"Check Your Privilege": A Response. And a Response.

 The response is here.

And my  response is here:

The author accuses the author of the original Princeton “check your privilege" piece of misunderstanding the correct meaning of the term privilege. Yet her own example of privilege is that of a two-legged runner being able to beat a one-legged runner in a race. But this is not privilege at all; it is greater ability. She does begin by calling this a “metaphor.” And she later says that privilege is something “institutional or cultural,” which is something very different from a missing leg. Okay; but then she actually calls this a case, in so many words, of “ability privilege.”

Privilege: Merriam Webster -- “a right or benefit that is given to some people and not to others.” If that is to include physical ability, say, or intelligence, achieving equality and ending privilege may be both very difficult and highly undesirable.

She then accepts, in fact insists, that having had ancestors who endured hardships or who were privileged counts for nothing: “Having ancestors that endured hardships is important only if either you endure those same hardships or if those past hardships have continued on today in the form of discrimination based on your shared characteristics.”

Excellent; this seems to me to concede the central point of the original author. And undermine the fabric of “affirmative action,” a present discrimination based on claims of past discrimination against different members of an identifiable group. Yet she then contradicts this claim by saying she is speaking for “people from groups who have historically been silenced or disregarded.” Not currently; historically. That should then include the author of the Princeton piece; yet she has apparently forgotten this. I guess it doesn’t because he’s “white.”