Over the Christmas break*, I stumbled across the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. Via New York magazine, tremble before the power of the Check Your Privilege Card:
I have so many questions!
- What about cis privilege? Wow, nice erasure there, "allies." I bet you didn't even think about how this damages trans folks. Maybe check your OWN privilege for a second before lecturing the rest of us?
- Would you ever dare hand these out to someone who doesn't understand the concept of "privilege" in the first place?
- If not, aren't you just attempting to signal that you are more enlightened than the other individual in the conversation?
- If this is merely an attempt at signaling, what is the proper response?
- Perhaps a punch in the nose? That is also a signal!
- How many new Trump voters does each bit of silliness like this create? There were a lot of protest voters in 2016** who are going to spend four years absorbing this sort of idiocy and have to decide if protest-voting is more psychically rewarding than sticking it to people who think that "Check Your Privilege Cards" are Good.
- Are these cards environmentally friendly?
- Were they printed in the United States or in sweatshops overseas?
- If they were printed overseas, isn't this just crass neoliberalism degrading the world's workers?
- If they were printed in the United States, were the printers and packers paid a living wage?
- Did the creators of these cards even think to ask these questions or inform their customers of the relevant facts?
- Isn't the failure to consider these basic facts just socioeconomic privilege run amok?
If you received a deck of these cards for Christmas, I'm sorry. Your friends are terrible. It gets better. Believe me: it gets better. Hang in there.
*My privilege is showing. Deal with it.
**725,000 or so for McMullin and 4.5 million or so for Johnson. Obviously not every Johnson vote was a Republican voter who turned away from Trump, but the Libertarian Party's total jumped up from 1.275 million; I imagine a significant portion of the 3-million-plus voters who went for Johnson this time around might come home to the GOP and Trump if the next four years aren't a total disaster—and perhaps even if they are. That 4 million (or so) extra votes, minus the 1 million or so extra votes that the Green Party picked up, would be roughly enough to eclipse Hillary Clinton's (utterly meaningless) lead in the popular vote, by the way. At the very least, it'd be a close-run thing.