I refuse to 'check my privilege'.
Here's a funny story, of course depending upon whether or not you have an actual sense of humor. I go to the Comedy and Magic Club last night, and we're in the overflow room with the 10 comics for $10 deal. The guy who looks and talks like Ed O'Neill is cracking jokes about these two young white dudes in the audience. He asks people to speak up who are college students and they walked right into it. One of them is Econ at Brown, the other Geology at Carleton. So he goes on to make a hilarious set of jokes against preppies, we're cracking up in the back because our niece is pre-med at Carleton, which is being mocked as the whitest college in America and all that rot. So we're getting the extra laugh out of that.
It's really practical to sit the whole thing out and laugh at the contradictions, while at the same time recognizing how much of what is considered comedy and politics is just riffing off of the ethnic stereotypes of the common American. I'm not checking my privilege, I'm just learning a lot about how old money and success requires defense. The mob really does want to eat the rich. These folks really do want to tell me that I'm a unicorn. What's interesting is that these stereotypes dealing with contradictions have been mutated in a new way so that the white comics have to say how bad it is to be black and how they must not insult in certain ways. IE some things are unspeakable no matter what your intention.
What strikes me as most corrosive about this new fact is that people who are ready to cross these ridiculous borders tend of necessity to consider themselves 'alternative' or 'rebellious' or 'anti-social', and this creates the illusion that guys like me are actually *incapable* of not being damaged by insulting speech. In other words, that my psychology (and 'minority' self-esteem in general) is in fact defective in the way ordinary vilified white males are not. They can take it. I cannot. They *must* take it, I *must* not. And BTW if you're a white male who finds any of this illogical, or worse, actually insulting, you need to STFU.
What is further interesting is that it is quite possible, if not probable, that I belong to some fragmental minority of Americans who actually reasoned my way towards cultural integration of the sort that's taking a beating right now. Ethnic and cultural integration is normal from my POV and people who can't do it are ignorant. But from the new POV ethnic and cultural integration is super difficult and anybody who does it is extraordinary because the rest of us are just racist assholes who need constant supervision. Which means racism is the new normal, exactly like the old normal.
So people who don't really understand the difference between oppression and a lack of privilege feel the need for a great social reckoning. I'm not exactly sure how far I should address this sort of madness. I judge by the degree of seriousness my own children on the subjects, qualified by the proviso that they were raised primarily in the upper middle class and never required the threat of violence to get motivated. So like most such youth, they have been spared the heat and hardships which sometimes tempers their character's steel.
I'm not worried, but I am learning.
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