Posted on 05/05/2014 3:10:03 PM PDT by Scoutmaster
There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. “Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.
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. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive. Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that;” check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.Talinside
But they can’t be telling me that everything I’ve done with my life can be credited to the racist patriarchy holding my hand throughout my years of education and eventually guiding me into Princeton. Even that is too extreme. So to find out what they are saying, I decided to take their advice. I actually went and checked the origins of my privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can’t possibly comprehend. I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.
Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.
Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.
Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?” Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.
Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential. Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?
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. Assuming they’ve benefitted from “power systems” or other conspiratorial imaginary institutions denies them credit for all they’ve done, things of which you may not even conceive. You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression. You don’t know who conquered their demons, or may still conquering them now.
The truth is, though, that I have been exceptionally privileged in my life, albeit not in the way any detractors would have it.
It has been my distinct privilege that my grandparents came to America. First, that there was a place at all that would take them from the ruins of Europe. And second, that such a place was one where they could legally enter, learn the language, and acclimate to a society that ultimately allowed them to flourish.
It was their privilege to come to a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character.
It was my privilege that my grandfather was blessed with resolve and an entrepreneurial spirit, and that he was lucky enough to come to the place where he could realize the dream of giving his children a better life than he had.
But far more important for me than his attributes was the legacy he sought to pass along, which forms the basis of what detractors call my “privilege,” but which actually should be praised as one of altruism and self-sacrifice. Those who came before us suffered for the sake of giving us a better life. When we similarly sacrifice for our descendents by caring for the planet, it’s called “environmentalism,” and is applauded. But when we do it by passing along property and a set of values, it’s called “privilege.” (And when we do it by raising questions about our crippling national debt, we’re called Tea Party radicals.) Such sacrifice of any form shouldn’t be scorned, but admired.
My exploration did yield some results. I recognize that it was my parents’ privilege and now my own that there is such a thing as an American dream which is attainable even for a penniless Jewish immigrant.
I am privileged that values like faith and education were passed along to me. My grandparents played an active role in my parents’ education, and some of my earliest memories included learning the Hebrew alphabet with my Dad. It’s been made clear to me that education begins in the home, and the importance of parents’ involvement with their kids’ education—from mathematics to morality—cannot be overstated. It’s not a matter of white or black, male or female or any other division which we seek, but a matter of the values we pass along, the legacy we leave, that perpetuates “privilege.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color. My appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, and to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting. While I haven’t done everything for myself up to this point in my life, someone sacrificed themselves so that I can lead a better life. But that is a legacy I am proud of.
I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing.
Back in the day, Columbia University had a 1% (1.5%?) quota against Jews, so this institutional discrimination pre-dates affirmative action. Affirmative action merely picks up where the old time discrimination left off, and Jews are still discriminated against as a subset of white people, no doubt now viewed as a particularly pernicious subset, since we’re all supposedly either oppressing the piece-loving palis, or at least buying Israeli Bonds and Sabra and Tribe Humus, so as to enable that oppression.
Fine with me. I turned my back on a university education decades ago, and instead opted to learn something. Those who are excluded from the university system are actually lucky. They won’t have to unlearn all the leftist drivel that they’d otherwise be pumped with.
Jewish applicants are considered to be part of the "white people" group by the bean counters.
Quite right. When was that decision made, and by whom? Who decided that all the many ethnic groups from Europee were henceforth to constitute a single agglomeration to be called "white?"
I assume you are aware that 100 years ago Jews weren't considered "white" by most Americans, and quite often neither were Italians, Greeks, etc.
If there is discrimination against Jewish applicants, it's precisely because all white applicants are discriminated against to make way for desired percentages (quotas) of African American and Hispanic students.
Well, no. There is still a large "white" quota, something like 60%. Within that large quota the slots are still distributed by merit. So Jews of merit still get in at the same proportion as if only merit were considered. At elite colleges this is in the 15% to 30% range or higher, iow 7x to 15x their proportion of the population. (Or considerably higher, depending on how you determine who is a Jew.)
I assume you will agree that Jews have been highly prominent in actively pushing for affirmative action programs that prevent large numbers of otherwise qualified whites from attending these colleges. Yet, since within the white category slots are distributed by merit, very few Jews are disqualified who would otherwise have qualified to attend.
Which can easily be seen by the wildly disprortionate number attending. Few would claim that instead of 15% to 30% Jews at Harvard, without affirmative action we'd instead have 50% or 75%.
My complain is not with successful Jews, and certainly not with the young man who wrote this essay, or with you.
It's with the very large group of "progressive" American Jews who enthusiastically promote policies that disadvantage large numbers of white people, most of them less privileged than those promoting the programs.
I would be entirely happy, as would you, with admission based entirely on merit. It is probably roughly the same number of Jews would get in on that system as do now.
I would be much less happy, though I would be able to see something resembling fairness, in admissions intended to "mirror America," with admissions distributed to provide equal representation for all groups.
Here's a quote from an article about what "diversity" means in practice in America.
Most elite universities seem to have little interest in diversifying their student bodies when it comes to the numbers of born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower-middle-class Catholics, working class "white ethnics," social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children, or older students first starting out in college after raising children or spending several years in the workforce. Students in these categories are often very rare at the more competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League. While these kinds of people would surely add to the diverse viewpoints and life-experiences represented on college campuses, in practice "diversity" on campus is largely a code word for the presence of a substantial proportion of those in the "underrepresented" racial minority groups.
- See more at: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html#sthash.ns6FcQRM.dpuf
What I object to is a policy that pretends to provide opportunity for all groups evenly, while in practice being a savage restriction of opportunity for one group (in reality an artificially-assembled conglomeration of groups, just as "Hispanic" is an artificially-assembled conglomeration of groups), gentile white Americans.
May I suggest you haven't looked very hard?
Here's a NYT article asking whether Princeton is anti-Semitic because (in 1999) its Jewish enrollment had dropped to about 10%, still at least 5x their percentage of the population.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/02/nyregion/princeton-puzzle-where-have-jewish-students-gone.html
This is as compared with the other Ivies, which are commended in the article for maintaining 1/4, 1/3 or higher numbers. (My understanding is that Princeton has since addressed this "problem.")
My question is this. Assuming people who think this way aren't idiots, aren't they aware that bringing "under-represented minorities" up to their appropriate representation, while at the same time recruiting 1/4 or 1/3 Jews is exactly the same thing as imposing a 25% cap on white gentile enrollment? Which is, of course, exactly what was done to Jews in the early 20th, except of course being far more savage.
During the quota period at Harvard, for example, Jewish enrollment never dropped below 15%, still far above their percentage of the population at the time. The effective quotas at Harvard today cap white gentiles at probably considerably less than half their percentage of the population. And nobody cares.
Well, no it didn't. Or, if they did, it wasn't very effective.
One of the groups affected by these policies was Jewish applicants, whose admission to some New England and New York City-area liberal arts universities fell significantly between the late 1910s and the mid-1930s.[5] For instance, the admission ... during that period fell ...in Columbia University from 32.7% to 14.6%. 15% was still 7x or 10x their percentage of the population.
Sounds more like they had a 15% quota, not 1.5% (or 1%). 15% was still 7x or 10x their percentage of the population.
Shouldn't have had any quota at all, of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_clausus#Numerus_clausus_in_the_United_States
Sorry, the last sentence is the second italics section got misplaced. It isn’t part of the quote.
My estimate is that the [Jewish] "quota period at Harvard" lasted roughly from the 1920s (when noted alum Franklin D. Roosevelt played a key role in instituting it) until sometime in the 1960s. My guess would be that Jewish enrollment at Harvard was below 15% during the earlier parts of that period, although I have no statistics in front of me at present. There was one particular Harvard president, whose name escapes me, who was notorious in lowering Jewish admissions numbers.
When you consider Jewish student enrollment in the Ivies, you have to take geography into account as well, in that the Ivies are located in the Northeast and draw most of their students from that section in the country. The Jewish population comprises - although to a lesser degree than it did back in previous decades - a significantly higher percentage of the population in the Northeast than it does nationally. So giving the national Jewish percentage of the population as a baseline is a bit of a distortion in this discussion. Most Jewish youngsters from other sections of the US never were interested in the Ivies and instead chose schools in their region. (Also the Jewish population nationally was more like 4% in in the 1930s and 1940s, and has now gradually diminished to 2% due to low birth rates, assimilation, and relatively small immigration rates.)
My intuitive take, overall, is that the current Jewish student population, though still represented in elite schools far out of proportion to its percentage in the population, has not statistically performed as remarkably well as its parents and grandparents generations of Jewish students. Asian students now seem to be accounting for even higher percentages of elite college admissions when compared to their percentages in the population than Jewish students are.
Don't think so.
Asians are about 5% of US population. I believe it's well known there's a very real, though unadmitted, cap on Asian enrollments at elite private colleges of 20% or 4x their percentage.
Meanwhile, Jews, with under 2% of the population, comprise 1/4 to 1/3 of the most elite colleges. Or 12x to 15x their percentage, or even more.
Primarily, the creepy leftist politicians who inscribed that notion into law, regulation, and policy.
Europee should be Europe. Apparently my left middle finger stutters.
Just like "Whites", "Asians" are bunch of vastly different national, ethnic, cultural, and religious groups. Yet the affirmative action and quota bean counters lump them into one group.
I have to apologize for using the term "Asians" in discussing college admissions policies, because it is inappropriate. I'm sure there are marked differences in academic achievement and college admissions percentages among these various subgroups. (Even an Israeli is an Asian, but you can be sure that the bean counters consider him "white.")
Absolutely. The term “Asian” has a completely different meaning in UK than here.Over there it means South Asians, not East Asians as in the US.
I don’t even know if Indians are counted as Asians here. If they are, it would be very weird, as Indians have at least as much in common with Europeans as with Chinese or Koreans.
We used to have a perfectly good term for East Asians, Orientals, which just means Easterners, which is geographically accurate. But for some obscure, and to me unexplained, reason the term became politically incorrect.
The US government counts Indians as Asians. Persians/Iranians apparently are counted as Caucasians/White even though they are related to the people of northern India. Apparently Afghanis may be considered Asians, though they are related to the Persians. There’s also trouble trying to fit some of the population groups in Russia into the US government’s categories.
Your post only cites a few of many examples of how foolish this US government obsession with demographic classification is. No matter how you classify this group or that group, there always going to be the proverbial round pegs in square holes. I'd much prefer NO official government classification of Americans, other than citizens and aliens, with aliens subdivided into legal and illegal.
Let's have people decide for themselves which group or groups they identify with, NOT government bean counters. But, you see, without government bean counters, there can be no affirmative action, quotas, or set asides, etc.
"Paging Procrustes...Will Procrustes please report to the Census Bureau...?"
You got it.
Support that agenda 100%.
I think the rules may have changed, but 20 years ago I worked with a guy named Martinez. He was married to an Anglo woman and they had two kids, a boy and a girl.
He told me that when his kids grew up, if both married Anglos, the children of his son would be classified as Hispanic, but the children of his daughter not, simply because of the different in surname. Even though all the kids would be equally 25% “Hispanic.”
Meanwhile, Bernardo O’Higgins and Anthony Quinn are classified as Hispanic, despite names as Irish as you can get.
Consider three brothers in 1900 Sicily. Brother A moves to Buenos Aires, brother B to Sao Paulo, brother C to New York. Under present law, when their descendants, all of pure Italian descent, get together for a family reunion in Las Vegas, those descending from brother A are Hispanic, those from the other two are just “white.”
Does that make any sense at all?
Meanwhile, it is to be simultaneously taken as an Article of Faith that "race" doesn't exist, and that there are no real differences between any two human groups.
Expressing interest in determining whether this is actually the case, much less really challenging it, can destry a person's life and career.
I believe you're wrong on the second brother's offspring. I may be wrong but I think that being a native Portuguese speaker or descendant thereof qualifies one as "Hispanic," just as being a native Spanish speaker or descendant thereof qualifies.
Nope. Or at least not uniformly across the government.
Census Bureau allows self-reporting as to who is Hispanic, but people from Portugal or Brazil do not meet the definition originally provided by law. “Americans who identify themselves as being of Spanish-speaking background and trace their origin or descent from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central and South America and other Spanish-speaking countries.”
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/05/28/whos-hispanic/
I believe other agencies use slightly different definitions, and Brazilians and others might qualify under them.
For at least a while, I believe people from Spain itself were not classified as Hispanic, though this may no longer be the case. How weird is that?
OUTSTANDING!!! A bit lengthy but worth reading every word.
Indeed. Thank you for this beautiful devotion!
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