, the thoughtful criticism that does get produced and make it past self-appointed gatekeepers ends up getting framed—through a headline a writer won’t generally choose—as activist outrage. Take Amy McCarthy’s Dallas Observer piece from September 2015, which used the moment’s news story about musician Ryan Adams covering a Taylor Swift album, and the attention this new cover album had received, as a starting point for a discussion of female musicians getting insufficient critical respect. Political? Yes, but hardly hysterical. The all-caps headline sends quite a different message: “THANK YOU RYAN ADAMS FOR MANSPLAINING TAYLOR SWIFT TO THE WORLD.”17 Apart from being misleading—if anyone was mansplaining Taylor Swift to the world, according to McCarthy, it was Boston Globe critic James Reed, whose far-shallower piece she was responding to18—there was really no overlap in tone.

It’s likely, then, that the ranks of the outraged have been overestimated. Yet the influence of privilege criticism remains, regardless of the sincerity of each individual critic. Readers—and I include in this category the people who get their criticism mainly from social media—end up with a severely limited outlook on what could not just be said but thought about a work or an artist.

FROM POLITICAL CRITICISM TO THE DEATH OF THE APOLITICAL VARIETY

TO BE CLEAR, there’s nothing new about art—or criticism, for that matter—being political. The roman à thèse, or didactic novel, is an old form, and Marxist literary theory wasn’t invented by the Tumblr crowd. Criticism and entertainment alike have always reflected the values of the time. Those who look at the current landscape and lament the loss of timeless art, or of purely aesthetic assessments, are—to put it generously—misremembering. And it’s no more inherently political for a cast to be multiracial than for it to be all white.

What’s new, then, is—here as elsewhere—the all-encompassing “privilege” framework. The question ceases to be whether a work is good, new, interesting, enlightening, or even—as with old-school political correctness—whether the work offends outright. It becomes instead one of how it falls according to various preordained privilege categories. To critique a work is to hold it up to the scrutiny of the privilege axes: gender, race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, able-bodiedness. The questions asked become whether ground has been broken, or, conversely, whether any insensitivity to these hierarchies was exhibited. A work gets called brilliant if it brilliantly skewers someone from one of the official have categories. Each artist, meanwhile, gets assessed—in the manner of a college applicant—according to whether his or her achievements are a) surprising, or b) predictable, given his or her background and identity categories. (Taylor Swift, Salon helpfully revealed,19 did not grow up on a favela. So really, why is she making music?) But there’s a bit of leeway. Self-presentation is, in a sense, all. “Privilege,” in the personal sense, can be owned, as a brand, or rejected, for the same reason.

The privilege turn cuts across all genres. Writer Arielle Bernstein’s 2016 Atlantic essay, “Marie Kondo and the Privilege of Clutter,”20 is a fine example of a potentially fascinating story held back by a “privilege” framing. In it, Bernstein describes her family’s “fraught” relationship to material waste, a relationship stemming from a history of fleeing Nazism and then Communism:

In the U.S., my grandparents and mother responded to the trauma they’d experienced by holding on to things. My grandfather was a collector who was prone to hoarding. He’d often find random trinkets on the street and bring them home, and he kept everything, from books to receipts to costume jewelry.… In my home, we didn’t throw out food or plastic bags, or clothing that was out of style but that still fit us. We saved everything.

The piece might have been an essay along the lines of Roz Chast’s graphic-memoir rendition of her late parents’ hoarding tendencies, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? It might have been a meditation on what it’s like to be the relatively pampered American child or grandchild of struggling immigrants. And it is, in a way, at least until Bernstein segues into remarks about Syrian refugees: “It’s particularly ironic that the KonMari method has taken hold now, during a major refugee crisis, when the news constantly shows scenes of people fleeing their homes and everything they have.” Is it ironic, though? How is this different from pampered Westerners cutting carbs while other parts of the world deal with famine? What did mentioning Syrian refugees in this context do, either for Syrian refugees, or, more immediately, for Bernstein’s story? It was a thoughtful tie-in with current events, but it was also out of place in a highly personal, highly specific story.

It’s difficult to read privilege-centric criticism through anything other than a privilege lens. Once the word is planted, it’s hard to avoid. Thus, I suppose, deBoer’s snarky Twitter response: “If it’s privileged to get rid of clutter, how privileged is it to write thousands of words on the political ramifications of the same?”21 While I can’t say I find the fact that someone had an article in an online publication a sign of noteworthy privilege, I did find myself frustrated by Bernstein’s imprecision over whether it’s her parents who lack the privilege of throwing stuff away, or whether this lack of privilege extends to the entire “families,” that is, to Bernstein herself. How is she—going by the information she provides, I don’t know her personally—any less privileged than anyone else in Kondo’s target demographic? An Atlantic commenter had a response along those lines:

You do realize that most Americans alive now have the same, equally important or vague ties—depending on how much they want to justify themselves—to previous generations that held onto things by necessity, yes? (You know, that whole Great Depression thing?) Many, if not most, of us are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of immigrants.22

What this critical comment tells us, though, isn’t that Bernstein is privileged and therefore wrong. It tells us that this privilege argument was a flawed one. Because there is an interesting point to be made about minimalism and privilege: The rich people who embrace minimalism do so in a way that suggests they’re somehow scrappier than poorer people who are more attached to whichever possessions. This tendency is hypocritical, annoying, and worthy of mockery. Yet to just point out that showily getting rid of your stuff requires a certain amount of privilege, while true, doesn’t get at that question. Obviously Kondo’s readers, in Japan and beyond, include people whose forebearers dealt with hardships. If there’s something particular about Bernstein’s relationship with the decluttering craze, it relates to her own specific family history and dynamics. Any broader awareness theorizing winds up making a writer seem out of touch.

In a certain sense, the privilege turn in criticism was unavoidable. We want art and entertainment—at least the mainstream sort—to be relatable, and it’s no longer tenable to assume relatability is achieved by putting a white guy at the center of the action. Some of what reads as gratuitous (or media-fanned) outrage to the general population may simply be the open expression of objections marginalized communities have held all along, and are only now feeling empowered enough to express. Yet the all-encompassing nature of the critique—and the extent to which the approach is demanded most stringently of precisely the creators and consumers who are not white men—has backfired. Rather than opening up paths to recognition for all, it has created two conceptual tracks: groundbreaking and actually good. In doing so, it has somehow managed to make the works that couldn’t possibly be described as groundbreaking—that is, the ones without any of that pesky “identity” stuff going on—seem as if they must have something going for them.

BUT IS IT APPROPRIATION?

AS I WRITE this paragraph, the scandal of the moment is a yoga class at the University of Ottawa, which may or may not have gotten canceled because it occurred to someone at the university’s disability center—the class’s host—that yoga is culturally appropriative. The story—however dubious23—went viral in the fish-in-a-barrel sort of way, with even Jezebel wondering whether canceling yoga due to cultural appropriation concerns was maybe a bit of sensitivity overreach.24 As Jezebel writer Ellie Shechet put it, “Yoga—like coffee, tea, math, syringes, and many other things people put to good use on a daily basis—has its origins in a culture that was infected by the long, sickly arm of Western colonialism.” The Ottawa yoga story—at least before it got somewhat debunked—became quite the unifier, which is, as these things go, the exception.

No form of cultural criticism is better suited to the privilege lens than the much-debated25 concept of cultural appropriation. The line between exchange and appropriation is drawn according to whether the cultural borrowing reaches down. Punches down, one might say, except that even clumsily expressed admiration isn’t exactly a punch. With the glaring exception of blackface, it’s difficult to single out an unambiguous case of cultural appropriation of the nefarious variety. Take drag. Is this an example of gay men bravely defying gender norms? Or is prancing around in imitation of a cisgender woman actually a mean-spirited thing for a cisgender man—yes, even a gay one—to engage in? As is so often the case, the answer is: both.

So, too, with the notorious kimono exhibit, in 2015, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition urged visitors to try on a kimono, inspired by a painting of Monet’s (yup, white) wife wearing one. There were various levels of problematic-or-maybe-not to sort out: Was the painting actually mocking white people for being into Japanese stuff? Were the museum’s visitors necessarily white, or necessarily from cultures that fall below Japan’s on the privilege hierarchy?

While it squicked out certain Asian Americans to see white people trying on kimonos (thus the protests26), by all accounts, kimono wearing by non-Japanese people isn’t fraught in the same way as headdress wearing by non–Native Americans, and is actually something that makes the Japanese people who sell kimonos to foreigners quite happy. According to news reports, Japanese observers were partly baffled, but also annoyed at having their plight, not so much appropriated, as invented by other East Asians.27 Can Chinese Americans be offended on behalf of Japanese people who, when consulted, are not actually offended?

Yet a further, ignored, angle is the question of whether it’s offensive (or even inaccurate) to suggest that Japanese people are somehow underdogs with respect to white Americans in the twenty-first century. But is a culture that’s produced kaiseki cuisine, competitive poodle grooming, and electronic bidet toilets really one to which the “punch down” framework necessarily applias? Part of the Japanese refusal to find the kimono exhibit offensive may have stemmed from the fact that it was, for them, problematic to suggest that anything other than sincere admiration was at stake.

The appropriation discussion is thus a microcosm of the privilege critique more generally. Despite being ostensibly about social justice, it ends up reinforcing and maybe even inventing hierarchies, and therefore further centering whiteness, maleness, Westernness, and whichever other forms of have-ishness I’ve forgotten. It’s about obsessing—to the inclusion both of bigger issues and, conversely, of apolitical ones—over politicized minutiae.

OUTRAGE BAIT AS MARKETING STRATEGY

IT ISN’T QUITE right to say that privilege awareness and think pieces merely restrict cultural production. They also, paradoxically, encourage many creators to offend, which is limiting in its own way, and which hardly contributes to progressive aims. Intentional outrage bait is perhaps most prominent in the fashion world, a place where there are, in the most straightforward sense, objects getting sold. The eternal question of why, despite so many bloggy reminders, fashion magazines keep offering up spreads showcasing white models in blackface (or in American Indian headdresses, or dressed as Syrian refugees) can readily be answered by the free publicity these choices elicit. It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of cynicism to wonder if maybe, when Bloomingdale’s ran—then briskly apologized for—a 2015 holiday ad suggesting that you “spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking,” they knew what they were doing, and were going with an all-publicity-is-good-publicity strategy. “What a Creepy Bloomingdale’s Ad Tells Us About America’s Understanding of Rape,”28 went a Washington Post online headline, for a piece that—through its use of social-media examples—wound up reprinting the ad image itself three separate times.

And where even to begin with the concern-drooling industry surrounding the existence of ever-younger, ever-thinner fashion models? Brands hire preadolescent-looking girls to strut the catwalk, and very concerned publications get to publish feminist talking points alongside photographs of symmetrical, emaciated-yet-voluptuous fifteen-year-old children, thereby reminding otherwise sensible adult women that we are neither as thin nor as smooth-skinned as we might be, which—through some mechanism I will never entirely outsmart—drives us to shop.

However, outrage-bait marketing isn’t just about selling stuff in the widget sense. If you or your work manages to cause controversy, you gain not only the attention of whichever fledgling journalist has been given the be-offended prompt, but also the adulation of the other side of the outrage wars. (The libertarian publication Reason ran a piece defending the Bloomingdale’s ad from the “Culture Police.”29) Just as, in politics, a hypersensitive mood may have brought us Donald Trump. In the creative realm, outrage policing ends up encouraging the unsubtly outrageous.

“MUCH-NEEDED DISCUSSION”

IN A WONDERFUL early-2016 piece on the Fusion Web site, writer Charles Pulliam-Moore traced the history of the expression “stay woke,” from “socially-minded, black social media” around 2013 to broader social-justice alertness to literally meaning staying awake.30 “Woke,” as Pulliam-Moore explains, gets employed as a way of sincerely promoting alertness to injustice, but also ironically, as a way of having a go at the hyperaware, as well as at those whose proclamations of awareness somehow announce their cluelessness:

“Woke” can also refer, mockingly, to (white) people whose perspectives on race change suddenly after learning about historical injustice. (e.g. “You talked to Brad recently? He read some Ta-Nehesi [sic] Coates and now he thinks he’s woke.”)

Pulliam-Moore gives an example of “woke” used in this context: “When Jezebel writes about a ‘Woke Hungarian Who Did 7 Types of Blackface to Save Africa From Going Extinct,’31 they’re mocking a white woman who acted a damned fool in her self-righteous quest, not praising her for racial awareness.” Precisely.32

One could place Justine Sacco, the notorious Twitter-gaffe committer, into this category as well. The tweet that sparked controversy—“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”—was widely interpreted as racist, but may also have been, as Ronson writes, “a reflexive critique of white privilege.”33 Whether out of earnest anti-racism; a desire to save their own reputations; or some mix, a white opponent of racism might want to think twice before ostentatiously demonstrating that sentiment. What this usage of “woke” reveals, for our purposes, is that there’s a backlash against white hyperawareness from some progressive journalists of color34: the very people the “woke” white ally believes him- or herself to be supporting.

And, with the necessary caveat that a letter to an advice columnist is not the most authoritative resource, consider this 2016 letter to The New York Times columnist Philip Galanes:

I am a member of a racial minority. Often, a person I do not know will take pains to bring a matter to my attention (a news article, movie or lecture) that features the subject of my race. I don’t pretend that people are color blind. But I am put off when a person I have just met tells me that I should read a book on my group’s experience with the American justice system. How should I respond?35

To which Galanes (who is, he admits, “not a member of a visible minority”) responds that while the letter writer’s annoyance is understandable, the thing to do in this situation is to suck it up and have that conversation: “[I]f this dynamic creates opportunities for much-needed discussion about the racism that is baked into so many of our culture’s institutions, think again about taking them up.”

Not to get too meta, but isn’t it also kind of troubling, if not racist, to assume people of color owe white people education on these matters? I ask not because I have any more personal insight than Galanes does into how it feels to be, say, a black person asked to expound upon 12 Years a Slave while waiting in line at the post office, but because that’s what the letter writer herself is telling us.

Two days later, the Times would run another piece by Galanes, a “Table for Three” column entitled, “Lupita Nyong’o and Trevor Noah, and Their Meaningful Roles.”36 In it, Galanes asks the Oscar winner and Daily Show host, respectively, about Hollywood diversity. The conversation sticks to that topic for a good long while, until Noah points out, “But you know the irony of #OscarsSoWhite? If you were talking with two white people, they would get to discuss their achievements, their hopes and dreams, maybe a passion project.” Nyong’o then agrees, adding that the focus “cuts down on human experience.” Galanes changes course and asks them about their work, only to ask Noah, soon after, “Growing up under apartheid, were you in a big rush to tell the truth?” His answer? “Not really.”

My aim here is not to pick on Galanes. On the essential point, he’s right. These issues are important, and it is crucial to hear about them from black people. As for whether the issues are, as he claims in the Social Q’s column, underdiscussed, there we’d have to part ways. Indeed, say what you will (and should) about the flaws of the “privilege” approach specifically, but white people with deep commitment to the “white privilege” framework are probably going to be less racist than average, a point Hua Hsu notes in his New Yorker review of an MTV show on the topic: “As I watched ‘White People,’ I fantasized about all the other, far more oblivious-seeming white people I would rather hear from than these fairly bright young kids, who had, after all, agreed to appear in a film called ‘White People.’”37 There is real racism and it doesn’t manifest itself as hypersensitivity.

Indeed, privilege accusations have a way of sparing the very people who’d most need to hear them. In a piece called “The Real Problem with ‘Check Your Privilege’: It’s Too Generous,”38 feminist writer Amanda Marcotte explains that she “find[s] the concept of examining your privilege to be limited, because it assumes that the only problem that those fighting for social justice face is one of education.” In fact, as she makes clear, some people are the joyful beneficiaries of systemic injustice:

There’s another possibility besides unexamined privilege, usually just shortened to “privilege.” It could be that they have looked at their privileges, find them appealing, and would like to preserve them at the expense of basic decency and keeping the peace.

Or as she puts it more bluntly, later in the piece, “it’s not about unexamined privilege. It’s about being an asshole.”

Writing in Salon, philosopher Myisha Cherry offered an even more pessimistic take:

When I look at people who refuse to accept that they have privilege, after they’ve been schooled about its existence and its problems, I no longer see an ignorant heart in need of enlightenment. I see a greedy soul holding on to anything that can put it ahead of others.39

The main problem with fashionable notions of allyship (that is, of privilege awareness) isn’t that its proponents are just as bad as bigots. Rather, it’s that privilege awareness has made it more difficult for baseline-well-meaning men, white people, etc., to treat members of marginalized groups as people, and not as anthropomorphized discussion points.

In his New Yorker piece, Hsu, like Tolentino in the Jezebel post discussed above, casts doubt on the power of awareness to bring about change:

[T]he show, emblematic of one version of our “conversation on race,” presumes that the solution is conversational. The problem with dwelling on the sullen vibes or narcissistic guilt spirals of white people is that feelings can change with relative ease. The scenes of American injustice that we see on a regular basis are not failures of people being insufficiently nice to one another.

Progressive-minded white critics will also sometimes grapple with the question of how useful all the self-awareness is, really. When New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum opens a review of Broad City by calling the show “[a] stoner comedy about two woke girls,” she isn’t just riffing off the title of another show, 2 Broke Girls. She’s also setting up a discussion of the “characters’ well-intentioned but barely informed fourth-wave, queerish, anti-rape/pro-porn intersectional feminism.” The review hints at a growing understanding on the left that aware can, paradoxically, be worse than the alternative.40 This understanding coexists (often in the same writer, even the same article!) with an impulse toward self-awareness confession. Soon after Pulliam-Moore’s “woke” piece appeared, The Guardian ran a sweeping essay by Canadian writer Stephen Marche called “The White Man Pathology.” While ostensibly a reported piece on the US presidential elections, it was also an explicitly Coates-inspired apologetic gaze at Marche’s own “white and male body.”41 The “body” rhetoric, so of the moment, gets repurposed here, in what seems at first glance to be classic “privilege” form, to allow for a privileged self-examination. “It is hard to have a male and white body and to conceive of its weakness,” writes Marche, in one of the many places in the essay where it’s not entirely clear if this is a heartfelt confession of white privilege or a parody of the same. In a twist, it isn’t quite that Coates’s work has inspired Marche to think about his own white privilege. He sneaks in a reference to the way white people use references to Coates’s book as a way to signal awareness:

You can say to yourself or to others that black people are stupid and lazy; you can say that you don’t see color; you can call your uncle a racist so everybody knows you’re not; you can share the latest critique of brutality on Twitter with the word THIS; and now you can tell a friend that she really has to read Between the World and Me.”

Marche equates I’m-not-a-racist posturing with racism, classifying each of these phenomena as an “alibi from … whiteness.” He skewers the genre, in other words, while simultaneously taking part. Or not exactly—maybe what he’s skewering is the thing where white people point to other white people and declare them the true racists. Maybe he’s offering up an alternative, one that involves still greater self-awareness. In which case, how frustrating: the white navel is already overexposed.

The next, unstated step in the progression Marche describes, from casual racism to anti-racist signaling, is, without a doubt, the white-privilege confession. His piece opens with a classic #woke scene, a #CrimingWhileWhite moment where he’s treated decently by a guard at the US–Canada border, and knows that he owes his decent treatment to his race. Sure, he offers no corresponding anecdote about what happens when nonwhite people enter the States, no anecdote (personal, or even something he’d read about in the news) of someone nonwhite having problems there, but he doesn’t need to. The point—which in this case is Marche’s Tocquevillian (Knausgaardian) observations at Trump and Sanders rallies—is always that the author gets it. And getting it, like all the rest, has a way of coming full circle. At one point Marche cites a passage where bell hooks calls white men emotionally stunted. Marche calls hooks’s assessment “inaccurate,” explaining, “No one is more emotional than a piece-of-shit white man.” And back into the privileged loop we go, to the place where self-awareness mingles with self-centeredness.

It wouldn’t be accurate to label all criticism of white “wokeness” from writers of color as “privilege”-critique. I’d thought that was where Rebecca Carroll was going with a Guardian column (headline: “Macklemore Raps About White Privilege—While Reaping Its Rewards”) about Stephen Colbert, Macklemore, and other white male celebrity’s much-heralded (in white progressive circles) discovery of white privilege.42 Carroll, who is black, referred to these public awakenings as “legitimate first-step efforts,” but nevertheless a form of “white liberal microaggression racism, vis-à-vis an extreme lack of racial conversancy—a language that reflects white privilege as culturally inherent, not novel discovery that warrants praise and a membership card to the Down White People Club.”

I was expecting, then, another piece about the insufficiencies of discussing white privilege. Carroll’s solution, though, was for white people to discuss white privilege even more:

And so, Stephen Colbert, the way to turn this around is not by living deeper in that legacy by giving your host seat to a black guest for five minutes in front of three million viewers, but by establishing a recurring segment in which you talk with all of your guests about white privilege and how it is perpetuating systemic racism nationwide—in our economy, in our neighborhoods, and in our everyday lives.

There is, needless to say, no official consensus on this matter, among writers of any background. The closest thing to one, though, is that privilege awareness, on its own, isn’t effective. And yet the freestanding declaration remains ubiquitous.

THE YPIS OF JEALOUSY

A LOT OF “privilege”-based cultural criticism stems from the fact that being a rich and famous artist is an enviable position. As writer and blogger Maria Popova has argued, and as I, too, have pointed out on occasion, a lot of the privilege accusations hurled at creative types come from confusion over unearned advantage and the earned variety.43 Jealousy leads critics to overestimate the privilege of artists whose work they find unimpressive. The idea being, what, if not some kind of extra-special privilege, explains why this idiot has a novel or TV show out, while I toil away at the office, on a computer game, or whatever?

In a 2011 Slate essay,44 the writer Katie Roiphe took aim at Internet trolls, a topic that was, at the time, new-ish: “There are several common fantasies about the writer that fly through comments sections. One,” she explained, “is that the writer is ‘privileged,’ and/or getting rich off of their insipid and offending article.”

This accusation, Roiphe claimed, was absurd:

If the writer has come from a place of privilege—and as in the rest of the world, some have and some haven’t—they are most likely frittering away whatever they do have by entering an insecure and unlucrative profession like writing. These demographic realities, though, make little impression on the angry commenter, who, one notes admiringly, sticks to her guns. We are clearly in a season of class war, and one can understand the class war against a hedge-fund guy, but a writer?

On the basis of who knows which unpleasant interactions, Roiphe continued along these lines, protesting the apparent tendency of commenters to treat proper spelling and grammar as “kind of a show-offy part of the writer’s ‘privilege.’ We all do have spell check on our computers, so clearly if the angry commenter wanted to she could spell correctly too, but spelling correctly would be giving in to the whole hierarchy, namely the idea that some things might be more interesting to read than other things, that has angered her in the first place.”

Touché, in a sense, although it isn’t such a stretch to imagine that famous writers who are the children of other famous writers—that is, the sort of people who’ve been fielding privilege accusations since at least 199345—would get this sort of thing more than most. Yet as it so happens, Roiphe was basically right. How else to explain the obsession, in feminist comment sections,46 with teen fashion blogger-and-more Tavi Gevinson’s supposed socioeconomic “privilege”? The thinking there is that she can’t possibly be a middle-class white kid from Chicago. There has to be some explanation, some secret rich relative, something.

THE RUSTY-CAR MOTIF

WHILE WALKING MY dog one day in Toronto, nostalgic, perhaps, for my hometown, I found myself listening to a WNYC podcast. Host Leonard Lopate was interviewing a surfer-slash-war-reporter. Despite the audio-only nature of the program, some part of my hetero-female brain was surely intrigued. Or maybe I’d just run out of podcasts. In any case, the interviewee, William Finnegan, turned out to be a New Yorker staff writer, who, after covering conflicts in Africa, decided to turn inward, and to write up a memoir of his lifelong love of surfing. These two seemingly contradictory interests make for a compelling story (Who wants the memoir of a surfer who isn’t also a talented journalist? A photo would do…), but they also amount to the same: a man driven to see the world, unencumbered by such bourgeois, soft concerns as, does the house have a dishwasher? Sun-damaged, but (we learn) six feet two, Finnegan laments the fact that some remote surfing locale he and a friend discovered is now a resort. The theme of the interview was that real surfing isn’t all Beach Boys and the boho-chic lifestyle. I thought about a profile I’d read a while back on cool-girl beauty blog Into The Gloss, of a nineteen-year-old female professional surfer, who revealed, among other things, that she gets highlights in the off-season, when being out in the sun isn’t enough to keep her properly blond.47 Somehow I doubt if this would meet Finnegan’s authenticity standards.

What struck me about the WNYC interview was as much what was discussed as what wasn’t. We learn that Finnegan got seriously into surfing because his father was a television producer working on a set in Hawaii. A moment’s Internet research reveals that William Finnegan, senior, was something of a big deal, a five-time Emmy nominee who’d produced numerous well-known movies and television shows.48 Lopate asked Finnegan how he’d supported himself at various points in his adult life when he chucked it all to just follow those epic waves, and the answers (worked at a bookstore, taught at a black school in South Africa) all sound reasonable enough, if not noble and fascinating. Yet what’s never so much as hinted at is the possibility that his privileged background played a role of some kind in his trajectory from Hawaiian surfer and college dropout to The New Yorker and WNYC.

Put another way: If Finnegan were a woman, I can’t imagine the family-privilege angle wouldn’t have come up. Consider that what sure sounds like a rich-kid hobby—hanging out at the beach full time—gets described as if it were some kind of science. Which I’ll accept, but please do tell me when a woman who periodically ditches work and family responsibilities to devote herself fully to sample sales gets presented on the Leonard Lopate show as an amateur economist.

The privilege turn has not made much headway in changing who gets to enter the arts in the first place. What it has done is introduce a log-cabin-narrative requirement for writers and performers of all genres. A scrappy origin story is always needed, not just for politicians, but for anyone in the public eye. In a 2014 Harper’s Bazaar interview with fellow actress Chloë Sevigny, Natasha Lyonne remarked, “You and I have that in common—we were both outcasts in school in privileged communities where we were not the richest.”49 Or take Louis C.K.’s description of his childhood. When an interviewer brings up the fact that his parents had met at Harvard, the comedian launches into an explanation of why this biographical detail isn’t what it seems. Below, his response to journalist Jonah Weiner:

When I was doing Lucky Louie and I had this blue collar profile, people were like, “Yeah, but his parents met at Harvard,” which is funny to me. My dad’s upper class [from] Mexico, and his father was an immigrant from Hungary. My mom was from Michigan, she lived on a farm in Michigan, and she grew up with nothing. She was just, academically, really bright, and she went to Harvard summer school to take some courses, and my dad was there going to grad school. They weren’t undergrad, that’s the thing to remember. If you go to Harvard undergrad, you’re a spoiled brat, and you probably got in through some legacy, and you’re not even getting that good of an education, most Harvard people, but Harvard grad school is where serious professionals get their degrees and licenses. My father was there studying as an economist, and my mother was doing some post-grad stuff.50

The feeling this passage conveys is that Louis C.K. came by his blue-collar persona honestly. Something-something “Mexico,” something-something “immigrant,” something-something “farm.” And then there’s the juxtaposition of Louis C.K.’s parents with Harvard undergrads, a group whose copious privilege no one is going to deny.

What’s so clever about Louis C.K.’s response is that he doesn’t simply point out (as he might have, and as comes up elsewhere in this same interview) that his father left the family when he was ten, and that Harvard or no Harvard, he had a tough childhood. He has the audacity to spin the Harvard part of his family history as conferring underdog status, as well as the rhetorical skill necessary to pull this off. And there really is an art to self-depiction as self-made. Consider the opening sentence of Finnegan’s New Yorker excerpt: “The budget for moving our family to Honolulu was tight, judging from the tiny cottage we rented and the rusted-out Ford Fairlane we bought to get around.”51 For some reason, privilege denial always includes a rusty car. All that rust—the car is literally scrappy—obscures a bigger truth about an artist’s circumstances.

LENA DUNHAM REPORTED TO POSSESS PRIVILEGE

PRIVILEGE-CENTRIC ARTS CRITICISM began to take off around the same time as online social-justice YPIS. The two phenomena act in synergy with cultural production itself, which now must preemptively deflect these accusations. Privilege checks have been appearing for a while in A. O. Scott’s movie reviews. In 2010, he took on the Sex and the City movie sequel in explicitly YPIS terms:

[T]he ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense. Over cosmos in their private bar, Charlotte and Miranda commiserate about the hardships of motherhood and then raise their glasses to moms who “don’t have help,” by which they mean paid servants. Later the climactic crisis raises the specter either of Samantha going to jail or the friends having to fly home in coach, and it’s not altogether clear which prospect they regard as more dreadful.52

It’s not clear what it means to accuse escapist entertainment of “unexamined privilege.” Nor is it evident who Scott hoped would do this examining. But so it goes with the dubious awareness requirement.

Scott went for a deeper privilege critique in his December 2012 review of Judd Apatow’s This Is 40, which, as he describes it, “is all about Pete and Debbie, who, along with their two daughters, occupy a big white house in one of Los Angeles’s nicer ZIP codes and who, in the course of a hectic week, undergo—well, what, exactly? A matched set of midlife crises? A rough patch in their marriage? A flurry of ‘first-world problems’ so trivial as to be an insult to the planet’s struggling masses?” Scott spells out that “for all its crude jokes and on-the-money observations of the tastes and consumer habits of aging white Gen X-ers (we still love the Pixies!), This Is 40 should not be mistaken for satire.”53 The film’s problem, in other words, isn’t its depiction of privilege, but its lack of self-awareness. It’s good and well to make a movie about rich white people with nonproblems, as long as you, perhaps, affix a disclaimer?

While variants of it appeared slightly earlier, the “privilege” critique as we know it today—where “privilege” is the only lens through which a work can be discussed—began in the spring of 2012, with the backlash to Lena Dunham’s HBO series, Girls. Just about everything written about the show—and even in its defense—addressed the “privilege” question, which had not really been a question until that point.54 Dunham, it was generally agreed, should be, must be, referred to as “privileged”; failure to mention Dunham’s privilege, and to do so with the term “privilege,” was tantamount to declaring one’s support for injustice. Dunham’s Fresh Air interview about the show, the month after Girls first aired, wasn’t the usual promotional introduction, but was presented, instead, under the heading, “Lena Dunham Addresses Criticism Aimed at ‘Girls,’” that criticism being “that the show is narcissistic, lacks racial diversity and showcases whiny, privileged millennials complaining about topics only relevant to whiny, privileged millennials.”55 The only thing everyone could agree on about the show was that it and its creator embodied “privilege,” and that to discuss the show was to discuss that aspect of it.

Given that Girls was the ten-trillionth show about a group of white friends living in New York and trying to make it in glamorous professions, it’s not immediately obvious why this one set forth the privilege critique. If we want to pin this on Dunham’s own “privilege”—and what notorious “privilege” it is56—we still come up short. In an industry filled with nepotism, the specific variant she benefits from—she’s the child of successful artists—puts her ahead of most, but hardly makes her success predestined. And the show’s New Brooklyn setting, while overrepresented in the cultural sphere, is far from the most posh onscreen setting. (Half of American entertainment takes place in enormous California beach houses.) If “privilege” is spectacular wealth or unearned advantage, surely better examples could be found, even in 2012 alone. (The “Housewives” franchise comes to mind.)

The explanation for the Girls-as-privilege meme lies in a convergence of the content (especially of the pilot); the marketing of the show; and the broader culture in which it first appeared, namely a postrecession America not inclined to sympathize with the nonproblems of a group of broke but safety-net-having young Brooklynites. The show opens with Dunham’s character, Hannah, learning from her parents—at an upscale New York restaurant—that they’re about to cut her off. A no-longer-so-recent college grad, her parents had been supporting her as she interned for free at a publishing house. An indictment of the times, but mainly one of the sort of recent grad who doesn’t at least try to find paid work. We watch Hannah whine and plead for her parents to keep supporting her. The episode ends with a still-more-cringe-inducing version of the opening scene: Hannah notices and pockets the money her parents have left for the hotel housekeeper. Insofar as “privilege” is brattiness, it’s certainly privilege being depicted. Some kind of messy conflation of Hannah the character and Dunham the person, and of the portrayal of a behavior and the celebration of the same, led to a collective—mistaken!—belief that the show was not just about but created by the unapologetically spoiled.

The show was presented as an anti–Sex and the City, offering a grittier, more authentic portrait of single female friends in New York.57 This promise of social realism set the show up for a certain kind of criticism. Without the scrappiness promise, it seems unlikely anyone would have found the show all that “privileged.” As New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum pointed out in an early review, “like SATC, Dunham’s show takes as its subject women who are quite demographically specific—cosseted white New Yorkers from educated backgrounds—then mines their lives for the universal.” The difference, Nussbaum argued—justly—lay in the “very different stages of life” depicted, rather than in the two shows’ socioeconomic worlds.58 Something similar could be said about the furious response to the show’s lack of nonwhite characters. As writer Anna Holmes pointed out in The New Yorker, some of the backlash was simply about the times (“this is 2012”), but I’d say it stemmed at least as much from Dunham’s own self-presentation as a progressive, and the breathless treatment of “Girls” as “groundbreaking.”59 A female creator, and so young! And so clearly not chosen for her adherence to conventional beauty standards! Holmes wrote that the show’s whiteness was “all the more surprising because Dunham, a self-described feminist, seems unaware that the progressive gender politics she embraces have a long and frustrating history of relegating race to the sidelines.”60 Indeed, if liking Girls hadn’t been presented as almost a progressive requirement, it seems far more likely it would have been permitted to just be a show.

I’d pause, for a moment, on two words from Holmes’s assessment: “seems unaware.” The conversation about Girls ended up hinging not on the show, and not even exactly on the identity of the show’s creator. Rather, the central concern was Dunham herself—her own relationship to privilege, and her ability to satisfactorily perform privilege awareness. The question, when it comes to Lena Dunham, is always this: Does she get it? Has she, Lena Dunham, properly reckoned with her place in the world, and properly conveyed the fruits of said reckoning to the appropriate commentators? The far bigger question, namely of who gets to make a show in the first place, took a backseat to questions of whom Dunham chose to cast, and what sort of stance the show was taking. Consider writer Max Read on Gawker, posting in response to a tweet of Dunham’s he felt didn’t come across quite right:

I used to think that [she] just hadn’t learned her lesson about treating minority groups as subjects for the children of privilege to strike poses over at dinner parties or make jokes about on Twitter, and that eventually she would stop saying stupid things and hanging out with stupid people. But, no, as it turns out, she’s just an asshole.61

For a time, it seemed as if social justice itself hinged on this one woman “learn[ing] her lesson.” There’s surprisingly little hint, actually, of this pattern letting up.

Dunham, herself, I’m not too worried about. She’s made unexamined privilege (which is to say, painstakingly examined privilege) her brand. Maybe it helped that she was already getting this label in the years before her privilege went viral: A New Yorker profile of her from back in 2010, pre-Girls, ran with the subhead, “Lena Dunham Cheerfully Exposes Her Privileged Life.” 62 She’s the think-piece face of millennial entitlement, which, if nothing else, keeps her in the news. “Is Lena Dunham too privileged to fail?” asked a Daily Beast writer, in reference to does it even matter at this point?63 “Lena Dunham apologizes for…”64 is a veritable genre. To be the symbol of the issue of the moment is surely exhausting, but she has, if not sought that out, found a way to make being so profitable.

THE VANISHING DIVIDE BETWEEN THINK PIECE AND SITCOM

WHAT IS A concern, however, is the impact the privilege critique, in its ubiquity, has had on cultural production. The vast majority of artists and entertainers haven’t, like Dunham, found a way to make teetering on the edge of obliviousness marketable.

Since the Girls backlash, new shows have been responding, preemptively, to the accusations that show received. This preemptive base covering has been the most obvious with Broad City, which—despite being hilarious and worthy enough on that count—got celebrated in the press for getting it in a way that Girls, in particular, had not. For starters, Broad City features a diverse cast—Ilana’s friend-with-benefits is a black man, and her roommate is a gay Latino. And there wasn’t that same Girls thing where you never quite believe that the protagonists are broke, let alone struggling. Writer Jada Yuan’s New York magazine feature on the show and its creators, “The Broad City Hustle,” is, as the title suggests, about the scrappiness—middle class, yes, but at least not that privileged!—of the protagonists.65 In a 2015 Slate piece called “The Best Part of Broad City Is How It Handles Class,”66 writer Heather Schwedel explicitly compares the two shows and declares Broad City the winner … on privilege-awareness grounds:

The show is very much aware of Abbi and Ilana’s privilege; it uses that old saw of making the characters seem clueless as a way to communicate knowingness to the audience to great comic effect. In the finale, that panhandler is able to guilt-trip them precisely because, “poor” as they may be, they are (unlike, say, the girls of Girls) aware of the air quotes around their disadvantagedness.

Schwedel makes the entirely accurate observation that “Abbi and Ilana’s cluelessness is so ratcheted up, so clumsily apparent, that it’s hard to mistake for cluelessness on the part of the show’s writers.” It’s now taken for granted that a lack of subtlety in areas such as these is a point in a show’s favor. And so Broad City, which is simply a more fun show than Girls, can’t be assessed as such. There needs to be a privilege-lens explanation for why it’s superior. It needs to be about which show gets it, and the “it” can’t be something as simple (and apolitical) as cleverness.

Entertainment that can be readily shared, out of context, on social media holds a certain advantage in the current market. Journalist Noreen Malone couldn’t have been more correct when she described the third season of Inside Amy Schumer as consisting of Schumer “taking the major hot-button feminist issues straight off the Internet and turning them into skits.”67 A show-ruining remark if there ever was one.

To Schumer’s credit, this approach sometimes worked. Her Emmy-winning68 parody music video, “Girl, You Don’t Need Makeup,” in which a (fake) boy band sings the praises of the Schumer alter ego’s natural beauty … until seeing her makeup-free, at which point the lyrics switch over to an insistence that she put on more of the stuff, somehow managed to both work and make the relatively subtle point better it’s ever been in made in print. Others, such as a sketch about aging actresses’ plight, really did just have the feel of talking points transposed, gratuitously, into viral-video form. Which, perhaps, explains all the Amy Schumer gets-whichever-issue-right think pieces (such as this Vox headline: “Amy Schumer nails why privilege isn’t the same thing as respect for women”),69 but it goes further still. The official site announcing Schumer’s Peabody Award win describes her contribution in righteous, noble terms that make it sound as if she’d be unwatchable: “The fleet-footed Schumer will satirically embody vacuous white privilege in one sketch before pivoting to comically interrogate rape culture, body image norms or sanctimonious savior narratives in the next—and then engage in crisp banter about sexual failures and disappointments in person-on-the-street interviews.”70

If Inside Amy Schumer is Jezebel as comedy, Aziz Ansari’s series, Master of None, is, perhaps, Salon. Dev, Ansari’s protagonist, spends most of each episode demonstrating his awareness of one facet or another of his privilege, or, less frequently, of a systemic injustice of which he happens to be a victim. The friend group at the center of the show—which has gone with the innovative choice of being about a group of single, well-off, thirtyish friends in New York—has no chemistry whatsoever, and seems instead to have been constructed purely to anticipate representation-specific criticisms. There’s a schlubby, white, male friend who, like the gratuitous upscale New York setting, signals that the series is, in fact, a comedy. Then there’s Brian, the good-looking Taiwanese American man, who has no discernible personality, but who serves the purpose of reflecting negative media stereotypes about the sex appeal of East Asian men. Women like him, it’s mentioned. In case you were about to point out that this group sounds awfully straight and male, and also, where are the black characters?—fear not! The remaining friend is a black lesbian! It is, at exactly no point in the series, convincing that any of these people are friends with one another. But Lena Waithe’s Denise, while plenty likable, is perhaps the least convincing of all, seeming, as she does, to have been airlifted in from a far cooler clique.

In the episode “Ladies and Gentlemen,” Dev learns about male privilege, while the audience gets a lesson in what the term heavy-handed refers to. In the opening scene, we see Dev and his friend—the white, schlubby guy—having drinks at a bar. Elsewhere at the same bar, we see a thus far unidentified black woman (TFUBW) getting aggressively hit on by a white dude. The show switches back and forth between these two situations: there’s Dev and white schlub (WS) walking home, deciding to walk through the park (male privilege alert!), and then there’s TFUBW walking home alone, visibly terrified of the ambient rape-culture menace, because—at least according to a certain brand of feminist think piece—that’s what it’s always like to walk home, at night, as a young woman. Except the thing is, the bar creep has actually followed TFUBW home! She has to call the police and everything! All the while, Dev is whining to WS about having stepped in a dog turd and ruined his “sneakies.” Because there was apparently some microscopic chance that not every agenda item had been addressed, we hear the would-be assault perpetrator insisting that he’s a “nice guy.”

At which point the viewer—this liberal, feminist, Canada-dwelling viewer—wanted to say, OK, we get it. Women, young ones especially, have to deal with the ever-present threat of male violence. This point—a sound one—is the episode’s argument. (Note: the sitcom episode has an argument.) But no, the show’s hand was heavier even than anticipated. We are then subject to a very serious discussion among Dev’s friend group, with the women educating the men about how getting followed home from bars by strange dudes is just how it goes for women, which segues into the next very important plot point, involving Dev voluntarily giving up some male privilege by encouraging women to have more airtime in a commercial he is (well, was) starring in. The episode even gracefully avoids the “cookie” accusation (that is, that the show wants us to praise Dev for being a decent human being), principally by having Dev (initially, because let’s face it, he’s a saint) disagree with his girlfriend and a female friend that it’s sexist when men come up to a mixed-gender group and introduce themselves only to the men.

The show’s best moments aren’t necessarily the apolitical ones, so much as the ones that break free of the op-ed-ish constraints. The “Finale” tells an old story about marriage ambivalence in a fresh way, and while there are talking points sprinkled throughout (marriage is an outdated institution, people say weird things to interracial couples, etc.), the story finally seems more like that of two people informed by their backgrounds, rather than like a Salon tirade come to life.

And the “Parents” episode, which plunges viewers into the perspective of Asian immigrant parents, is brilliant, and seems as if it comes from another show entirely. First we see Dev and Brian, acting like entitled millennials, annoyed at their old-country parents. We then get flashbacks, from both fathers’ perspectives, and to their childhoods in India and Taiwan, respectively. While its thesis is the same as that of the other episodes—Dev is nice, niceness is good, and racism is bad (we witness both fathers, in flashbacks, experiencing racism upon arriving in the States)—this one doesn’t linger quite so long in those realms.

It seems, in other words, that the show gets it right like none ever before. Perhaps not surprisingly, Ansari’s own opinion essay on the topic of racism and the entertainment industry, which appeared in The New York Times as a bonus track of sorts to the show itself—a thoughtful look at what it means to be an entertainer from an underrepresented group, and on the challenges of diversity in casting—is ultimately quite a bit better than the show.71 What works as a think piece falls flat as entertainment. Yet at least no marginalized groups were harmed (or even left unacknowledged) in the making, right?

Not so! Even Master of None—this show whose entire selling point is having gotten it right—has, apparently, failed. On Jezebel’s side blog, The Muse, writer Kara Brown took Ansari to task for not including enough female characters, nor enough “women of color in significant roles.” How this squares with Brown’s following sentence, which is a list of the three main nonwhite (or, in one case, mixed-race but white-reading) female characters on the show, I couldn’t say. And at New York magazine’s Vulture blog, writer Ali Barthwell hones in specifically on the question of Dev’s love interests, who are mainly white women:

For a show that so deftly takes on race and how it influences how we see one another, and where every actor’s ethnicity informs his or her character, the decision to not engage with it romantically on any level feels like a missed opportunity. Master of None addresses how the world perceives Rachel dating an “ethnic,” as one man refers to Dev—wouldn’t it be great if there were also a conversation about Dev’s romantic preferences?72

On the one hand, I want to scream. Must entertainment always set forth, in digestible, sound-bite-esque terms, a “conversation”? Can’t the “conversation” just be the thing people who watch the show have about it? Apparently not. Artists and entertainers are now expected to respond, in more or less real time, to journalists’ criticisms of their politics. On Vulture, writer E. Alex Jung took Amy Schumer to task73 for failing to properly consider a Guardian piece that had accused her of having “a shockingly large blind spot around race.”74 “Rather than listen to the critique, she got defensive,” wrote Jung, before offering up as an example of a performer who takes a “better approach,” namely “to listen and take the criticism in rather than try to shut it down”: none other than … Lena Dunham. Reader, I give up.

The requirement winds up being that much greater for women, particularly women of color, thus revealing another way the privilege turn has backfired. Yes, the very people whose voices progressives supposedly want to hear are expected to take on additional thought-leader responsibilities, while also being entertaining, and while of course, within that entertainment, getting it right. The prime example of this phenomenon has to be Mindy Kaling, whose sitcom, The Mindy Project, is pretty defiantly unconcerned with identity politics or getting things right, and who regularly gets taken to task for this.75 Kaling ended up responding, on NPR, to critics faulting her for not being active enough in the conversation around her existence:

I was on Twitter recently and a critic, who’s been very critical of me and of the show, was talking about a round table that three South Asian women had done where they kind of criticized and dissected the show, and said, “Why doesn’t Mindy respond to this?” … I’m an actor and a writer and a showrunner and I edit my show.

Crucially, she added, “And I think that it’s insidious to be spending more of your time reflecting and talking about panels, and talking more and more in smart ways about your otherness, rather than doing the hard work of your job.”76

Kaling’s right, or at least, I wish we lived in a world in which she were. However, we’re now in an age where entertainment has to be in the service of a greater good. And as such, if further good can come about through the entertainer moonlighting as an opinion writer, that’s simply what’s demanded.

In The Atlantic, writer Megan Garber celebrated the fact that comedians have—in her view—become the new public intellectuals. She argues in the piece that as comedy “became (slightly) less exclusionary to women and minorities,” the genre “began to ask, and answer, the questions that newfound diversity will tend to bring up—questions about power dynamics and privilege and cultural authority.” An opened playing field, it would seem, must lead to sanctimony:

As comedy began to do a better job of reflecting the world, it began, as well, to take on the responsibilities associated with that reflection. It began to recognize the fact that the long debate about the things comedy owes to its audiences and itself—the old “hey, I’m just making a joke” line of logic—can be partially resolved in the idea that nothing, ultimately, is “just a joke.” Humor has moral purpose. Humor has intellectual heft. Humor can change the world.77

A part of Garber’s argument is right—the “just a joke” disclaimer, long pinned on the kind of casual bigotry that lacks any humorous component, is done, and good riddance. However, the notion that inclusiveness means an end to the sort of humor that lacks an explicit “moral purpose” is frightening.

The beginning of Ali Barthwell’s remark about Master of None, that bit where she writes, “For a show that so deftly takes on race…” is key: The show is presenting itself not as entertainment, but as a shining beacon of privilege awareness. The disappointment—as with Schumer and Dunham—comes from the sense of a broken promise. With that said, it’s not entirely clear that any of these creators ever quite had the option to not, as it were, converse. Any show that’s by-and-about someone who isn’t a white man ends up subject, in a special and all-encompassing way, to this sort of criticism. Consider this part of Barthwell’s review: “The onus is not necessarily on minority showrunners to change our views on who makes a viable romantic partner. But a preference for white lovers is not the same as wanting a partner who likes hiking or has tattoos.” Consider, the first word of the second sentence, that “But.” There’s always this underlying assumption that a show by someone who isn’t a white man is, in and of itself, a political gesture, and must, to be consistent, follow through with impeccable politics. This places an extra burden on already-marginalized performers, and produces too much think-piece-mirroring entertainment.

All of this played out the most dramatically in the controversies surrounding Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Tina Fey and Ryan Carlock’s sitcom about a Midwestern woman who escaped kidnapping and imprisonment to start a new life in New York. A Time magazine headline labeled the series “TV’s Most #Problematic Show,”78 which is absolutely true, if a bit convoluted to explain. Basically, in season one, the show violated (or subverted) a rule about not casting white people in nonwhite roles when it was revealed that the Jane Krakowski character is an American Indian woman intentionally passing as white. Problematic! Tina Fey—already a problematic “White Lady” for more reasons than I can keep track of—got taken to task for not engaging with online critics.79 Then in the second season, Fey, and whoever else at the show, decided to have some fun with the tendency of television shows to get called out for offending. In the most problematic episode, Kimmy’s roommate Titus—black, gay, and played by Tituss Burgess, who might be the actor with the best comic timing in history—puts on a one-man show, in which he acts out what he imagines was his past life as a geisha. In a nod to Boston Museum’s kimono-gate, there’s not just Titus in a kimono (and whiteface; had this been blackface, we’d have left problematic territory for the straightforwardly racist, and therefore less think-piece worthy), but also a plotline involving hypersensitive Asian American protesters. It was clever, but if it was funny (which, fine, it was), that’s because Burgess has comedic superpowers. While I enthusiastically support Fey’s resistance to sanctimonious media criticism, and think her wise for avoiding engaging with her online detractors, there’s always something a bit limited about a think-piece plotline, which, ultimately, that plot was. Even when it’s a think piece you agree with.

Predictably enough, the kimono episode sparked still-more think-piece controversy. In The Guardian, critic Eric Thurm spells out what, exactly, made the plot problematic, while taking care to add that other “elements of the season work because they meet the old test of ‘punching up,’ making fun of people who can take it.”80 What’s barely mentioned is the fact that the show is doing quite a bit to increase onscreen diversity. It’s only after explaining why the kimono plot was problematic that critic Allie Pape, on Vulture, admits, “[F]or what it’s worth, [the show] clearly intends to address Hollywood’s deficits—there’s no other show on TV whose primary cast is three women (two of them over 45), two men of color (one of them gay, the other an immigrant), and zero white dudes.”81 The cast’s diversity, though, is a side note. It’s almost as if that diversity makes its occasional forays into provocation that much more problematic, since perfection seems within reach.

THE HARDER THEY TRY, THE FASTER THEY FALL

THAT SAID, PRIVILEGE-BASED criticism tends to reach its peak when responding to works from what might be called the sanctitainment genre: A new show or movie will come out, one whose entire purpose is telling a very important story, and it’s only a matter of time until the articles start appearing about why this latest work is, in fact, the most offensive thing ever, how dare they, how dare they! Usually, around the time a civil rights issue reaches noncontroversial status in mainstream society, that’s about the right moment to make a movie about the righteousness of the now-long-accepted cause. Thus, I suppose, is what happened with Roland Emmerich’s widely panned 2015 film, Stonewall, about the 1969 Stonewall riots. And thus all the more so the Sarah Gavron’s also-2015 Suffragette, about take a wild guess. Gay people should be allowed to go to gay bars and live peacefully! Women should have the right to vote! Yes, an enthusiastic yes to both, but who were the liberal-minded Westerners in 2015 who questioned either? But moving on.

Both of these movies attracted tremendous from-the-left criticism and even protests.82 In a Vanity Fair review, writer Richard Lawson lays out the issues with Stonewall, faulting Emmerich for making his protagonist a “beautiful, blond angel from the Midwest, sent to the Village to marshall the nonwhite, gender-queer street kids into action. Which, y’know, is certainly not how the Stonewall riots, which were largely incited by drag queens and trans women of color and lesbians, actually happened.” The movie’s redeeming feature, Lawson argues, in a backhanded-compliment sort of way, is the awareness its flaws raise of—yup—privilege: “Stonewall at least does that bit of good: it illustrates how systems of privilege and prejudice within a minority can be just as pervasive and ugly as anything imposed from the outside. And that’s an outrage.”83

Yet the true “privilege” treatment came in writer Daniel Reynolds’s defense of the movie, in The Advocate,84 a fairly short essay that uses variants of the term six times (but that also, to Reynolds’s rhetorical credit, includes the unforgettable admonition to “not throw the gayby out with the bathwater,” to express the thought that the movie, for all its flaws, shouldn’t be dismissed entirely). While Reynolds allows that “Emmerich’s perception that the best point of entry for ‘everyone’ would be the steely blue eyes of a white, musclebound young man from rural America may well indicate his own unexamined privilege,” Reynolds’s privilege-focused take goes one step further, calling out “[c]ritics of the movie, who are privileged enough to have seen” highbrow LGBT-themed films for expecting art-house perfection from a mainstream picture. According to Reynolds, the audience Stonewall is there to help is the small-town American kid with a homophobic family. An argument along those lines is needed, if one is to defend the legitimacy of a work accused of privilege. Or, at the very least, there needs to be some sort of acknowledgment that one is aware of the privilege accusations and the reason for them. If you’re going to praise a work that has already been called out in this way, you need to pile on the disclaimers. Thus the 2013 AlterNet piece, “Lena Dunham Privileged? Yes, But You Should Still Watch ‘Girls,’” which begins with the sentence, “Privilege is a powerful and predetermined form of luck.”85 A definition of privilege, in other words, is the very first line of what is, ostensibly, a review of a television program.

As with Stonewall, the Suffragette criticism was about the erasure of nonwhite historical actors. It’s a weaker case with the British suffragette movement of the early twentieth century than with the Stonewall riots, but as a New Statesman piece helpfully explained, not every last suffragette was white, so in principle, the movie might have acknowledged contemporary sensitivities without resorting to full-on anachronism.86 If the backlash to the relatively minor grievance was higher profile, it may have had something to do with Meryl Streep being in the film. But the think-piece virality of the opposition to Suffragette wound up stemming, as it so often does, from a questionable T-shirt, in this case one bearing a quote from real-life suffragette (and Streep’s character) Emmeline Pankhurst: “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.”87 The movie’s four (white) female stars posed in this shirt for Time Out London, each with the flawless-yet-undone hair of a glamorous actress going for a casual look, and with expressions that suggested a blithe indifference to the associations that “slave” might have, particularly—if not exclusively—in the United States.88

Tasked to review the film for The Stranger, critic Ijeoma Oluo instead produced an essay about her refusal to do so, “because I’m no longer going to legitimize films that refuse to acknowledge the existence of people of color. And neither should you.”89 Oluo doesn’t claim in the piece that the movie is overtly racist, merely that in some entirely different version of it that she’d have preferred, it would have had nonwhite actors.

The privilege critique tends to fall with the heaviest thud on artists and works with a progressive mission. Is it that works purporting to be progressive come across as particularly hypocritical when they fail to exhibit progressiveness on all fronts? That there’s something particularly irritating about the smug self-satisfaction of the marketing campaigns around good-cause movies, say, such that it’s that much more irritating when they, the self-proclaimed official arbiters of justice, screw up? Or is it, on the contrary, that these works are already vulnerable, given their progressive messaging, and are easier targets? After all, a movie about gay rights or women’s suffrage will already have a built-in audience of detractors from the right, as well as of politically indifferent sorts whose eyes roll at earnest messaging of any kind. Ultimately, both are true. Progressive works that fall short are more annoying than mainstream ones that were never trying in the first place, but they maybe shouldn’t be.

The problem is less that “privilege” enters into criticism than that it’s become the only critique. All there is to say about a work is where it stands with respect to privilege. Where on the privilege hierarchy does the work’s perspective sit, and what precisely is its attitude to those lower down? Might anyone have taken offense, even if no one actually did (asks a critic who is, in all likelihood, plenty privileged himself)? Criticism has thus overcorrected for patterns of earlier eras, when the whiteness or maleness of characters and creators would go unremarked.

HOW PRIVILEGE CRITICISM BACKFIRES

MEANWHILE, THE WORKS that end up spared are the ones that were never promising privilege awareness to begin with. And who gets to produce such works? White men. The conceptual space for art in the apolitical sense, but also for political art that isn’t making an easily digestible, so-and-so-nails-such-and-such-issue sort of point, ends up excluding anyone with any sort of “identity.” Consider the Jonathan Franzen–criticism dichotomy, as laid out by writer Mike Medley in The Globe and Mail, in a piece about the novelist’s reputation: “To some, [Franzen] represents everything wrong with contemporary literature, a symbol of unchecked privilege and unexamined sexism; to others, he’s the Great American Novelist, one of the most skilled sentence builders of his time, a writer who can internalize the foremost issues of the day and bring clarity to them through his fiction.”90 Such is the dichotomy: Either you’re on team identity politics and you sit around policing whatever authors may or may not have left “unexamined,” or you’re able to appreciate their brilliance. Where’s the room for those of us who think he’s just OK? And that, yes, he’s gotten a boost from being of the one demographic allowed to exist outside the identity sphere, but that his identity doesn’t discredit his work?

What “privilege” has done is create two tracks: the good-but-dull artist, whom think pieces declare gets it right, and the enfant terrible, a Franzen (or a Karl Ove Knausgaard, or a Michel Houellebecq; an opinion writer or two also come to mind) who tells it like it is. But do they, really? Declaring your appreciation for PC-defying white male artists is ultimately as much of a boring political statement as sharing, sheeplike, whichever sketches your right-thinking friends have declared, on social media, to have “nailed” the issues of the day.

“Privilege” criticism leaves no conceptual space for enjoyment that isn’t in line with politics or identity, particularly for any reader/viewer who isn’t a white man, and therefore able to go the antisensitivity route without getting accused of personal hypocrisy. Or, rather, it leaves two options—either you can stake your claim as being the “cool” woman (or black person, gay person, etc.) who laughs along with bigoted jokes that aren’t even funny, or you can object. Which just isn’t how cultural consumption actually works. Plenty of the books, movies, and television shows I like most are offensive not just to my politics but to Jews, to women, and—ahem—to Jewish women. It’s tough to articulate exactly how this works, and there’s certainly a threshold of offensiveness where a novel or program will lose me entirely. Yet part of cultural consumption is escape.

The privilege lens also more or less rules out a certain sort of unlikable character. And no, I don’t mean those cases where “unlikable” is used to praise female characters for being feminist role models. I’m thinking of characters like Basil Fawlty, Archie Bunker, or George Costanza: straight white men who are privileged, by today’s definitions, but convinced of their own victimhood. Hotel owner Basil has to deal with his nagging (but usually correct) wife and the Spanish employee he hired who speaks no English (but whom he hired, it’s spelled out, because it meant paying a lower wage). And the guests at Fawlty Towers are a mix—a few make unrealistic demands (sweeping views from hotel windows; fresh-squeezed orange juice), but many others have the audacity to demand basic hotel services like checking in. Archie’s a casual-bigotry machine, but his malapropisms, plus the juxtaposition of his sanctimoniousness-incarnate son-in-law, makes it seem classist to despise him outright. And there’s George Costanza, who pretends to be disabled in order to have a private restroom at the office, and whose redeeming qualities the show never reveals.

The privilege approach forbids such characters. It allows obvious cases—Stephen Colbert, South Park’s Cartman—but once there’s any complexity, any hint that the viewer might … identify with the lack of self-awareness, forget it. Thus the sheer unacceptability of Hannah’s character on Girls. Such characters’ self-pity and obliviousness are what make them funny, but also what make them relatable. That’s where the humor comes from—that discomfort that comes from seeing a part of oneself in a character who’s clearly not intended to come across as an especially good person. We don’t get this from Aziz Ansari’s Dev taking his parents to dinner, buying them gifts, and calling out all the bigotries. And the thing is, entitled obliviousness is both wrong and relatable. Relatable across ethnic and gender lines, or else why would I kind of see where Basil Fawlty is coming from?

Having reached the end of the chapter on “privilege” criticism, I’m meant to offer a way out. But is there one? We could, I suppose, have two separate tracks for criticism, two different sections, as it were: one for the quasi-academic, quasi-political discussions of how various works contribute (or don’t) to social justice; and another where critics (of all genders! of all backgrounds!) are free to convey, RT≠endorsement style, what they actually think about the works. Some of the “actually think” responses would, of course, be influenced by the work’s politics, but there wouldn’t be that same political default. If I’m not declaring this the out-and-out answer, though, it’s because I fear the “privilege” approach has now become ingrained in how we consume art and entertainment. It may have simply gotten to the point that all other possible responses to a work have been rendered incomprehensible.