thefederalist.com/2016/03/28/privilege-theory-is-a-war-on-happy-childhoods/
“Check your privilege” is a meme that’s gained traction on college campuses and other venues where privileged people tend to gather. Loosely translated, it means “Shut up.”
More specifically, it means that your attitudes, habits, values—and hence any idea you may express—are caused by the unearned privileges you enjoy based on your demographic classification. So, your mission—whether or not you choose to accept it—is to engage in self-criticism instead of conversation.
Confused? Privilege theorists are here to help. They explain that privileges—whether material, social, or professional—come from being male, healthy, prosperous, safe, white-skinned, heterosexual, non-gender-dysphoric, or any number of things that cause you to experience the world in a different way than somebody who comes from a different category in today’s social matrix. If you’re still confused, you can consult this chart to keep score.
Oh, one other thing. Even if you score low on privilege, you are still guilty (even more so) if you’ve “assimilated” into a culture that values the attitudes or habits associated with privilege. This means you need to further check your behavior and your language. Indeed, David Marcus explained in a recent Federalist essay how quickly privilege theory is infecting our language. Ironically, when we deem the speech of some more equal than the speech of others, the result is social inequality.
In any event, privilege theorists today most strongly classify privilege with something they call “whiteness.” Your helpful campus diversity specialists define whiteness as an ideology. This means that if you are labeled white, you possess privileges connected with “an ideology based on beliefs, values, behaviors, habits, and attitudes, which result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege based on skin color.”
But there is a remedy for such guilt. It involves attending re-education camps, which seem to be popping up like mushrooms today on college campuses. It’s even popped up inside the U.S. Marines: since surveys have found many Marines oppose the new policy of putting men and women into the same combat units, all must now attend “prejudice training.” From Portland Community College’s educational project aimed at telling students that their very existence as white-skinned actually causes racial inequality to University of Vermont sending “white” students off to a re-education retreat, self-criticism is the order of the day.
