Perhaps one should blame Barack Obama for this. Ahmed’s political worldview seems to be part Obama, part Warren Buffett: vacuous civil rights rhetoric plus vacuous “progressive” corporate rhetoric. Obama was the one who finally sapped the last substantive content from the words “hope” and “change,”…
The problem with privilege is not that it is an undue luxury, then. It is that all do not share in it equally. A failure to recognize that causes a doomed political strategy; it results in critiquing those who have privilege rather than granting it to those who do not. That means dragging entitled …
Critiques of white privilege can therefore slip into the very callousness that we are attempting to critique in the first place. If white peo- ple are perceived to experience “undeserved” advantage, then creating a world of just deserts will involve removing those advantages. But if those “advantag…