THE “RIGHT” KIND OF PRIVILEGE
THE MERE WORD “privilege” is one of those terms—like “social justice,” “gender studies,” or “Clinton presidency”—that reliably draws shudders on the right. Progressive use of the term comes in for regular mockery in conservative publications,1 enough so that there’s now a privilege “beat.”2 Yet mainstream conservatism isn’t quite sure where it stands on the concept. On the one hand, commentators have correctly noted that “privilege” is a jargon-and-nonsense gold mine. In principle, the right has the upper hand, because when it embraces nepotism and silver spoons and so forth (Trump, Paul, and all those Bushes), it can’t be accused of hypocrisy. The thing where a bunch of rich white kids get together to microscopically investigate their own privilege only seems to happen on the left. So it falls on those of us who fall left of center to duck our heads in shame. Therefore, it might seem as if the right could just declare the nonuse of “privilege” as a point in its favor. On the other hand … YPIS clearly works. It summons emotions and wins arguments. The temptation is just too great to adopt what’s clearly an effective silencing technique. (Left-wing students are getting “trigger warnings”? Gosh darn it, conservative students are entitled to some of their own!3)
Which is how we wind up with Tal Fortgang, famed 2014 opponent of privilege checking, publishing a piece in 2015 called “38 Ways College Students Enjoy ‘Left-wing Privilege’ on Campus” for The College Fix, a conservative online student publication.4 In it, Fortgang explicitly namechecks (and quotes, but doesn’t cite) “Peggy McIntosh, the matriarch of privilege’s modern construction,” and then introduces his checklist with what seems like a parody of tone-deaf writing, but is (probably?) not:
While the marginalization of right-wing thinkers on campus in no way compares to the experience of black Americans throughout history, it might behoove left-wingers on college campuses to think about the various privileges from which they benefit simply by being members of the overwhelmingly dominant group in their academic communities.
The checklist itself mixes fair-enough observations (“I can describe my summer writing job without censoring the name of the publication or its political leanings”) with pandering about “‘trigger warnings’” and the “‘safe space’” concept. The most notable thing about the article, though, is that it exists. It is, however, part of a mini-genre of conservative rhetoric: calling out left hypocrisy (or “trolling” progressives by using their own approach against them). In 2014, the online magazine The Federalist ran an item called “People Who Say ‘Check Your Privilege’ Should Do It,” in response to the Fortgang affair.5 In that article, doctoral student Greg Collins made exactly the point Fortgang himself would a year later:
To face eye-to-eye with my fellow Millennials who embrace the check-your-privilege gospel: It is a privilege when your views conform with those of more than 90 percent of your professors. It is a privilege when your worldviews are blessed by a proliferation of like-minded commencement speakers and guest lecturers. And it is a privilege when you have university resources, money, and time within fingertips’ reach to wield to advance your political cause. Politically homogeneous micro-aggression: The privilege that doth not speak its name.
There is, of course, the even stronger case for checking the privilege of privilege checkers, namely that the people making these accusations tend to be fairly privileged themselves. And one does also find, from conservatives, a certain amount of relatively more straightforward privilege accusation—that is, arguments that someone or some group of people are wrong on account of being advantaged.
The right is thus happy to YPIS Democratic politicians, especially a certain former senator from New York.6 The actual subhead to a 2015 Weekly Standard piece? “The Privilege of Being Hillary Clinton.”7 In it, journalist Noemie Emery explains—shades of Franzen on Wharton—that Clinton’s problem is that she’s the most privileged person ever:
Many times before, people have run for public office from positions of privilege, having been rich and/or connected, having been famous as athletes or actors, as millionaires funding themselves, or as celebrities whose names were already on everyone’s lips. But no one before Hillary had launched their political career from the White House as first lady, able to enlist the prestige, perks, and glitz that surround that position.
Yes, I suppose that’s true. Given that same-sex marriage only just arrived, and that we haven’t had any female presidents, she’d sort of have to be the first.
The strangest candidate, from a “privilege” perspective, though, is (at the time of this writing) Donald Trump. A symbol, one might think, of unapologetic privilege—a living cartoon of ostentatious wealth, as well as born-rich white male New Yorker—his appeal, at least initially, seemed to be as an example of someone who says a hyped-up version of what many Americans, at their lowest points, might be thinking. More id than candidate. The same impulse that makes a hero out of the professor who says outrageous things but declares, I’m tenured so I do what I want! had, it seemed, done the same for the tycoon.
In a Daily Beast story from January 2016,8 national security expert Tom Nichols—right-leaning, but no fan of the Donald—attributes Trump’s rise to “a new, more virulent political correctness that terrorizes both liberals and conservatives … Any incorrect position, any expression of the constitutional right to a different opinion, or even just a slip of the tongue can lead to public ostracism and the loss of a job.” This new political correctness, he claims, makes absurd outspokenness an appealing trait:
These brutish leftist tactics radicalized otherwise more centrist people toward Trump not because they care so much about gay marriage or guns or refugees any other issue, but because they’re terrified that they’re losing the basic right to express themselves.
Journalist Kevin Drum, responding to Nichols from the left, in Mother Jones,9 had to (partially) agree:
[T]he whole “privilege” thing sure does get tiresome sometimes. And we do get a little pedantic in our insistence that no conversation about anything is complete unless it specifically acknowledges the special problems of marginalized groups. It can be pretty suffocating at times.
While any number of factors may have brought about Trump’s moment, the free-speech angle seems central. As even center-left and progressive sorts, one by one, find ourselves on the wrong side of YPIS pile-ons, even those of us who see Trump as a fascist disaster are going to get why a man without the self-censorship button has, in this political climate, made it as far as he has.
That much, then, made sense. Yet now there’s another version of the Trump-and-“privilege” argument. Writer and political commentator Andrew Sullivan—whose former blog, the Dish, I used to work for—spelled out the Trump-and-privilege connection in a New York magazine piece10 that, while highly critical of Trump, sought to understand where his supporters were coming from:
A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain.
Sullivan doesn’t appear to be referring to any specific, real-life interaction (where, after all, would the meeting take place?), but rather to the privilege call-out phenomenon. And this dynamic makes sense, to a point. To some extent, the privilege turn is about putting race- and gender-related identity politics ahead of economic inequality. Yet that’s not quite it: it’s more about a self-awareness, identity, or “feelings” sort of emphasis, including socioeconomic status as a (malleable) set of identity categories. Yes, “white privilege” confuses because it suggests all whites are privileged. Yet “privilege” is used all the time to make socioeconomic points. And as Elizabeth Nolan Brown wisely pointed out, in Reason, “both the social-justice left and the so-called ‘alt-right’ view the world primarily through identity politics.” Even beyond the more explicitly racist elements of Trump’s fan base, the class-based privilege check is among the more robust.
An earlier version of this take had come from Charles Murray, The Bell Curve coauthor and, more recently, the self-appointed mouthpiece of the white working class. In The Wall Street Journal, Murray revived his 2012 Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 argument—that elites have walled themselves off, leaving poor white Americans to suffer—and uses that division as an explanation for a resentment candidate’s appeal.11 Clive Crook, who notes that he’s the “friend in Washington, D.C.” whom Murray had referenced as someone who’d witnessed anti–West Virginian snobbery, reiterates Murray’s point in a piece of his own on Bloomberg View, but hones in on the snobbery angle: “Trump wages war on political correctness. Political correctness requires more than ordinary courtesy: It’s a ritual, like knowing which fork to use, by which superior people recognize each other.”12
For Crook, as for anyone who’s looked around in the past several years, Trump’s appeal is his rejection of political correctness. Yet Crook ties the anti-PC allure specifically to a particular regional, racial, and socioeconomic position. As such, he argues, “Supporting Trump is an act of class protest—not just over hard economic times, the effect of immigration on wages or the depredations of Wall Street, but also, and perhaps most of all, over lack of respect.”
Have you got that straight? The above passage is a “privilege” argument … for Trump. Trump, whose tactic is insulting the marginalized (women, Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants), is to be taken seriously—his fans, to be respected and sympathized with—because what he’s actually doing when he expresses hatred for various underdogs is lending support to other underdogs. I found the Murray and Crook pieces via a tweet by the libertarian journalist Julian Sanchez, which summed it all up so beautifully: “So, basically, Trump is how non-campus America responds to microag[g]ressions.”13 Because that’s it, isn’t it? What is “flyover country” if not a microaggression?
However, it also really doesn’t make sense. Once the privilege approach is used to support (and not just to explain) resentment racism and xenophobia, it has, it would seem, overstayed its welcome. What the Trump-as-Social-Justice-Warrior angle demonstrates is the readiness with which “privilege” rhetoric can be employed to express just about any sentiment. Including the case for a President Donald Trump.
While the American left—or a branch of it (i.e., Bernie Sanders and his supporters)—puts economic inequality front and center, the right has landed on a cultural, YPIS-infused defense of poor and working-class Americans. The white male ones, at any rate. And the argument goes something as follows: The real Americans (white, Christian, small town, not-too-educated) are culturally alienated from a cosmopolitan, un-American elite (consisting of Jewish television producers, the Obamas, and, say, Dan Savage). They’re sick of being cast as the one marginalized group it’s acceptable to mock. And, on a deeper level, they’ve been harmed by socially liberal ideals. While it’s well and good for some female corporate lawyer to hold off having kids until she’s given up her career and married a banker, the evils of non-procreative sex have led to the downfall of the working-class family.
These cultural arguments have been floating around for a while now—Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat’s Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream came out in 2008, which is also when Sarah Palin was going around with her coastal-media-elites stump speech. Charles Murray’s “bubble” quiz—the one where, if you don’t follow NASCAR or go to country music festivals or whatever, you live in a bubble, aka YPIS—appeared in 2012, to promote his book, Coming Apart.14 Yet in more recent years, they’ve fused more explicitly with “privilege” rhetoric.
Connor Kilpatrick, one of the main from-the-left critics of the “privilege” approach (see chapter 1), wrote an essay for the socialist magazine Jacobin about “another problem with the politics of privilege: the ease with which it’s used by conservatives.”15 Discussing “conservative politics,” he writes, “a huge part of it is an attack on what they see as a series of unjust and unfair ‘privileges’ being protected by a liberal state.” Kilpatrick turns the hypocrisy charge right back at them, but his isn’t a YPIS accusation:
And yet notice how confident conservatives are that framing issues in terms of “privilege” will always go their way—the diminishment of Medicaid, the defunding of the welfare state—and never towards a solidaristic politics of single-payer. Funny how that works.
His most interesting point, though, is about the overlap between right-wing YPIS and the original:
Sometimes, the Right will even go across the globe to turn the immiserated American poor into just another privileged class. Whenever they want to dismiss shocking new stats on American poverty, how do they do it? They quickly juxtapose the American poor against the impoverished in less developed countries.
Kilpatrick references the conservative refrain about poor people in America having refrigerators, and then notes, “Ask yourself: is this not, essentially, the same argument as the ‘first world problems’ meme so beloved by progressives?”
He concludes, going further still, by pointing out that conservatives have employed the privilege framework “for decades now,” and suggesting that it’s actually the left that’s adopted a conservative approach. I’m not sure that’s quite right in terms of the chronology, but there’s definitely something conservative about YPIS, whatever the ostensible political stance of the person using it. As I argued back in 2012,16 the framework always somehow winds up in bootstraps territory. It’s of course a disaster if you think you’re self-made and you’re not. Yet if you’re accepted as such, you’ve won. YPIS is about treating unacknowledged privilege as the real problem. Owned-up-to privilege (think Mitt Romney) of a premeritocratic, patrician bent is thus spared.
There’s been a right-wing populist reappropriation of “privilege” rhetoric, one that in many ways actually overlaps with the original variety. While the emphasis falls more on classism than racism, the gist is the same. While the motives may be a bit more cynical, the diagnosis—that urban elites look down upon small-town nonelites—is fair. At the far right, however, things get trickier. There (and sometimes on the center right as well) you see full-on reversals. For example, did you know about “black privilege”? I can’t say I did, but someone at the online magazine American Thinker thinks it exists (“It’s Past Time to Acknowledge Black Privilege”), as does someone at the National Review (“White Privilege: Myth & Reality”).17 The depths of the Internet also reveal the belief that “female privilege”—not White Lady, but female, period—needs checking.18 I’m referring to the famous realm where, whenever society becomes just a smidge more fair, or threatens to, those who used to be at the top of some hierarchy (and maybe still are) start to feel threatened. Yet there are groups that inspire that sort of resentment more than women and black people. Such as …
“JEWISH PRIVILEGE”
IN 2011, I had the strange experience19 of noticing a guy I recognized from college (at least, I think it’s him) on an Occupy Wall Street–leaning Tumblr, “We Are the 1 Percent.” Subtitle, “We Stand with the 99 Percent.” I hadn’t known about this man’s million-dollar trust fund, but that wasn’t the interesting bit in his contribution20 to that, the most self-flagellating of Tumblrs. As was the style of that moment, the post consisted of a photo of the dude standing behind a big, handwritten sign bearing his social-justice message, the message itself helpfully reproduced in typed text below. It began:
I have always had many advantages. I am:
1) White
2) Male
3) Jewish
4) Son of Wall Street bankers …
Items 1, 2, and 4 were pretty self-explanatory. Yet what, I mean what, was item 3? Why was he claiming his Jewishness as privilege? It seemed—and still strikes me as—obvious that someone could be Jewish and white, male, rich, and therefore otherwise privileged. However, that’s not what you’re saying, if you put “Jewish” on a list like that. You’re saying that your Jewishness is privilege. Which it isn’t! And announcing that it is puts you in not the best company.
In June 2015, the international news agency Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported on a “demonstration against ‘Jewish privilege’ organized by [a] self-described fascist” in a Jewish area of London, England. The fascist in question hoped to “[l]iberate” the area from Jewish oppression.21 To which one might say, “Oh, look, now even neo-Nazis are adopting ‘privilege’ rhetoric!” Which is, on the one hand, true and noteworthy, and on the other, entirely unsurprising, and not new in the least.
While the specific wording about “so-and-so privilege” is so very now, the sentiment is as timeless as they come. The belief that Jews are unusually privileged is not a fringe strain or obscure facet of anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitism. It has been for all of modernity, including the days before “anti-Semitism” was coined as a term. And this isn’t about Zionism, or not just: From the 1840s French socialists who’d had it with those Rothschilds (for a good time, search Alfred Toussenel’s 1847 Les Juifs, rois de l’époque: histoire de la féodalité financière (The Jews, Kings of the Era: History of Financial Feudalism), readily available online, for instances of privilège) to the 1930s German small-business owners who thought Jewish immigrants were stealing their jobs, all the way up to the Nazi-philic trolls of today’s Internet, what they all have in common is a belief that Jews have money, power, and influence beyond our numbers, and are using all of it to pull the puppet strings of the world. Anti-Semitism has always been about “liberating” non-Jews from the yoke of “Jewish oppression.”
With the notion of “Jewish privilege” so central to anti-Semitism, a Jew who stands accused of “white privilege”—or “privilege”-type—unspecified—may wince, and not out of defensiveness. For reasons stemming from nothing more exciting than the mechanics of headline construction, various articles by Jews attempting to navigate these questions—including one of my own, although I thankfully got a chance to clarify in a subsequent piece—include references to “Jewish privilege,” or some variant thereof, when all that’s said in the article itself is that “Jewish” doesn’t mean not privileged.22 Of course, that said, there are Jews who—out of social-justice zeal—refer to Jews as a privileged group.23 I don’t find the “self-hatred” framework all that useful; when I see remarks around those lines, on social media and such, I think that this is a Jew who hasn’t gotten out much. If your perspective is, say, that of someone who grew up in a wealthy and largely Jewish coastal suburb, where well-off Jewish kids were the in crowd, you might imagine Jews to be life’s undisputed haves. Yet it’s silly and anecdotal (and YPIS-y) to believe this, I realize. People can arrive at ridiculous ideas no matter their life experience.
Attempts at responding to “Jewish privilege” accusations by casting Jews as not privileged, however, tend to fall flat.24 Selectively looking at occasional anti-Semitic hate crimes today—and severe anti-Semitic violence from other times and places—while ignoring the broader context (that is, a country where anyone white or white-ish is ahead of the game) is missing the point. The far better response is to say that anti-Semitism isn’t about Jewish underprivilege. Its presence can’t be refuted with instances of Jewish success. Spun a certain way, those lists are anti-Semitic!
All of this is frustrating, because casual anti-Semitism—the anti-Semitic microaggression, as it were—hasn’t gone anywhere. For years, many Jews would avoid speaking out against such incidents, for fear of seeming hysterical. After all, compared with the Holocaust, what’s a “JAP” or “good-with-money” comment here and there? So it can be tempting, now that calling out polite bigotry has become commonplace, to join in. Yet it never seems to work. The privilege framework offers up a language for our experiences, but forbids us from using it.
Jewish confrontations with “privilege” rhetoric run the gamut, from enthusiastic embrace of the framework to outright rejection. Some American Jews (and I’m thinking of a good percentage of my Facebook feed) are on the far left, and have zero qualms placing Jews (and, boy oh boy, Israel) on the side of all things privilege.”25 While remarks about “Jewish privilege” specifically aren’t so common (but I’ve seen this), it’s simply assumed, in progressive circles that Jews are haves. Ashkenazi Jews, for sure, but possibly all plausibly white-looking ones as well. Editor Sigal Samuel reported the following, from a conference for Jews of color:
[The] preoccupation with privilege was a dominating concern at the conference, for obvious and well-founded reasons. But for some, particularly among the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, this preoccupation meant that they almost self-policed themselves out of attending the conference in the first place.26
Yet another example, then, of privilege awareness actually preventing marginalized people from speaking up for themselves. After all, there is always someone else who has it worse.
Once one leaves the furthest reaches of the social-justice left, however, many Jews aren’t prepared to embrace this interpretation.
In 2012, a video appeared by Franchesca Ramsey, called “Shit White Girls Say … to Black Girls.”27 The video—the full context of which requires a deep dive into 2012 viral videos—involves Ramsey, an African American woman, wearing a blond wig and imitating the clueless things white women say to their black friends and acquaintances. Mostly, it was straightforward comedy as punch up. Yet featured among the tone-deaf remarks was the following: “Jews were slaves, too. You don’t hear us complaining about it all the time.” At the time,28 this struck me as, at the very least, odd. First, and least important: when, in the history of Oppression Olympics, have Jews invoked slavery in ancient Egypt, rather than the Holocaust or, at the very least, pogroms? More to the point: The video gave the impression that Jews exemplified white privilege.
There’s a temptation—and I, too, experience it—to just say, that’s the small picture; the big picture here is anti-black discrimination. Shouldn’t we just overlook a bit of casual anti-Semitism if it’s in the service of anti-racism? (The video not only went super viral, but got a favorable write-up29 from a Jewish woman of color, who used it as a prompt for discussing racism she’s faced within the Jewish community.)
The video was somewhat controversial, but the controversy it started was over whether it constituted (as NPR put it30) “reverse discrimination.” Which is striking, because it puts a specific dig at Jews under the heading of reverse racism, and therefore not actually racism. According to the privilege framework, anti-Semitism is a plight of haves. If Jews are white, anti-Semitism can’t be racism. If Jews are “privileged,” then any Jewish complaints about oppression are rooted in the desire of haves not to give up their unearned advantages. And yet … there is anti-Semitism! The question is one of how to discuss it.
Here’s what I blogged in 2011:
We’re now living in an age of dividing the marginalized from the privileged … While “marginalized” as defined in America these days is not entirely about class, the fact that Jews are understood to be a group of well-off white people means Jewish-specific concerns are understood as by definition First World Problems.31
While I couldn’t say the same of every blog post that I wrote years ago, in this case, I still think I was onto something. In March 2015, I expanded on the topic—and on a post I’d written for the Dish in 201432—in The New Republic:
[T]he privilege framework—the now-default one used for addressing marginalization—fails to be of much use when challenging anti-Semitism. If anything, it can make matters worse. This is in part because anti-Semites have hijacked the framework: A glimpse at the #JewishPrivilege hashtag on Twitter reveals white supremacists embracing a warped version of privilege theory, according to which non-Jewish white people are marginalized by Jews. Theirs is a form of bigotry that presents itself as an anti-oppression movement.33
About a week after that piece appeared, writer John-Paul Pagano had an essay in Tablet magazine that made a similar point.34 (Knowing the timescale on these articles, I have every reason to think we came upon the same thought independently.) Here’s Pagano:
The “prejudice plus power” idea erases real anti-Semitism—a construct with its own history of horrific effects, which is often lumped in with racism, but is actually something else. To borrow from comedy parlance, most racism “punches down”—an incumbent group constructs and subordinates an underclass. The stereotypes that make up such racism diminish their victims. For example blacks, to the white racist, are inferior, criminal, stupid, lazy, and lusty. Anti-Semitism is often the opposite, envisioning the Jew as a preternatural creature—as evil, brilliant, controlling, connected, rich, and powerful beyond measure. Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory. As such, Anti-Semitism often “punches up.”
Variants of this point appear all over the place. Here’s Cathy Young, a journalist skeptical of the “SJW” approach, in June 2015, in The Observer: “[S]ince Jews in Western society today are seen as more privileged than not, ‘social justice’ discourse sheepishly sidesteps anti-Semitism—surely one of the most pernicious forms of bigotry in Western history.”35 Or see the (accurate-for-the-article) headline of a February 2015 Tablet essay by Jamie Kirchick: “Rock, Paper, Scissors of PC Victimology: Muslim > Gay, Black > Female, and Everybody > the Jews.”36 And finally (but there’s more out there, rest assured), editor and commentator David Frum, in his April 2015 Atlantic analysis of Garry Trudeau’s comments on the Charlie Hebdo massacre, faulted Trudeau for overreliance on “privilege,” and, more broadly, on putting “exposing privilege” before exposing the truth: “There are many dogs in any fight, and the task of identifying which one is the underdog is not so easy.” Yup. Frum went on to connect the privilege quest with the “surge of violent anti-Semitism,” much of it from Muslims, in Europe, noting, “The concept of the ‘underdog’ becomes unstable and uncertain in these conditions.”37
Indeed.
As delightful as it’s been to see a theory I’ve long held enter the mainstream, the truth it hones in on is an upsetting one. The more “privilege” takes hold, the more it’s the case that complaints about anti-Semitism read as not only relatively trivial, but altogether reactionary. An exception can only be made in the admittedly not all that rare cases when the ideology comes unambiguously from the right, as when journalist Julia Ioffe received all manner of anti-Semitic (and explicitly pro-Nazi) harassment after she’d written a less-than-hagiographic profile of Melania Trump.38 That, of course, counts. Yet, strangely, the fact that Jews suffer online abuse from white supremacists (and I have personal experience of this) doesn’t call to question, in progressive circles, whether Jews are full beneficiaries of white privilege.
The Jews-and-privilege debate plays out, with the expected fanfare, on college campuses in the United States and Britain.39 Things got especially heated at Oberlin, when it was revealed that a professor there was posting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to Facebook.40
Columnist Roger Cohen summed up these controversies clearly and calmly in a New York Times column:
The zeitgeist on campuses these days, on both sides of the Atlantic, is one of identity and liberation politics. Jews, of course, are a minority, but through a fashionable cultural prism they are seen as the minority that isn’t—that is to say white, privileged and identified with an “imperialist-colonialist” state, Israel. They are the anti-victims in a prevalent culture of victimhood; Jews, it seems, are the sole historical victim whose claim is dubious.41
Indeed, in part because support for Israel has become a right-wing cause, anti-Jewish oppression isn’t something the left these days is especially interested in fighting. And just as the fact of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has also been exploited by that party’s critics,42 so, too, have conservative critics of academia hopped on each of these stories, perhaps, at times, overstating the case.43 Yet if I’m reluctant to attribute left anti-Semitism to the fact that the US (Christian) right is so rah-rah Israel (or to the fact that Jews on the right seem more than pleased to agree that Israel is a “white” country, and that Jewish values are Western ones), it’s because progressive ambivalence in this area has a storied tradition from long before the state of Israel’s founding in 1948. Throughout the nineteenth century, French socialists dabbled in anti-Semitism; it was only with the Dreyfus Affair, at the turn of the century, that the French left began to accept that even “bourgeois” Jews could be oppressed. And it wasn’t just France! The use of the expression, “the socialism of fools,” to describe anti-Semitism, stems from nineteenth-century Germany.44 While plenty of anti-Semitism comes from the right (and yes, I’m thinking of Ted Cruz’s “New York values” dog whistle), the left has never quite known what to do with anti-Jewish oppression that frames itself as revolution.
In twenty-first-century America, causes otherwise liberal Jews might otherwise support (and often enough, do support) get classified as inherently anti-Israel, with varying degrees of anti-Semitic subtext. (Must I go through the ritual? Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism.) From #BlackLivesMatter45 to activism against campus sexual assault,46 just about every righteous cause gets linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Insisting upon an anti-Zionist stance winds up alienating even many progressive Jews, as writer Mark Joseph Stern shows, in a Slate piece about anti-Semitism within LGBTQ activism.47 Specifically, he discusses the concept of “pinkwashing,” which, as he explains “presumes that the Israeli government has no interest in promoting LGBTQ rights except to help mask its oppression of other groups. This presumption is totally unique to Israel.”
My interest here is not to digress into commentary on intractable international conflicts. Rather, it’s to point out why the privilege framework is worse than useless as a tool for understanding anti-Semitism. It forces us to speak only of cases where Jews were hated for being impoverished, rag-wearing, pious shtetl dwellers. Think Fiddler on the Roof. And this sort of anti-Semitism was sanitized for a Broadway audience, because actual anti-Semitism has never, ever, been about this. Even in times and places where the typical Jew was observant and poor, modern anti-Semitism is about the fear of Jews who assimilate a little too well, and who are, of course, dripping with cash.
And so, attempts at describing anti-Semitism in privilege-framework terminology—that is, of discussing issues of representation, “microaggressions,” and so forth—place Jews, no matter their political affiliations, on the right. If Jews are “privileged,” goes the thinking, then a Jew who feels oppressed is in the same boat as any other white person with that racist, entitled delusion.
FORTGANG’S COMPLAINT
WHAT EXISTS FOR some Jews is a kind of whiteness dysmorphia: We who nearly always read as white to the outside world—with all the benefits that entails—will imagine ourselves to be racial Others. Which we are, in our minds, thanks to our exposure to decades’ worth of popular culture where nebbishy Jewish men lust after shiksas, while nebbish-ette Jewish women sit at home on Saturday nights, Rhoda Morgenstern–style, waiting for Mr. Nebbish (or better yet, Dr. Nebbish) to call. (Which he won’t, because he’s out with a strapping blonde.) From The Mary Tyler Moore Show to the Fockers franchise, from Woody Allen to Philip Roth and back again, Jewish difference and exclusion is felt. And all of this counts, even if the “privilege” framework has no place for it. Yet it doesn’t count quite as much as being viewed as nonwhite to the outside world as well.
Which is, I think, what was going on in the notorious Tal Fortgang essay from 2014. Given the title, “Checking My Privilege: Character As the Basis of Privilege,” in the Princeton Tory, the student journal where it first appeared, and republished as “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege” in Time magazine, the piece is neither as obnoxious as that second headline suggests, nor as subtle as the first does.48 Fortgang opens by stating that he’s had his own privilege checked “several times this year.” His first impulse, it seems, was a reasonable one:
That’s the problem with calling someone out for the “privilege” which you assume has defined their narrative. You don’t know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are.
True! Then … less true: “You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression.” He’s completely right that these things aren’t known, but not that they’d have any relevance here. If your family suffered for you to have an obstacle-free (or obstacle-lite) existence, you are privileged. A cutoff has to be put somewhere. That, or you wind up being like one of those politicians who digs and digs and lo and behold, finds some distant ancestor who bore some working-class semblance. And then we suddenly hear all about that farmer or coal miner or whatever in all of their speeches. If you’re not running for office, don’t do this. Even if you are, maybe give it a pass?
Fortgang, then a Princeton freshman, had the misfortune (or privilege?) to express, in a viral essay, something awfully close to the thoughts I had, as a kid, when the (white) teacher told the (all or nearly all white) class to feel bad about what “we” had done to the slaves. I remember thinking that the phrasing, the all-inclusive “we,” was ridiculous. My family, as I’d been learning since infancy, hadn’t been in America at all prior to the Civil War, and was in fact busy being pogrommed in the old country. While obviously some of them did, not all of my ancestors made it out of Europe in time to escape the Holocaust. How on earth was I responsible for victimization that happened when my ancestors themselves were victims? It was only much later—I’m going to say, postcollege—that I even heard about white privilege, meaning that, no matter who your family is, if, upon arrival in America, your family landed on the “white” side of things, you’d wind up benefiting from the racist system already in place.
Ultimately, I think the truth falls between the two extremes. My point here is simply that I don’t find it all that strange that Fortgang would, as a Jewish college freshman hearing about white privilege for the first time, balk. Having read the essay many times at this point, it’s still not clear to me whether his objection is to being accused of a form of privilege (white privilege) that he, as a Jew, does not possess, or whether his point was that no one—not even a Mayflower descendent—has systemic advantages from being white. Was his family history to be interpreted as a striving-immigrant tale, shared by most white (and many nonwhite) Americans? Or was the concentration-camp part of the story meant to indicate that he, as the not-so-distant descendent of people rounded up on the basis of insufficient whiteness, couldn’t be white-privileged? Was his issue that “white privilege” isn’t real, or that he, personally, didn’t have it? When he writes, “I do not accuse those who ‘check’ me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line,” it’s clear from the context (that is, the top of the essay, where he hasn’t yet addressed the Jewish angle) that the “ethnic group” he’s referring to is white people, not Jews.
One could chalk this tension up to the ambiguity of identity (or to the fact that this essay is a freshman composition), but it can’t be both of these things. If Fortgang’s objection is to Jews—as a marginalized minority—being accused of white privilege, because they’re marginalized, then he’d have to buy into the white-privilege framework. Right?
Fortgang’s tough-to-untangle musings on whiteness and Jewish identity are quite a bit less interesting than the analysis they prompted in the more intellectually oriented wing of the Jewish parochial press. Tablet ran two diametrically opposed takes in the aftermath of Fortgang-gate. The first, from writer Liel Leibovitz, defended the essay—and essayist—from critics on the left:
To assume that he, the grandson of a poor Jewish immigrant, stands shoulder-to-shoulder in the same privilege bracket as the grandson of, say, a well-heeled patrician just because both are white men whose parents can afford a good college is to assume that neither is able to transcend the happenstance of his birth and that both, despite having grown up in such radically different traditions, arrive at a conversation with precisely the same point of view, shaped exclusively by their skin, their cocks, and their cash.
If he’d left it there, fine, but he did not. He instead swung over, Fortgang-style, to the usual conservative talking points, noting, somewhat gratuitously I’d say, that “nearly three-quarters of all black Americans are born to unwed mothers.”49 His point seemed to be that if you care about privilege, you should be offering patronizing advice to black people.
In any event, fellow Tablet writer Marjorie Ingall wasn’t having it. In her rebuttal,50 Ingall offered an array of data points about life being just plain harder for women and people of color. And since Fortgang’s gender was never up for debate, she honed in on the other bit. Here’s Ingall, addressing Leibovitz:
What you’re really asking, skeptically, is when Jews became white folks. But by and large, in America, we are. Our median net worth is three times that of the average American’s. Our circumcised dudes disproportionately win Oscars and Nobel Prizes. We’re CEOs and elected officials. When Fortgang’s grandfather fled Poland in the 1930s, the picture was pretty different.
Ingall emphasizes that she doesn’t think anti-Semitism is kaput, only that white-male privilege is something that a Jew can have. Which—much as I reject that framework—I’d mostly have to agree. As for whether disproportionate Jewish achievement points to an end of anti-Semitism, that’s another story. There I’d have to go with no. In 1930s Europe—to pick up on Ingall’s argument—anti-Semites didn’t hate Jews for being oppressed refugees, at least not initially. They hated Jews for overachieving, which is to say, for any achievement, because any Jewish success was seen as usurping non-Jewish dominance.
Meanwhile, at the Forward, Sarah Seltzer offered an analysis remarkably similar to Leibovitz’s, but landing in a very different place:
I wish I could tell Fortgang that yes, his family’s history in the Holocaust has created residual trauma, echoing through the generations, that is deserving of sympathy and creates a disadvantage, for sure. And yes, the work that his family put into raising their own up is admirable. But at the same time, here he stands! He remains a white male Princeton student, which puts him pretty close to the top of the heap.
She adds, in the piece, that Fortgang “is not exactly as privileged as his WASPy classmate, Biffy St. Snoot, but [he is] up there.”51 There seemed to be general agreement, among Jews responding to the episode, that the Holocaust in some way matters for assessing Jews’ relationship to “white privilege.” What’s emerged, then, is a split over how much it matters, and in what way.
A further awkwardness in the Jews-and-whiteness conversation: There’s an ostensibly anti-anti-Semitic mantra that involves insisting that there’s no such thing as “looking Jewish.” In its most progressive variant, this denial manifests itself as a reminder that there are Jews of color, Jews of possible color (for example, Sigal Samuel on her Mizrahi identity52), and, just generally, Jews who don’t read as white. More commonly—at least, until very recently—rejection of the “looking Jewish” concept meant emphasizing that Jews are just as white as the next white person, and would involve those tiresome lists of famous blond Jews—born Jewish as well as converts to Judaism. (Did you know that Scarlett Johansson?…) On the one hand, there are a lot of blond Jews around, and there’s intracommunal discrimination against Jews who look either whiter or less white (especially less white) than, I don’t know, Sarah Silverman. On the other, it remains the case that “looking Jewish” is a term recognized in the culture. Jews who happen to meet the physical description—whether or not more Jews do than non-Jews (which is dubious, once you’re bringing everyone who counts as white in the contemporary United States into the mix)—experience discrimination on that count. It’s possible that something has happened between performer Vanessa Hidary’s 2010 video, sharing an all-too-familiar story of someone telling her, as a compliment, that she didn’t look Jewish, and Broad City, with its celebration of young Jewish (and stereotypically Jewish-looking) women as comedic heartthrobs.53 The point being, insistence on Jews’ “whiteness”—and, moreover, on it being anti-Semitic as well as exclusionary to suggest that a “Jewish” appearance exists—makes it just about impossible to respond to anti-Jewish appearance-based racism. A Jewish woman who feels bad about her hair, nose, whatever, is, according to “privilege” understandings, a white woman who needs to get over herself.
The privilege framework always fails when two underdogs face off. Take the parallel questions of gay male misogyny and homophobia among straight women. Both exist—but is the answer to decide who’s more privileged, a gay man or a straight woman, and declare one of the two bigotries inherently impossible? According to the rules of “privilege,” though, that’s the only way.
Are Jews white? (The “white” ones, that is.) This question is one I’ve thought (and read54) about for years, and I don’t have a satisfactory answer, beyond a tentative yes, but. The whole scholarly and journalistic question of Jews’ newfound whiteness—the narratives of assimilation and upward mobility—ignores the fact that Jews were actually pretty much always white. Even in Nazi Germany! Why do we think Jews were forced to wear the yellow star? Jews—in Europe, and in white settings in North America—are at most a quasi-visible minority. That’s been true even at moments rife with racialized theories about “The Jew,” and it’s no less so in calmer moments. I have ample anecdotal evidence from France (where I’ve lived and speak the language) and Flemish Belgium (where I try to communicate, but as my in-laws can attest, not so much) that I read as white even there, even in places known for anti-Semitism. And in the States, where to begin? I don’t get followed around stores or pulled over while driving or hassled by cops. My Canada experience is, at this point, limited, but in Toronto, where the reigning xenophobia is (going by the casual racism I’ve overheard) anti-Asian, there is no doubt whatsoever that in Toronto, I’m white. And then there’s the fact that I, a Jew, and a firm believer in speaking frankly and unapologetically about the existence of such a thing as looking Jewish, can’t always tell who’s who.
Yet whether American Jews are white is, in a sense, the wrong question. What’s clear is that—with the exception of the very few who are—Jews are not black. And the major form of racism in the contemporary United States is anti-black. It doesn’t take being the world’s greatest anti-racist ally, or the closest reader of Ta-Nehisi Coates, to have picked up on which group bears the brunt of American racism, if you yourself don’t happen to be black, that is. Even if your historical knowledge is limited to something-something slavery, something-something Jim Crow, you may have noticed how, for example, the seat next to a black man (however dressed) on a commuter train will remain empty while the rest fill up. You may have seen cops hassling black teenagers, and have found yourself in countless situations where the servers can be distinguished from the served on the basis of skin color alone.
Unless your head is deeply buried somewhere, you’ll have noticed that all Americans who aren’t black wind up benefiting from that fact. All-things-equal benefiting, that is; there are of course individual nonblack Americans who are, for systemic or idiosyncratic reasons, screwed. George Zimmerman, arguably the face of anti-black racism in America today, is a half-Peruvian man whose appearance is sufficiently nonwhite that, had the story gone otherwise, one could easily imagine a man resembling him being the victim of a racist attack by a white person. The man referred to by The Daily Beast headline, “White Cop Convicted of Serial Rape of Black Women”55 is half white and half Japanese. (More on that complicated question in a moment.)
For some Jews, the fact that America treats us as white is proof that America is a less racist place than Europe. That American Jewish whiteness more or less hinges on anti-black racism creates an additional barrier for us to really getting how central racism is to American life. If you grow up learning about how oppressed—how racially oppressed—you’d be if you lived anywhere else in the world (except Israel, which poses its own problems), you’re going to think of America as a place that’s transcended old-world xenophobia, rather than as one that exported it and invented new varieties. David Brooks gets at this in a column called “Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White,” the headline being, here, quite instructive.56 He writes, as if to Coates:
[T]he disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise.
Brooks then notes, “Your ancestors came in chains.” Yes, that’s about the size of it. In America, Jews’ difference, Jews’ oppression, can get worked into an immigrant narrative, one with a happy ending, and one that in no way precludes Jewish whiteness.
A new round of Jews-and-whiteness debate emerged around the question of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. Jewish, yes, but Jewish enough? More specifically, some Jews wondered whether Sanders’s insistence upon his own whiteness was a denial of his Jewishness. In a JTA blog post, journalist Ron Kampeas expressed discomfort with Bernie Sanders’s “discussing his white privilege” in the run-up to the Nevada primary.57 While Sanders was explaining that he, unlike Obama, benefited from having white ancestors (and again invoked his Polish heritage), in order to make a point about discrimination against African Americans, he was also, Kampeas argues, deflecting potential anti-Semitism:
The Jews of Sanders’ father’s generation—and to a degree of Sanders’ (he’s 74)—were not as inclined as are tribe members today to reveal their background. At a time when bigotry was much more prevalent, they used their whiteness to “pass” as members of the majority.
What’s interesting, for our purposes, about this story is the place of “privilege” in all of it. What we’re looking at, with Sanders, is a case where admitting to privilege may also be an escape. In one sense, Sanders is just echoing where he stands in the culture. References to him as the white male opposition to Clinton abound.58 There’s a certain reassurance, for Jews, in checking our own “white privilege.” There’s the same masochistic element as there is for all white people, but there’s also a sense of relief, of freedom, in insisting that you are the “have.” And that remains the case, even if you’re apologizing for your unearned advantages. Whether we choose to, in the manner of David Brooks, believe earnestly in the American dream, or go the Sanders route and self-flagellate for whiteness, it amounts to the same: both routes are about protesting (too much?) that American Jews aren’t marginalized.
The assimilation question is always a tough one, though, because it presumes an authentic, Jewier, identity that someone is taking pains to hide. However, though, what if this is just who Sanders is? In a New Republic piece on Sanders’s Jewishness, Mark Oppenheimer (a former editor of mine) admits that Sanders—unlike Joe Lieberman—can’t possibly be hiding religious particularity (yarmulkes and such) because he’s not observant. Oppenheimer nevertheless wishes Sanders would open up about something: “He could discuss how he left ritual observance behind, decided not to go to synagogue, married out of the faith.”59 He could, I guess, but there’s not much to say about the faith one isn’t practicing. I also don’t go to synagogue (despite Hebrew school as a kid) and my husband isn’t Jewish. And there isn’t some closeted part of me that’s religious, and has a Jewish husband. (I’m now picturing a character played by Ben Stiller jumping out of the closet, literally, and yelling, “Surprise!”) There’s a bit more to be said about whether Sanders is hiding his cultural particularity, but he’s been living in Vermont, after all, not on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Oppenheimer’s most persuasive when he moves beyond Sanders specifically and looks at what it says, more generally, that it takes a Sanders-type Jew to break down barriers:
The real test of Americans’ tolerance, of our embrace of minority cultures, is whether minorities can win office while being unapologetic, proud, visible, and obvious about their minority identities. And on that count, I don’t think the United States is even close.
That assessment seems right. And what it tells us is that a candidate who speaks out about his own white privilege is preferable, to the electorate, to one whose whiteness is in doubt. Again, the interesting angle here is not whether inside of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders there’s a Hasid just screaming to get out. No, it’s that owning one’s white privilege can so readily function as a way of using the same. That dynamic holds true whether you’re Bernie Sanders or not, and, indeed, whether you’re Jewish or not. It’s built into the very ambiguity of the expression, to own one’s privilege.
THE NEW JEWS?
I started to wonder about the “privilege” these two minority groups experience, and how the numbers shape the perception of us in the media and ultimately in the admissions office. What does “privilege” mean for a Jewish American? What does it mean for an Asian American? What does privilege mean to someone who must toe the line between these two cultures, desperately trying to come out “just American”? I didn’t find a simple answer to that immense question, but I did realize that even as a double minority, I enjoy a lot of privilege.60
The above excerpt is from Samantha Yi’s article in the Forward called “Checking My Privilege as a Korean Jew.” As a 2015 graduate of Northwestern, Yi’s essay is, on one level, another installment in the checking-my-privilege genre. A format that (see chapter 1) serves as reliable “content” in the new-media landscape, given that everyone with an Internet connection and some modicum of privilege seems able to churn one out. As is so often the case with such essays, a story that might have been compelling and specific (I mean, a Korean-Jewish American who grew up feeling like “a mini Barbra Streisand”!) gets funneled into these limiting parameters, and winds up being about the tired question of whether or not the author a) is privileged, and b) has properly checked the privilege in question. My interest in how privilege-aware strangers on the Internet qualify themselves is, as I think you’ll have picked up on by this point, quite limited. However, there’s a bit more to it in this case. Specifically, Yi’s in a unique position to weigh in on where Asian and Jewish Americans fit in the “privilege” framework. That she doesn’t have an answer tells us more, I think, than if she did. The answer is: It’s complicated.
In a certain sense, if the privilege approach screws over Jews, it really does a number on Asians and Asian Americans, those other so-called model minorities. The framework’s ability to label marginalized people “white,” and therefore white-privileged, has its issues when it comes to white-looking Jews. Things get that much trickier when the “white” person in question isn’t “white” by any definition. Can you be white-privileged but not white? In a relative sense, of course you can (i.e., discrimination against dark-skinned black people), but is that white privilege, exactly, if you could still be hated, racially hated, for your nonwhiteness?
In a Daily Beast item called “Cop Used Whiteness as His Weapon to Rape Black Women”—and tagged, simply, “privilege”—editor Goldie Taylor wrestles with the fact that the white-privileged cop in question was, while plenty evil, not actually all that white: “Technically, [Daniel] Holtzclaw is biracial: born to a white veteran police officer and a Japanese mother—but, make no mistake, Holtzclaw claimed to be white.”61 That he did, Taylor notes, by referring to his “white cock” during the assaults: “He wanted [his victims] to know that he was white. He wanted them to know that they were black and therefore powerless.” As the tag would suggest, Taylor accepts Holtzclaw’s self-proclaimed whiteness at face value:
In his estimation, he was everything they were not: middle class, white, and male. Based on his own words, Holtzclaw embraced some of the most unfortunate aspects of that privilege. Despite his mixed racial heritage, he bought into and used that sense of supremacy to sexually violate his victims and the oath he swore to serve and protect them.
Neither Taylor nor I have been granted special insights into this man’s psyche, but it at least seems possible that all the insistence upon his own whiteness stemmed from insecurities around not being white.
As Hua Hsu observed, in reference to the Isla Vista killer—another half-white and half-Asian criminal whose horrific acts were attributed to white privilege—it’s more complicated: “Maybe whiteness does explain something, but in an indirect, unconscious, aspirational way. Perhaps, in this reading, he was not a benefactor of ‘white privilege and entitlement’ but someone vexed by its seeming elusiveness.”62 It seems just as possible that the same thing would have been going on with Holtzclaw. And, as Hsu points out, questioning the “whiteness” of a racist criminal doesn’t have to mean denying the relationship between the crime and a racist society.
Except under the privilege framework, it does. It’s either-or: A person of color can’t be racist, ergo a racist can’t be a person of color. Yet even more importantly, the privilege approach puts all the emphasis on identifying the least-privileged party, while remaining hazy on who’s who at the other end of the spectrum. That haziness encourages scapegoating. As long as a have-not has been correctly identified, it hardly matters which relative have is taking the fall. To suggest that it does is to cast yourself as Team Privileged (that is, as someone whose sympathies are in the wrong place), and quite possibly to have derailed the conversation.
Consider the case of Peter Liang, the New York police officer found guilty of manslaughter in the death of Akai Gurley, an unarmed black man, The New York Times reported that many-but-not-all in the city’s Asian and Asian American community felt that “the officer, who is Chinese-American, [was] a scapegoat who was targeted at a time when there is a roiling national debate about the policing of black neighborhoods.”63 It was an understandable reaction, especially given that the tragic death occurred from a ricocheted bullet.
Outside of certain fraught contexts, where such expressions could be read as detracting from still-more-pressing anti-racist battles, it’s generally understood on the left that Asians don’t read as white, and, as such, face discrimination. Cultural-appropriation scandals—Oberlin’s Asian-fusion dining-hall cuisine, a protest of a Boston museum’s kimono exhibit—regularly involve Asians and Asian Americans in the “victim” position. And, on a more positive note, it’s greeted as progress whenever there’s any kind of nonstereotypical representation of Asians on TV. Particularly when—as on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or Master of None—an East-Asian American man gets cast as the heartthrob. There’s a sense in which the privilege framework, as understood on the so-called SJW left, gets the Asian American experience right. Rather than—as has happened with Jews—simply taking the “model minority” cliché at face value, the progressive left has, for the most part, accepted Asians under the “of color” umbrella.
The Asian American experience of racism think piece is an established, and not particularly challenged (at least, not from the left), part of the new-media landscape.64 Editor Nicole Chung wrote a massively popular personal essay for feminist humor Web site The Toast, in which she describes how hurt she feels when she receives variants of you-all-look-alike. The incident that sparks the discussion involves someone telling her, at a party, that she resembles an (attractive) Asian American actress.65 It’s exactly the sort of “racial microaggression” (her words) that could easily seem like nothing, except to the person experiencing it. And it’s incredibly difficult, not to picture an equivalent article being written by a Jewish woman, but to imagine such a piece winding up in a progressive outlet, rather than a right-leaning one. Which is, in a certain sense, fair. Unlike Jews, who often have a choice between passing as just white (oh Bernie Sanders, you with your “Polish” ancestors) and announcing our difference, Asians are a visible minority (well, many different ones).
For the social-justice left, for the most part, the fact that Asian Americans are visibly nonwhite is enough. I mean, if you search, you can find a contingent of Asian Americans on the far left who understand themselves as Asian-privileged (as versus simply Asian as well as, in some other way, privileged), much like my Jewish trustafarian-Tumblr classmate above.66 The notion that something like “Asian privilege” exists gets regularly shot down on the left, however.67 The left seems to understand—and rightly so—that “Asian privilege” is a bigoted concept.68
Where Asians fall in the US “privilege” framework more broadly—that is, beyond social-justice, social media, and progressive think pieces—often winds up depending on where powerful white people want to place them. If the goal is patting oneself on the back for “diversity,” Asians count as “diverse.” Meanwhile, if the goal is complaining that white kids are no longer quite as privileged as they used to be in, say, education, that oh-so-nefarious Asian advantage gets to be condemned.
There isn’t space (or need) here to fully rehash the whole Asians-as-the-new-Jews conversation, but a bit of background is in order. In the early twentieth century, Harvard and other elite universities tried to keep out Jews, who would otherwise have been overrepresented in the student body, by rejiggering admissions requirements toward “character,” defined as … basically, as not being Jewish. Today’s so-called model minority, Asian Americans, are similarly overrepresented at elite schools and universities, and may also face a more difficult time getting admitted.69 Affirmative action, which is in principle about raising the number of underrepresented minority students, also contributes to a holistic, balance-seeking approach that winds up doing a favor for society’s famously favored: white people.
There are instances of white people benefiting from diversity efforts in this way playing out all around, as Kate Robinson alluded to in Jacobin, writing that privilege theory tends “to encourage a type of politics in which various marginalized groups are held responsible for the oppression of others, such as the construction of Asian Americans as enablers of white supremacy.”70 That’s a side note in her piece, so she doesn’t give examples. I, meanwhile, will stick with the one I know best: New York City schools. Major media outlets—The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic—regularly run news stories and analysis of the diversity crisis at New York City’s “specialized” magnet high schools.71 While I know why I read these stories—I went to Stuyvesant—I’m never entirely sure why a more general audience would care. Unlike the Ivy League stories that also appear in these publications, the question of what a bunch of immigrant high school students from Queens are up to isn’t exactly a glamorous one. Its interest, I think, lies elsewhere.
Before getting at why I think this, a word on the numbers: Going by the census, New York City, in 2010, was 33.3 percent (non-Latino) white, 25 percent black, 12.7 percent Asian, and 28.6 percent Latino. Including whites who identify as Latino or Hispanic brings the city’s white population up to only 44 percent.72 Thus the outrage when TV shows set in the city are all white—that’s not what the city looks like. New York City’s private, or “independent,” schools, meanwhile, are an impressive 63.5 percent “European American,” which presumably means white; they can’t all be new arrivals from, say, Switzerland. The amount these schools pat themselves on the back for not being 100 percent European American is quite something. They tout statistics on the number of “students of color,” a category that most certainly includes Asians.73 (A Riverdale brochure illustrates its 33-percent-of-color stat with a photo of a white boy and an East Asian boy working on some kind of project together, as if such a scenario were something to write home about.74) And they have to, because they need all the statistical “color” they can get.
Yet in the very same city, at the very same time, a public high school whose student body is 80 percent of color can be the target of tremendous diversity criticism … because 73 percent of those students are Asian.75 Stuyvesant High School, which is, again, 20 percent white, gets taken to task for not catering to students of color … but “of color,” differently defined.
It’s accepted that private schools will be rich and white. That’s a given. As is the notion that as long as they aren’t waving Confederate flags, as long as they’re giving their handful of black students prominent places in promotional materials, and making a big, big deal about the fact that not every last student is white, they get to pass themselves off as bastions not of privilege in the bad sense, but of noblesse oblige.
However, jump down a rung or ten, to where the city’s middle classes broadly defined are fighting it out, and suddenly it’s a problem that … well, what is the problem, exactly? It sounds most sympathetic to say—and it’s correct—that there aren’t enough black and Latino kids at the most selective public high schools. But is that the complaint? Or is it that there’s this enormous, newish building in Tribeca offering an excellent (well, prestigious, at any rate) free education, and not a whole lot of white kids are benefiting. Complaining about that, however, is socially unacceptable. So the complaint gets phrased as, what about black and Latino kids? It is an important intervention, but one that can be both a fair point and a cover for a more sinister one.
The hypocrisy here is even that much more outrageous when one looks at the whole “cost-of-tutoring” angle: The private schools charge tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition, but are to be praised for giving the occasional scholarship. That some families pay a few hundred dollars for a prep course to help their kids get into a more competitive public school is, meanwhile, evidence of a system that favors the rich.
Ah, but private services are different from public ones! To which I’d say, that they are, but we’re talking about YPIS outrage, not legal distinctions. If you see it as a travesty that education all too often fails to counteract inequality, isn’t it a problem that there even are private schools? Somehow … no. That’s just how it is. No one would dare to dream that the really, really, really rich would be sending their kids to any public school, even one filled with fancy Chinese and Korean immigrants whose parents could, at one point, spare literally hundreds of dollars for tutoring.
For the city’s rich, white, but diversely brochured private schools to get called out for their privilege, they need to do something outrageous. It can’t just be that the kids attending these schools will sometimes-but-not-always get dropped off by a car and a driver, while their public school counterparts are taking the subway. Yes, as personal finance writer Helaine Olen has shown, coastal prep schools are pricier and more exclusive than ever.76 Yet that’s unsurprising. No, for the schools to bring about real rage, it has to be bigger than that.
Appropriately, the most rage I’ve noticed directed at private schools in recent years has stemmed from a New York Times story called, “At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege from the Inside.”77 In it, Kyle Spencer reports on a seemingly well-funded effort, on the part of these schools, to alert the white-privileged to their white privilege:
In the past, private school diversity initiatives were often focused on minority students, helping them adjust to the majority white culture they found themselves in, and sometimes exploring their backgrounds in annual assemblies and occasional weekend festivals. Now these same schools are asking white students and faculty members to examine their own race and to dig deeply into how their presence affects life for everyone in their school communities, with a special emphasis on the meaning and repercussions of what has come to be called white privilege.
It’s a brilliantly written piece, because Spencer never outright says that there’s something absurd and hypocritical about the endeavor. In Salon, Corey Robin expressed what was, I think, almost the inevitable response: “You’d think that if the parents and teachers of these masters of the universe were truly concerned about racial and class privilege they’d simply abolish private schools.”78 The closest Spencer gets to overt criticism along those lines is to note, “It may seem paradoxical that students at elite institutions would decide to tackle the elitism they seem to cherish.” Yes, it certainly might. A cringe-inducing opening anecdote describes some students at Friends Seminary gazing into the navels of their nonoppression and complaining of the bigotry they face for being “ditsy” and “privileged.” Lingering in the background (and oh, in the comments) is the fact that the students at these schools are benefiting from something a bit more than just white privilege. What about how they live in New York and are really, really rich?
Yet the hypocrisy angle may have been overstated. What jumped out,79 to me, about the efforts was that they’re being sold not as earnest anti-racism, but as training for the modern world. Writes Spencer: “Educators charged with preparing students for life inside these schools, in college and beyond, maintain that anti-racist thinking is a 21st-century skill and that social competency requires a sophisticated understanding of how race works in America.” As cynical and bleak as that may sound, it is, from the perspective of someone shelling out tens of thousands a year for the best, the sort of thing that ought to be included. We do live in a society where a seemingly racist faux pas can lead to someone’s downfall. (Or, perhaps, to their Republican presidential nomination.) Knowing what “white privilege” is, and how to avoid letting yours show, absolutely is a “skill” these days. The rich-getting-richer aspect of elite privilege-awareness education put me off, and I wasn’t alone. As Conor Friedersdorf put it, in The Atlantic, “These educationally privileged students will become exquisitely adept at invoking privilege to signal moral sophistication and guard their status among similarly acculturated peers.”80 Coming at the question from well to Friedersdorf’s left, Robin arrived at the same: “Global society, 21st-century skills: These are buzzwords for the international capitalism the students of these schools are being trained to lead. Far from being educated to dismantle privilege, they’re being schooled to perpetuate and preside over it.”
Freddie deBoer also, not surprisingly, jumped on this story as well, with a blog post81 that’s, if anything, harsher on the schools: “In these contexts, the obsessive focus on conversations, awareness, and knowing becomes inevitable. Solutions must, like causes, remain vague, indistinct, and resistant to material evaluation.” Where I’d split with him on this, though, is his insistence that once, back in some unspecified Golden Age, the privilege framework worked:
Perhaps no form of subtle social control better exemplifies privilege’s ability to dominate through soft power than the way in which privilege theory itself becomes a commodity, monetized and peddled to the privileged as easily as consumer electronics or expensive clothes.
In deBoer’s interpretation, a righteous anti-oppression theory got corrupted once the rich and powerful came up with ways to use it to serve their own ends. But was it ever otherwise? I keep coming back to the fact that Peggy McIntosh taught at Brearley. It’s hard for me to look at the prep-school privilege workshop story as a case of an otherwise subversive theory getting corrupted. Even beyond that, though, there’s little reason to think the privilege framework ever wasn’t superficial, or that it ever wasn’t about rich people patting themselves on the back or ritualistically absolving themselves of well-deserved guilt. What these workshops, in all their big-picture absurdity, point to isn’t so much the hypocrisy of any individuals, or the perversion of an otherwise sound approach, as a problem intrinsic to the privilege framework. From its origins, it’s always been about self-awareness, and the enemy is always the person who’s said the wrong thing. The and-now-what of privilege checking has never been articulated.
Privilege-awareness education—which has become enough of a trend that it has its own scholarly detractors82—shifts the paradigm. It used to be that sensitivity meant being discreet about which students are on scholarship, or, at public schools, about which qualify for a free lunch. (My homeroom teacher was a master of lack of discretion where that was involved.) That approach wasn’t perfect. It often left socioeconomically disadvantaged students feeling invisible, while allowing socioeconomically blessed kids to blithely go around thinking everyone shared their advantages. Today, the idea is to put the privileged students on the spot, and to make them reflect on what it means that they don’t face these obstacles. Of course, there’s no way to alert privileged students to their privilege that doesn’t also highlight the disadvantage of the others. And there’s no way to alert posh students to their poshness that doesn’t make them, on some level, that much more pleased with themselves.
IN PRIVILEGE’S NO-MAN’S-LAND
OSTENSIBLY, THE POINT of privilege checking, of YPIS, is to achieve justice. Social justice, if I may use the term. So it seems relevant that the lens has been adopted, with such enthusiasm, in the service of maintaining the status quo. While the right has always borrowed rhetoric from the left to serve its own purposes—like when the absence of conservatives in academia gets cast as a need for “ideological diversity”—something new has gone on with “privilege.” The term isn’t only used to articulate how conservatives are the real victims, although that does, as we’ve seen, happen. It’s also used as a way of casting discrimination of all kinds as a form of anti-oppression. There’s always going to be some selective understanding of the truth, according to which the hated ticks more “privilege” boxes than the hater.
On this much, the privilege framework is accurate: Society has hierarchies, and some categories of people are—all things equal—luckier than others. Those who deny that “privilege” exists in those broad, sweeping areas where you’d need your head rather deep in the sand not to have noticed—that is, who deny that the rich have it better than the poor, white people better than black people—need not so much a privilege check as an introduction to reality. The trouble is that those hierarchies don’t explain all injustice, and that they don’t always correspond to the hierarchies that “count” according to the privilege framework. Privilege at best describes an all-things-equal advantage, and doesn’t account for the individuals doing worse than their identity categories would predict. However, if the privilege-checking consensus is that your group doesn’t count, that its plight isn’t real, you’re screwed. And you’re screwed not just because you don’t get to use “privilege” rhetoric to articulate your situation. You also lose because, according to the privilege framework, if you complain about oppression but are actually privileged, you are, in fact, the worst.
The “privilege” approach, according to which anyone deemed “privileged” is fair game and by definition impossible to victimize, backfires, in a serious way, when the target is chosen wrong. Once the righteous “punch” becomes the highest form of argument, there’s absolutely nothing to stop punches in every which direction from getting the benefit of the doubt.
When it comes to intermediaries, the issue isn’t just that the privilege lens treats all who don’t have it the absolute worst as privileged. Rather, it’s that intermediaries so often become the face of “privilege,” functioning as scapegoats for society’s most powerful. It’s not that there are people who, all things equal, have it worse than Asians or Jews—which there are—but that Asians and Jews end up being cast as the ultimate haves. Which lets the ultimate haves (in this case, white gentiles) off the hook.
This intermediary-bashing dynamic is also what’s going on with the White Lady construct we met in the previous chapter. There as here, someone who’s almost the most privileged winds up embodying “privilege”—and getting taken to task for societal injustices—in a way that the very most privileged somehow do not. Yet we also see this play out in garden-variety YPIS, where someone who drops a biographical detail indicating that he or she is … middle class—and not a starving refugee—gets declared, for a fifteen-minute increment, the face of privilege. Because that’s who generally comes in for these pile-ons on comment threads or in Facebook debates. That’s who’s available. It’s the nobody in a thread who makes a casual reference to shopping at Banana Republic (ooh, fancy, it’s as if he doesn’t know that some people can’t afford Kmart!!!), not the head of a bank or corporation.
And I don’t see this as a coincidence. Rather, it’s one of the great appeals of privilege theory for the most privileged. If a group that isn’t quite at the top gets to function as a stand-in for the one that is, then the hierarchy doesn’t have to shift. No revolution is needed. The have-nots and the have-not-quite-as-much contingents will just fight things out among themselves.