Community College instructor Gint Aras responds to Tal Fortgang’s dismissal of his white privilege.
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If you haven’t heard, this past week Time Magazine picked up an op-ed by Princeton student Tal Fortgang. Titled Why I’ll Never Apologize for my White Male Privilege, it’s an unfortunate, incendiary article of unintended ironies.
Predictably, Fortgang tells a history of his family, their survival of the holocaust, then their hard work as immigrants in the United States. Fortgang’s belief is that a history of character and diligence got him to Princeton. It implies that if everyone and all families had similar character, they would have similar success.
My first response was embarrassment. Then I questioned the wisdom of Time’s editors. I soon felt lucky to have attended college in the early 90’s and not in our contemporary social media madhouse. There are similarities between me and Fortgang, and I might have written a similar article when I was 20.
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I should start with the important differences between Fortgang’s family history and my own. He’s Jewish and I’m Lithuanian. My grandparents’ generation aided the Nazis in their 1941 annihilation of almost the entire Jewish population in Lithuania, over 200,000 people, a feat completed in a matter of a few months. It’s still a difficult chapter Lithuanians have trouble facing.
The sense of entitlement he has learned to dismiss is not a trait exclusively white or wealthy.
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Alongside this important difference, however, are many parallels. My elders, like Fortgang’s, survived World War II. They lived in displaced person camps, and were fortunate enough to find passage to the United States. Both our families learned English while teaching their children a foreign language at home. They worked, instilling values of responsibility in their children, teaching a long-term view of the future. When troubles arose, my grandfather would say things like I escaped the Soviets. I’ll survive these gas prices. That kind of attitude helped me eventually to take a masters degree (an MFA, but still) from Columbia University.
I understand the fury people feel after reading his article. We have to remember, however, that this young man is not Rand Paul, Paul Ryan or Scott Walker, Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. He’s the result of their culture, quite obviously influenced by them. But there is still a huge difference between the point of view of a student writing in a college newspaper and those grown men. This young man is in the process of learning. Conservatives holding student writing up as an example of truth should really reinvestigate their philosophies.
Curiously, Fortgang’s piece is not altogether different from the kind of writing I get here at the community college where I teach English. Our student population is a galaxy away from Princeton. They will routinely be the first in their family to attempt college, and almost everyone here qualifies for a need-based Pell Grant.
Fortgang’s control of language is better than my students’, as is his sense of history. But his one-sided approach to a problem and his complete inability to acknowledge or appeal to the opposite point of view is rather typical of someone only recently graduated from an American high school. His certainty is also par for the course, especially for young male students.
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Certainty is a massive barrier to education.
The most valuable college lessons are designed to reveal our blindness to us. It’s much easier to teach someone naturally curious and aware of their ignorance than it is to try to unwind someone’s stubborn head. Tal Fortgang may very well grow up without changing his opinions at all. Princeton will present him with all sorts of perspectives, but what he really needs is hands-on experience with the minefield our underclasses negotiate.
Perhaps Fortgang will learn about this minefield. Maybe he’ll learn that checking one’s privilege does not mean to feel defensive, or as Michael Denzel Smith argues in The Nation, to apologize. Checking one’s privilege means to gather awareness, if not of the shape and blast of the mines, then at least of one’s fortunate position at the minefield’s edge. There’s also the hill where homes are often built from profits earned from the sale of mines.
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All this aside, those of us on the left face a danger in our response to Fortgang’s camp. The sense of entitlement he has learned to dismiss is not a trait exclusively white or wealthy. My students tend to treat the college like the customer service desk, and they believe, similarly to Fortgang, that claims to great character actually equal great character. A professor should acknowledge their greatness before they’ve demonstrated even basic skill.
The place where Fortgang’s point of view intersects perfectly with my students’ is in his treatment of the past. Yes, he has gathered a more detailed historical narrative (partially because he’s fortunate to have an available family tree). However, someone taught him to inflate himself with it. My students have learned the same thing, and a lot of them tell virtually the same exhausted cliché: “My elders worked hard to get to this point. They made many sacrifices. History treated them badly. But they gave me the values that got me where I am today.”
Fortgang’s bio suggests he might want to major in history. Studying history places one before a narrative that should shock us to humility. Our human story of interdependence between kings and slaves is at once brutal and sublime. A historian does not put the past together as much as s/he admires the pieces of the jigsaw, a small handful of them profoundly greater than the individual fortunate to hold them.
If Fortgang learns that lesson, he won’t have merely checked his privilege. He’ll have taken advantage of it, placing himself in position to offer the rest of us solutions to problems we can’t yet see.
Photo by atramos
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True Community runs each Wednesday. Gint Aras explores his experiences as an instructor in a community college that serves a lower-middle to lower class district in Chicagoland.
Previous True Community articles:
Why Is It Wrong To Be Sexist, Racist or Homophobic?
I Had To Kill A Guy At Work Yesterday
Top 3 Education Myths and How They Affect Men
The Myth and False Lesson of Independence
I love the condescension that Mr. Aras so easily drips on Mr. Fortgang. Perhaps Mr. Fortgang can be “reeducated” during his additional years at Princeton. If that doesn’t work, perhaps he can be escorted to the countryside for a period of internment to learn the errors of his ways. Mr. Fortgang forthrightly rips to shreds the whole industry of victimhood and grievance. He must be silenced.
“But there is still a huge difference between the point of view of a student writing in a college newspaper and those grown men. This young man is in the process of learning. Conservatives holding student writing up as an example of truth should really reinvestigate their philosophies “
What an ageist, condescending load of crap. I recall similar arguments were made against students protesting against the war in Viet Nam.
“Certainty is a massive barrier to education.” I agree totally agree. Meanwhile, it goes *both ways*. Certainty that someone DOES have white privilege is also an obstacle to education. If you’ve ever gone to a White Privilege Conference, you will have met some people who have absolutely no room for doubt or questions or uncertainty whatsoever. They are some of the most certain people you will ever meet.\ By the way, I’m glad you didn’t simply regurgitate the quick and easy circular argument that his inability to see his privilege is clear evidence that he has privilege. It’s invisible and… Read more »
To fix the problem of privilege, feminists have come up with this concept of intersectionality to be utilized with the “benevolent sexism” to try and make a simple problem even more complex. I’m reminded of an old children’s game. When walking home with a group of friends someone will yell step on a crack and break your mother’s back. The children will still get home, but they’d avoid stepping on any cracks. Sometimes the pavement was really cracked and you’d see the tip toe or they try and jump over a section. Of course the adults need to be more… Read more »
But who gets to decide what privilege is and when it should be “checked”? Women aren’t asked to “check their privilege” when it comes to men dying 9x more often in industrial accidents or living 5 years fewer, or being only 47% of the electorate. They are quite content to dictate policy as politicians court the all important women’s vote. When people do notice these disadvantages, they are often dismissed as “benevolent sexism”. First defense of privilege is to call it something else. Fortgang wasn’t the first. He was just white and male so didn’t have the privilege of using… Read more »
It’s better to just let people have their fun with their moral superiority and ignore them.
Being some combination of white, straight and male means that people care less about your problems, so I generally just keep my problems to myself. There does tend to be anger when I ignore their problems as well, but like I said, ignore them.
The trouble with this assertion is that Mr. Fortgang wrote the op-ed exactly to counter (what he perceives as) people using the phrase to put him on the defensive and dismiss his opinions. Whether he’s correct about their intentions or not, a lot of people experience “check your privilege” that way. I fear that the furious response to his op-ed will only reinforce that perception.