http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/05/what-the-origin-of-check-your-privilege-tells-us-about-todays-privilege-debates/370795/
The idea, I suppose, is to get conservative students to shut up, as their viewpoints come from a place of privilege which makes their opinions illegitimate. The added bonus is the teaching of white guilt, to be expiated by voting Democratic. Since we all know how constructive and helpful the ideological movements in higher education have been to our nation since at least 1963, and how helpful the white-guilt enabled presidency of Barack Obama has been to the advancement of western civilization, I certainly want to get on board with this movement. Wouldn't want to miss out on whatever is trending in academia these days, or fail to play my part in allowing liberals to now do to the entire nation what they did to Detroit.
So, here's me, confessing my sins and owning up to my privileges. The more I have thought about them, the more I have realized how manifest they are. I am privileged, privileged, privileged, and guilty, guilty, guilty, of not being sufficiently aware of my privileges. I'm so privileged no one should pay attention to any opinion I have ever expressed. I probably shouldn't even be allowed to vote:
1. I was privileged to have been born before the modern liberal deconstruction of the family, in an era where 90%+ of children were born to their own married parents, such that I got to be raised by both a mom and a dad, who were married before I was born, and who stayed married as they raised me to adulthood. As numerous studies have now conclusively demonstrated, being born into or adopted at infancy by already-married parents who stay married as you are raised is the best possible way to start one's life. This family environment fulfilled untold psychological, physical, and financial needs, which no government program or alternative family structure could possibly hope to duplicate. As Charles Murray put it in Coming Apart (Crown Forum 2012):
No matter what the outcome being examined –the quality of the mother-infant relationship, . . . aggression . . . and hyperactivity, delinquency in adolescence, criminality as adults, illness and injury in childhood, early mortality, sexual decision-making in adolescence, school problems and dropping out, emotional health, or any other measure of how well or poorly children do in life – the family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. . . . Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family’s socioeconomic status. I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties.
Millions of future children will not have this privilege, but will be born into a world where the television shows, movies, textbooks and even the President of the United States all announce support for a new definition of family which teaches that children do not need both a mother and a father. How terribly sad for them. How incredibly privileged I was to have been born before the "war on poverty" and its subsidization of illegitimacy, no-fault divorce, irresponsible entertainment, and redefined marriage had accomplished their assault on fatherhood. The result? I got to be raised by both my mom and also my dad, I was never told that a welfare or child-support check, or a second mom, was an adequate substitute for a dad, and I never came to believe those things. Thus, I knew enough to seek after the roles of husband and father myself someday, which have given me the greatest joys and blessings of my life. PRIVILEGED? CHECK.
2. I was privileged to have parents who thought of themselves first as parents, and not as someone primarily trying to be my friend. This meant they accomplished their parental responsibilities. If I got in trouble at school, I never told my parents, because I knew whose side they would take: not mine, the teacher's. I was privileged to have a mother who read to me, setting me on her lap and requiring me to also read, out-loud, to her, day after day after day, until I knew what I was doing and had mastered the skill. This is one of my earliest memories. And it worked, something clicked, and I began to read on my own. I was privileged to have a dad who lectured me constantly about the importance of hard work and honesty, and who was not afraid to discipline me in a corporal fashion when appropriate. The result? I was parented, before being befriended, as a child, so that I got to be raised, not enabled. PRIVILEGED? CHECK.
3. I was privileged to play outdoors. I was able to be raised before the onset of iPad tablets, Cable-TV, Netflix, etc. Videogames? There was Pong, but it didn't really hold one's interest for very long. There were only five channels on the television set, and only one of them, Channel 5, ever showed anything interesting (reruns of Batman and Gilligan's Island or Speed Racer and Star Trek). But the good shows didn't start until late in the afternoon, so Summer days were mostly filled with hours of unsupervised outdoor play. My friends and I would sneak past the barbed-wire fences to ride our bikes in the Water District, or go in the desert next to it before it was developed with new homes and figure out ways to blow things up, or ride our bikes through the flood channels and tunnels that ran from behind the railway tracks at the Union Plaza beneath Fremont Street, where it could get pitch black in the middle of the day and only the sound of the water on your tires let you know you were staying in the middle of the channel. It's a wonder we didn't die down there. How stupid were we? We would play pickle in the space between our houses. We would make up our own games. I remember especially something called crazy house, which was a bizarre combination of hide and go seek and the Fugitive, with increasingly complex rules we made up as we went along. By the end of the summer we had all become so adept at not only formulating these new rules but adjudicating disputes about their implementation that we could have all run for legislative office. The result? Even though I'm still a huge fan of movies and other visual forms of entertainment, I also learned to enjoy real reality, not solely virtual reality. PRIVILEGED? CHECK.
4. I was privileged to grow up before the ubiquitous use of Ritalin and the treatment of natural boyhood restlessness as a medical disorder. Instead, the treatment for a hyperactive boy was to be given a bike, a library card, and an allowance. This allowed me to fill my life with the kind of printed material that appealed to a young boy and turned him into a life-long reader, while giving me something to channel my attention to so I could learn to focus free of pharmaceuticals. This matters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFpYj0E-yb4
Parents weren't very paranoid at the time, so I could ride my bike, alone or with a friend or two, and without any adult supervision, to the K-Mart on Rancho and Washington to buy Hardy Boys books, to the 7-11 on Rancho and Charleston to buy Mad magazines, the Flash and other DC comic books, to the B. Dalton or Waldenbooks in the Meadows Mall to buy Tarzan novels, or paperbacks full of Ray Bradbury's twilight-zoneesque short stories, or to the library on Charleston Heights, across the alley from where Robert Shaddy cut my hair, where the librarian introduced me to Encyclopedia Brown and the Great Brain. The result? Printed words became my Ritalin, and I learned to sit still and focus by learning to love reading. PRIVILEGED? CHECK.
5. I was privileged to be taken to church every Sunday, and often during the week as well. Sometimes for several hours a week. This meant that, as a child, I came to enjoy the feeling associated with learning about spiritual things, and, as a teenager, I was given adult mentors, scout leaders, youth advisors, and the like, who, I now realize, dedicated loads of their free time to keeping my friends and I entertained. We were expected to provide service hours to various and sundry local charitable endeavors, to get up in front of the congregation and speak, to go camping, backpacking, and fishing, and, as we got older, to serve as youth staff for the younger boys' scout camps. What all this meant to my life can never be fully articulated. Public speaking and leadership training, yes, but, more importantly, the opportunity to essentially grow up in my own small town, as part of a community where families knew one another, which many residents of Las Vegas and other cities would never have fully understood. I was privileged that the Church in question was incredibly politically incorrect, such that we were taught, contra the media messages which were starting to be generated at the time, that no good thing would come of experimentation with drugs or sex. The result? I arrived at adulthood without having had any unexpected children who I wasn't ready to be a good father to, without any unexpected STDs, and with values that came from a more legitimate source than public education, peers, or Cable TV. PRIVILEGED? CHECK.
6. I was privileged to come of age, politically, in a culture that refutes my social and political and religious values. Movies, television, mainstream news media, the universities, publishing: All of these worlds are liberal, and they all portray the world from a liberal default position which need not be defended because it is the way that right-thinking people in these worlds simply know one is supposed to think. Thus, to be a conservative in this world is to be exposed to a constant challenge to one's beliefs. This is a good thing. It means that, to hold onto politically and socially conservative positions a person has to think, reason, read, argue, and articulate. "I emote therefore I am" won't work for conservatives, which keeps us from becoming intellectually lazy, at least most of the time. And this is a good thing. Because rigor in intellectual thought is helpful in all kinds of other areas of life as well. PRIVILEGED? CHECK.
7. As I have raised my own children, I have been privileged to raise them in an environment where they have learned that, as middle-class whiteys, they would not be getting any special favors when it was time for them to apply for college scholarships, so they'd better study hard because their future depended on their own academic merit. I asked one of my sons recently, who excelled academically in school, if he had done this because we had pushed him. I was a little concerned that his successes (which I have greatly enjoyed celebrating) came at some psychological cost which I might have imposed. To my relief he said no, but then he went on to say something that made me realize I had enjoyed this privilege: He said, probably somewhat facetiously, that "they" in "society" had pushed him. I asked him what he meant, and, again perhaps somewhat facetiously, but also probably a little bit honestly, he told me he had heard many times in school that the white males wouldn't be getting any extra points when it came time to apply for college, and so he had worked his hardest. If the recipients of affirmative action truly understood this principle, they would be first in line with the loudest voices demanding it be dismantled. Instead, its the white kids and the Asian kids who get the most important actual benefit, the benefit of motivation, from a system supposedly designed to help their other peers. (My children are 1/32 Native American. I always assumed that would never do any of them any good, and none of them ever provided this information on any applications. Thank the good Lord they never heard of Elizabeth Warren or else they might have misspent their youth playing video games.) PRIVILEGED? CHECK.
So there you have it. On this page, I write my last confession. (I've also been privileged to see some really good plays.) Should I now stop opining and stop voting (or start voting leftward) to make up for my privileged status? Or should I stick with my conservative principles so as to keep fighting for a world where more people enjoy the same privileges I have received? I think I'll stick with the latter.
