here is a question regarding my "white privilege",

[Dreamer Tatum]

24. Don't worry - white privilege threads aren't about you.

They're about the person decrying "white privilege," who, with almost perfect certainty, is a white person just like you. Pointing out the fact of your "white privilege" is never meant to accomplish anything other than to burnish the progressive credentials of the person doing the pointing. And when I say "pointing," I don't mean a gentle reminder that you have benefited from some ancient, well-established social and financial apparatus that has elevated you to your current loft without so much as a callus on your part. I mean THIS sort of pointing:



(Let us ignore for a moment that almost everyone on DU is not named Bush, Kennedy, Clinton, Trump, Morgan, Rothschild, or any other name associated with actual, tangible privilege. Those white people don't read DU, so finding them to chide them about their ACTUAL is, like, HARD, man. Better to remind a poor guy that at least the cops don't crack his skull every ten minutes. That way time can be preserved to throw support behind someone about to cash in their actual privilege chips to run for President again.)


You asked a fair question of those who bolster their self-esteem, street cred, and post counts what you are to do with this awful privilege that has been bestowed upon you. You got wiseassed responses or ones that urge you to work to change the system or short-circuit the process. Using, you know, those methods we all know work so well. At this point you might start to realize that this whole "white privilege" thing is pretty much an enormous pyramid scheme, except in place of soap or timeshares or internet advertising, you are meant to sell guilt. The persons who have reminded you of your "white privilege" are selling you guilt. And the only way for you to not have to buy the guilt is for YOU to sell the guilt. And when those who have sold YOU the guilt see that YOU'RE selling guilt, then they know that they're higher on the pyramid than you, and that is what matters.

And you know this hierarchy is all that matters because, again, the product is the process. No one ever said Amway's soap is GOOD. It's just supposed to be BOUGHT. In this same way, when you confront those attempting to hold themselves above you, they have damn little in the way of actually DOING SOMETHING about this thing which literally infects your DNA. Conduct the following exercise: count the posts on DU reminding otherwise good Democrats and progressives how shameful their "white privilege" is, and then count the number of posts in which someone details concrete actions they have undertaken to negate or toss off their "white privilege." The former will overwhelm the latter, and in fact the ratio may be near infinity.

My advice is to nod politely at the Check Your Privilege squad and move along. You don't have to buy soap if you don't want it, and you damn sure don't have to sell it, and in fact I bet you're already reasonably clean in the first place.