"The idea of 'privilege'... really came into its own in the late eighties, when Peggy McIntosh, a women’s-studies scholar at Wellesley, started writing about it."

"In 1988, McIntosh wrote a paper called 'White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies,' which contained forty-six examples of white privilege. (No. 21: 'I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.' No. 24: 'I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the "person in charge," I will be facing a person of my race.') Those examples have since been read by countless schoolkids and college students — including, perhaps, Tal Fortgang, the Princeton freshman whose recent article, 'Checking My Privilege,' has been widely debated."

The New Yorker traces the "privilege" meme back to a Women's Studies professor in the 1980s. I vaguely remember when this article came out and hearing various feminist scholars scoff that everyone already knew this. But it was written in a spiffy way that got the idea across and therefore, I guess, irritated some people who felt like they'd had that idea long ago.

Remember when you were young — if you're not young now — and you'd read other people's ideas and think "Hey, that's my idea," as if the writer had ripped you off and the credit was rightfully yours? I remember that as a characteristic feeling of youth. It's a feeling that drops off with age. We share all of the ideas of all of humankind. If you can read it, you understand it. If you understand it, it is in your head, and it is yours. The best ideas, when you read and understand them, feel as though they were always there in your head.

Quite possibly, all of the best ideas have been thought before, and each new generation can only restate them. Did Tal Fortgang read Peggy McIntosh? Did Peggy McIntosh crib from W.E.B. Du Bois? We're all doomed to paraphrase, to feel we can only paraphrase, that we've been paraphrased, and that we're being paraphrased without citation. Some of this is delusional, and some of this is obvious. Haven't you already written that somewhere?