Opinion: On using ‘privilege’ as a weapon in the political correctness war

The good news, contrary to a slew of media reports, is that Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government won’t be mandating that its incoming grad students take a course on “checking your white privilege” as part of their new-student orientation.

It turns out that the supposed training seminar was a figment of the wishful thinking of a campus student-activist group, HKS Speak Out. The group announced on a May 13 Tumblr page that a Kennedy school dean had committed to “a required session” on privilege “during orientation.” Two days later, as Chris Caesar of Boston.com reported, a Kennedy school spokesman said that “the school has absolutely no intention of requiring or even offering such a program.”

The bad news is that hardly anyone in the media has applied any of what is supposed to be their trademark journalistic skepticism to the burgeoning “white privilege” industry and its efforts to induce Mississippi-esque rivers of guilt in white people, especially white male people, just for existing.

What exactly is “white privilege”? What does “check your privilege” mean? I’ll let Noah Rothman of Mediaite, one of the few journalists who has dared to ridicule the privilege movement, explain:

“Your privilege, which you will be reminded to ‘check’ repeatedly by those adherents to the faith, centers on the subjectively defined benefits associated with your gender, age, religion, physical appearance, full use of all or some extremities, height, race, skin tone (not to be confused with race), and sexuality. And that is a truncated list of the ever-expanding catalogue of ‘privileges’ one might wield,” Rothman writes. “First coined in 1988 by social justice activist Peggy McIntosh, the term has become a religion for a sect of politically correct college students and left-of-center bloggers.”

Publicity about the privilege movement came to a head on April 2 when Tal Fortgang, a freshman at Princeton, wrote an article for the Princeton Tory, the campus conservative newspaper, saying that he was tired of being told to “check” his “privilege” by campus progressives implying that he was enjoying special favors from society just because he was white and male. He pointed out that his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and his grandfather had fled Poland when the Nazis invaded. The two arrived in America speaking no English and struggled to raise and send four children to college, including Fortgang’s father, who in turn worked long hours and sacrificed time with his own children to support them. “My appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, and to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting,” Fortgang wrote.

Time magazine re-published Fortgang’s article on May 2. At that point a volcano of publicity erupted. Almost none of it was favorable to Fortgang, as journalists and academics mocked and belittled his article. Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld scolded Time for dignifying Fortgang’s “screed” with a re-publication, and pointed out that Ryan Sager, the Time editor who commissioned the piece, had previously written for — horrors! — National Review.

Salon’s Peter Finocchiaro made fun of Fortgang’s youth (“only a few short months ago he was living at home with his parents”), which presumably accounted for his “dearth of empathy.” Gawker’s Adam Weinstein speculated that “a conservative money front” had funded Fortgang’s politically incorrect views. (The Princeton Tory, like other conservative college papers, receives most of its funding from the Collegiate Network and its parent, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit devoted to advancing conservative ideas on campus.)

Nice going, grown men, piling onto a college kid!

As New York magazine’s Kat Stoeffel pointed out, the push at Harvard’s Kennedy school to install privilege checking as an integral part of the orientation curriculum seemed to be a direct response to Fortgang’s article. And perhaps for one crazy — or cowed — moment, some Kennedy school administrators actually bought into the idea, or at least dropped hints that they were doing so. Fortunately, sanity returned. Even at the liberal New Republic, writer Julia Fisher had noted that the word “privilege” had been turned into a weapon to be wielded against the politically incorrect.

But I wouldn’t count on the “privilege” people going away anytime soon.

Charlotte Allen writes frequently about feminism, politics and religion. Follow her on Twitter @MeanCharlotte.