There's also this parenthetical stuck in by the WaPo editors:
(Contacted by an editor at The Washington Post, Amsterdam Falafelshop co-owner Arianne Bennett said the author was selected to run the register not because he speaks English but because of his entertaining personality. Bennett says all employees are trained to work the register; the most talkative and witty are tasked with running it.)In the critique of privilege, who counts as privileged? Should a sandwich shop owner be a prime target?
And, by the way, when did it become unusual for middle-class American kids, in the years before graduation from college, to work in fast-food joints? It used to be completely the norm, not anything you'd consider yourself special for doing. Here's a list of places I've worked: International House of Pancakes, Burger Chef, The White Horse Diner, The Brown Jug, and Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger. That wasn't odd, just what a typical American college student did in the summer.
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65 comments:
Krazy Jim's ... we are not worthy.
Good work habits are so unfair to oppressed groups.
I don't think these "white privilege" and "men are rapey" storylines are good for kids as they grow up. We wouldn't allow any other group to be so constantly denigrated. It hurts the way you see yourself, and that isn't good. That isn't the way we raise other groups up.
You know, I've said this before. When I was growing up, all the women's magazines wrote articles about how men don't really love, they just want sex. And I was a little bit afraid of boys when I dated. I believe that has fed into the current feminism and "rape" moral panic we have now. We have raised girls to see men as less than fully emotional beings.
And now we are raising young people to see white people as less than individuals, too. To make them feel guilty for success. Which certainly won't breed success.
The author of that piece is programmed to feel he is privileged, special, and will naturally rise through life. He even refers to his "trajectory" at one point leading him away from that society, as if at 23 he has had no personal choice to deliberately move away from lower and lower middle class society.
At no point does the author seem to serious contemplate that: Families and invididuals rise and fall. Death comes for us all. Accidents can leave one disfigured and incapable.
One of the commenters over at WaPo really hit it on the head - to paraphase: There's nothing more priveleged than using the built-up resources of generations of family and friends than spending your time trying to experience what others less fortunate than you experience, instead of using the gifts and resources given to you to build yourself and your family further - and benefit mankind more broadly.
The idea that working at a lower-middle-class fast food joint is some sort of experience in the un-privileged is ridiculous. If the author had moved to haiti for a year, different parts of Africa, etc....that perhaps would have been an appropriate vignette to right about. How's your white privilege work when you have no construction or physical skills, don't speak the local language, and don't have any friends?
The blimpyburger site is slow. You may have Althouseslammed it.
All it shows is how hard it is to get good help. effing hipster douche bag
White privilege is really white achievement. Whites built this society, and nonwhites live in its walls.
I had to chuckle when he compared himself to George Orwell. Ironic really.
I think jobs like that went by the wayside around the time that college costs rod exponentially in response to the federal student loan racket. If you are going to come out of school in mounds of debt anyway, why bother to spend your summers flipping burgers?
sykes.1- You are wrong. and you are a nasty poo-poo head.
I realize that almost everyone in North America thinks of him or herself as "middle-class" but I think if you've attended a $30,000/year high school, you maybe should add an "upper" to that designation.
Oh, gag me. Liberal, wonderful wise-beyond-his-years goes native, educates the lower classes while experiencing life among the proletariat. Now, with a degree in geography, he's a free lance illustrator, having established that he's something special for working in a greasy spoon as a high school kid.
And the Washington Post actually thinks it worthy of publication?
It says more about the WP's editors than the vapid rich buffooon who wrote this tripe.
"I had to chuckle when he compared himself to George Orwell. Ironic really."
Here's Orwell, working in a restaurant:
He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deep
underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly
hot and very dark, with only dim, yellow bulbs several yards apart. There
seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages--actually, I suppose, a
few hundred yards in all--that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of
a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food,
and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like
the whir of engines. We passed doorways which let out sometimes a shouting
of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once a shuddering draught from
an ice chamber. As we went along, something struck me violently in the
back. It was a hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blue-aproned
porter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on his shoulder, his
cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh. They shoved me aside with a cry
of '_Sauve-toi, idiot!_' and rushed on. On the wall, under one of the lights,
someone had written in a very neat hand: 'Sooner will you find a cloudless
sky in winter, than a woman at the Hôtel X who has her maidenhead.' It
seemed a queer sort of place.
One of the passages branched off into a laundry, where an old,
skull-faced woman gave me a blue apron and a pile of dishcloths. Then the
_chef du personnel_ took me to a tiny underground den--a cellar below a
cellar, as it were--where there were a sink and some gas-ovens. It was
too low for me to stand quite upright, and the temperature was perhaps 110
degrees Fahrenheit. The _chef du personnel_ explained that my job was to
fetch meals for the higher hotel employees, who fed in a small dining-room
above, clean their room and wash their crockery. When he had gone, a
waiter, another Italian, thrust a fierce, fuzzy head into the doorway and
looked down at me.
'English, eh?' he said. 'Well, I'm in charge here. If you work well'
--he made the motion of up-ending a bottle and sucked noisily. 'If you
don't'--he gave the doorpost several vigorous kicks. 'To me, twisting
your neck would be no more than spitting on the floor. And if there's any
trouble, they'll believe me, not you. So be careful.'
One of my kids delivers pizza. Seriously learning a lot that way, and making pretty good money.
White Guilt as self confession sessions sounds too much like the communists and the Catholics have merged into one new new huge institution dedicated to charging money for mandatory atonement rituals.
No wonder Donald Trump touched a nerve by calling reality on their crafty asses.
He doesn't have white privilege, he suffers from witty privilege.
I love that book, Down and Out in Paris and London.
TreeJoe asks: "How's your white privilege work when you have no construction or physical skills, don't speak the local language, and don't have any friends?"
In Botswana, for example, English is one of the two official languages.
Botswana has a high level of economic freedom compared to other African countries. The government has maintained a sound fiscal policy, despite consecutive budget deficits in 2002 and 2003, and a negligible level of foreign debt. It earned the highest sovereign credit rating in Africa and has stockpiled foreign exchange reserves (over $7 billion in 2005/2006) amounting to almost two and a half years of current imports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botswana
All this liberals moaning about "white privilege" don't realize that what they're really talking about is capitalist privilege. The fact that nearly all American capitalists used to be white is a sad commentary on past American racism and racial policies.
But that was past.
Today, there is nothing preventing an enterprising black American from starting his own business. And many are.
CStanley nails it. High tuition. Easy money. Why work?
Who does it serve, this teaching young people that some people do well only because of the color of their skin, and the rest will probably suffer even if they work hard?
My wife was a restaurant chef for many years. Orwell got a lot wrong about why cooks did things certain ways. He thought that they used hard-to-clean copper pans simply because it was traditional. If I remember correctly, in Down and Out . . . he went on a minor rampage about horrible restaurants were altogether. People cooking and waiting on other people. He didn't see the sense in them.
They give degrees in geography?
JCC wrote:
"Oh, gag me. Liberal, wonderful wise-beyond-his-years goes native, educates the lower classes while experiencing life among the proletariat."
Most of the people he worked with were on the very bottom. The poor are always there. If you went to a similar restaurant in Moscow in 1978 you would have seen the same lower-rung workers, doing the same crappy work for crappy pay.
What Phillips should have done is work at a middle-class job, the kind a person has but doesn't like all that much, that may not have a glorious end-point but allows him (or her) to put career on the second or third tier while they concentrate on friends and family and living a happy life.
I think that what Phillips has done, possibly purposely, is to move one from social position, which he did nothing to earn, to slum with people on the bottom, who did nothing to earn their lowly status, either (or so he believes). Phillips has bypassed the middle class of people who may end up with the dishwashers or the rich depending on their virtue.
I like the expression "liberal privilege".
I thought that was well-written. Hooray for UW Grads!
This is awesomely idiotic. Thank you, thank you.
MayBee, the recent surge of "privilege" and "microracism" or whatever arguments are attempts to evade the reality that we have mostly escaped the historic bonds of isms.
Among the younger cohorts, this is not a majority white society, and a new elite is forming that is just excruciatingly painful to many. Cultural privilege now takes the form more of Ben Carson's mother than anything else, and it is an agonizing experience for those who are "left behind". Many of those "left behind" are individuals from the type of background that the writer possesses.
This truth we must drown in a sea of rhetoric.
At the same time that we have become a society that largely escaped its old fixed bigotries, we are a much more competitive society with a living standard that is declining on average, thus magnifying the benefit of a strong cultural background. If you are raised with a family focus on hard work, self control and achievement, you can do very well, but the simple straight paths no longer exist for many.
So you have disaffected people from all walks of life contributing to this.
Hagar said...
They give degrees in geography?
I took geography. It is incredibly PC. The world's geographic and human assets need to be managed by a ruling class of educated people. No introspection, of course. On literally the same page of the textbook, they disparaged the cultural hegemony of the West because it destroyed local cultures, and praised UN and NGO aid programs that paid governments based on how close they got to gender-equal education.
"Good work habits are so unfair to oppressed groups."
That, I fear, is part of the lesson the left is teaching children and not just "children of color."
In a very racist but probably authentic account of teaching in a black school, the teacher asks the children who have been complaining nonstop about whites, what they would do if all the white people disappeared.
"We be fucked" was the answer.
I have never met a person with drive who didn't do well in life, regardless of their beginnings.
I have been told, while working as a computer operator in college, not to do extra work, (I wrote programs for my boss to analyze network problems in order to learn R-Base.) because it made everybody look bad and they were just taking advantage of me. It led to my career. I found out I could create far more value for my employer, and so for myself, by identifying trends in network problems and fixing them for good, than by wandering over and resetting a piece of equipment when an alarm went off. If I had listened to those good Democrats, God knows where I would be.
If I had listened to those good Democrats, God knows where I would be.
A GS-11 in Silver Spring?
"I thought that was well-written."
What was your favorite sentence?
"A ragged line of mostly young, mostly white and entirely wasted souls stood before me and extended out the door."?
"A ragged line of mostly young, mostly white and entirely wasted souls stood before me and extended out the door."?
Hey! Just like my first job!
I wrote a song about it at the time:
"Tacos and beer,
tacos and beer,
the burnouts come crawling
for tacos and beer."
I don't remember the rest of it.
I think he should have tried the pimp business. It would make a great reality show. You know, watching him get beat up by his bitches.
A working life is for the most part a random collection of inconsequential events. The tedium helps to dull the aggravation and the futility. Every day you roll another heavy ball of shit up the mountain. Then you die. The writer is to be commended for finding the high moral purpose and drama in his working life. The greatest white privilege is to think that your working life is some kind of privilege.
Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger
Cheaper than food!
My first song I wrote was "I Had Brunch with Lorne Greene"
We were a terrible punk band named the Ted Bundy Machine.
The custom Prof. Althouse describes, that of working fast food jobs prior to graduation, died when we imported illegal aliens to do manual labor. I got a part time job writing FORTRAN code in the late 70's.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I have seen plenty of white men work worse jobs than this, and they were doing it for a living and to support families. They are at it today.
The writer hasn't had much of an education if he thinks this is the hardest employment available.
I agree with the above, that this slumming is entertainment for the upper class. Somewhat like Marie Antoinette and her ladies getting a thrill pretending to be peasants.
Around here, in California, there are plenty of white kids doing cafe and restaurant jobs. This is not obsolete.
Granted you will see more of it in smaller towns and towards the Central Valley.
@ William -
"A working life is for the most part a random collection of inconsequential events."
Guess that depends on what you choose to do for your working life. Or perhaps your working life has too little importance to you.
"The tedium helps to dull the aggravation and the futility."
You chose incorrectly.
I cut lawns at 12, caddied at 14, cut lawns again until I got a job at a warehouse at 18, then while in college: sandwich shop, liquor store, auto parts, foundry, grocery store deli, landscaping (best job I ever had), cell phone activations, and phone sales before finally moving to New York and becoming an editor, then lawyer, then back to editor.
Down and Out in Paris and London was my favorite book for years, I prefer Orwell's nonfiction to his fiction.
This essay is nice, the kid means well and has some courage. I don't think he deserves the criticism just because he hasn't broken free of the brainwashing yet. He may still.
JCC said...
@ William -
"A working life is for the most part a random collection of inconsequential events."
Guess that depends on what you choose to do for your working life. Or perhaps your working life has too little importance to you.
"The tedium helps to dull the aggravation and the futility."
You chose incorrectly.
Most people don't get to choose.
@ Terry -
"...but allows him (or her) to put career on the second or third tier while they concentrate on friends and family and living a happy life."
William, you should speak with Terry.
Orwell wrote after he had already done a stint as a colonial policeman, which was its own sort of dirty job. And he had had a good look at the daily miseries of Asia. He wasn't a bit naive going into Wigan Pier and Down and Out.
You know what white privilege really is? It's following the rules, obeying the law, working (or studying hard) making yourself helpful and useful, having manners and respect, being a patriot. You know, how we all (almost) used to be.
Here's a solution for all those progressive liberals who fret about their white privilege: Hey you guys, step up and volunteer to have your IQs lowered either through surgery or some concoction of drugs.
I loved Blimpy Burger. Was that a cash under the table job?
Funny. I was talking about kids like this yesterday. While he writes about privilege, this is really "I am too good for this kind of work." I couldn't wait to work and earn because while my parents could give me money, they didn't. If they did for clothes, then they had a say in what I wore. So I mowed lawns and babysat, said I was 15 at 13 to sweep hair at a salon and got my first paycheck job serving in a dining room at 15. Then there was Pizza Hut, Shoney's and an ice cream shop. All my friends did the same.
Does anyone notice how kids are uninterested in learning to drive too? I couldn't wait, but most I know are "meh".
I read somewhere last night and rolled my eyes...and I could not put my finger on it until just now...but the tone of the piece, and the twerp's attitude reminded me so much of everything I disliked about "Nickled and Dimed"... Any chance he is her kid?
Until the knees went,I used to be an action movie star. The pay was ok, but the hours were grueling. The stunt man did most of the dangerous work, but you had to be on the set all day and available for the close ups. And don't get me started on the nude scenes. So gratuitous. And Julie Christie was such a perfectionist that you had to spend all writhing around with her just to get the scene right. This kid doesn't know how good he's got it.
buwaya puti said...
I don't know about the rest of you, but I have seen plenty of white men work worse jobs than this, and they were doing it for a living and to support families. They are at it today.
I was told on by someone on this website that the trade of "plumber" was somehow menial and not worthy of anyone's respect. But a lot of people are plumbers and they seem to do alright., I don't think it's a matter of "white privilege" though.
@ Basil, 10:39AM
Slow clap from Coal City, right to you bud.
We were a terrible punk band named the Ted Bundy Machine.
How could you tell?
We were a terrible punk band named the Ted Bundy Machine.
isn't that something like being the shortest midget?
How could you tell?
We never made it big? ; )
"when did it become unusual for middle-class American kids, in the years before graduation from college, to work in fast-food joints?"
A very lefty friend told me that his son couldn't find work as a dishwasher or busboy in Manhattan because the restaurants exclusively hired illegal immigrants for those jobs. In the suburbs the story would be different, I think.
My first job at 14 was at Tater Junction at the mall. It was owned by a couple of Arabs that sexually harassed me and all the other girls. Then I got job at Big Star as a cashier. It was union so I was making 12 bucks an hour. Life was so easy for teenagers then.
My first job was as a busser at a TGIFridays. It was a great job!
Rusty - what? Plumbers make a lot of money and are in demand. If my kid was mechanically inclined, I would push them towards the trades/vocational training, not college,
when did it become unusual for middle-class American kids, in the years before graduation from college, to work in fast-food joints?
The "unusual" part of it is that he did it as a hobby, not because he needed the money.
That's what's so disgusting about it.
tim maguire said...
landscaping (best job I ever had),
Damn! Me too! Have never been healthier (physically and mentally) or happier than I was doing that job.
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