No Apologies Necessary - Part 3

bbc.com

Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang has been told repeatedly to "check his privilege" - to be aware of how his socio-economic and cultural background shapes his views - and he's not happy about it.

"The phrase," he writes, "handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung.

In an opinion piece originally carried last month by a conservative Princeton student publication and reprinted on Friday in Time magazine, the 20-year-old condemns those who paint him with the "privileged" label for "diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive".


To answer his critics, Fortgang recounts his ancestry, which includes a grandfather who fled Poland after the German invasion in World War Two and a grandmother who was sent to a Nazi concentration camp.

"That's the problem with calling someone out for the 'privilege' which you assume has defined their narrative," he writes. "You don't know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are."

He says he is privileged, but not in the way the liberals think:

It was my privilege that my grandfather was blessed with resolve and an entrepreneurial spirit, and that he was lucky enough to come to the place where he could realize the dream of giving his children a better life than he had.

He says the virtues of "faith and education" passed along from his parents are his privilege.

"It's not a matter of white or black, male or female or any other division which we seek, but a matter of the values we pass along, the legacy we leave, that perpetuates 'privilege'," he concludes. "And there's nothing wrong with that."

Asking him to apologize for it, he asserts, is "insulting".