CNN: "The Parkland Kids Keep Checking Their Privilege"
In addition to being a totalitarian cult, PC is also basically a young-people's movement driven largely by the popularity of its cringey jargon/slang. So, y'know, like, check your privilege and don't do any of those microaggressions and whiteness. All that stuff is totally transmisogynoir. Not to mention columbizing or whatever.
It's enough to make you miss 'phallogocentrism'.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:11 AM
2 Comments:
The best part: "Corin brought Yolanda Renee King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s granddaughter, to the stage as her special surprise guest."
Checking your privilege = handing the mic to a 9 year old because her grandfather did great things 50 years before she was born
The other day I was reading Victor Klemperer's The Language of the Third Reich, which I saw referenced in one of those currently fashionable, bed-wetting "how to survive the coming darkness" books. I still recommend it though. It's gripping, it its way, and actually rather reassuring in the end: Sure, the rhetorical parallels make the Trumpists' authoritarian impulses pretty plain, but we all knew about them anyway. What is more interesting are the dissimilarities. Worth reading.
But the reason to leave a comment about it here is that Klemperer has a discussion of "privileged" (Privilegiert). The Nazis, ostensibly for to reward the assimilated, designated certain Jews as "privileged", and allowed them some additional freedoms, the most significant of which was not having to wear the yellow star. Nothing was more effective in demoralizing the Jewish community. Klemperer writes, "There are few sentences I heard uttered more frequently and with more bitterness than this one: 'He is privileged.'" What an invention the Germans stumbled upon, a way of turning much of the anger at the Nuremberg laws against those oppressed by them, but a little less. How much was resistance to the regime reduced during its early, fragile years by this one little trick?
OK, Godwin's law and all that. Nothing in the contemporary PC usage of "privilege" is anywhere close to the degree of what Klemperer described. But the structure is there still, and here is the contemporary American version. This author analogizes TSA pre-check and "white privilege", then wrings her hands over how easily she got used to pre-check. Missing from these ruminations: any thought that taking off your shoes and the other things pre-check spares you are completely unnecessary for anyone. Seen through the lens of privilege, the problem with the security line is not its uselessness, its intrusiveness, or the base level indignity of the security theater rigamarole, but that some people get a marginally less bad version!
The "privilege" locution has gone from nowhere to ubiquitous on college and HS campuses and on line in the last fifteen years. Also in that time the the degree to which young people are subject to the para-faculty's surveillance-security-lifestyle bureaucracy has increased substantially. (As has the expense they and their families bear to fund it.) Elsewhere and elsewhen, the privilege idea has been introduced to make the oppressiveness of such a bureaucracy an assumed necessity, to gain a measure of acquiescence and even self enforcement. The para-faculty, who push the privilege talk so hard, have stumbled on this use again.
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