"I'm not worried about whether I would be protected or not at said institution. I'm, you know, Privileged White Woman..."

Tim Walz’s daughter announced that she was accepted into a graduate school but has decided not to attend, stating that as a “privileged white woman,” she does not want to support institutions that fail to protect student protesters. 🤡 pic.twitter.com/F995YVHPrl

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) March 30, 2025

Nothing more privileged than choosing to do nothing. She's just doing nothing for a year. But that's okay. She's "not really in a rush."

I wonder which institution "said institution" was. It would help in understanding how much of a sacrifice this is. In some cases, an ambitious person, who can afford to take a year off, could do things to bolster her credentials and gain access to a more prestigious school. Why, this public declining of an offer is itself a credential! Especially in some fields... so I have to wonder what she majored in, undergrad. Sociology? I looked it up. It was indeed sociology! And a minor in women’s gender and sexuality studies. 

So, great viral video. Great audition tape. 

I remember when feminism involved seeing woman as the victim, but now we see young women contemptuous of that viewpoint and not worried about whether I would be protected. 

Tulsi weighs in.

Biden chose Harris as his VP because of the color of her skin and sex—not qualification. She's been a disaster. Now he promises to choose Supreme Court nominee on the same criteria. Identity politics is destroying our country.

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) January 31, 2022

This is such a weight to load onto Harris and Justice X, but Biden created this very obvious and easy opportunity, and since it is so predictable, he's fully responsible for it. He did what he did in pursuit of his own power, and he — a white male — is President of the United States because of it. That, too, is white privilege.

"I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools."

"I told myself that prioritizing being a 'good leftist' at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard... Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst....  The pandemic, and the school-reopening debate in particular, has thrown me into an ideological mid-life crisis, questioning all my prior political assumptions. I’m still attempting to hold onto the progressive label while calling out the policies I see as antithetical to it, but the longer fellow progressives support new school closures and other policies that restrict kids’ lives in order to allay the anxieties of adults, and have been shown to cause far more harm than benefit, the more alienated I feel."

From "How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics/I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home" by Rebecca Bodenheimer (Politico).

"Is calling something 'poetic' calling it a 'poem'?"

I find myself retorting to a reader, Nancy, who emailed me to say — in response to my calling something "a sincere effort at poetic polemic" — "Polemic, yes, but who would call that a poem?" 

At the link there's video of a performance called "White Privilege," which Slate called a "poem." I can see that I repeated that word, "poem," before my sentence that began with "I think": "I think it's a sincere effort at poetic polemic." I know I wrote "poetic polemic" to nudge the reader to question whether something that's too polemical deserves to be considered poetry. 

But, speaking of "White Privilege," isn't it white-privilege-y to question whether this set of words is a poem? I'm resisting googling "What is a poem?" but I do remember watching the "Master Class" course with Billy Collins teaching reading and writing poetry, so let me give you this from the old white man:

 

"No one else could have written that. This voice is just yours, and yours alone."

ADDED: I went back to the email to tell Nancy: "I made a poem post out of this."

And I see that Nancy has written back to me: "She calls it a poem." 

"She" is the reciter of "White Privilege," who I see I haven't yet dignified with a naming in this post, so let me say, it's Kyla Jenee Lacey.

"Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin."

"I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world. Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College. The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said 'I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.' I was the only person in the room to abstain. Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of 'white fragility.' They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a 'power play.' In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues." 

Writes Jodi Shaw, resigning from her staff position at Smith College, quoted at "Whistleblower at Smith College Resigns Over Racism Jodi Shaw made less in a year than the cost of tuition. She was offered a settlement, but turned it down. Here's why" (bariweiss.substack).

"You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s going to happen. It doesn’t take you 10 minutes and it doesn’t take you six weeks. It’s like, whoa. OK. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second."

Said Trump to Bob Woodward, using an analogy to explain how he felt about Kim Jong-Un, quoted in "Trump Attacked Generals as Weak and Too Focused on Allies, Woodward’s Book Says/The journalist Bob Woodward’s 'Rage,' which will be released next week, recounts tense conflicts between the president and his senior leaders" (NYT).

Any actual bombshells in Bob's new book? Well, we hear that according to his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, Trump said "My fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals." And he "called the United States military 'suckers' for paying extensive costs to protect South Korea."

And former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said: "When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit."

And Woodward talked to Trump and tried to get him to say something about race other than that a good economy is good for black people:

When Mr. Woodward pointed out that both he and Mr. Trump were “white, privileged,” and asked if Mr. Trump could see that they both have to “work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country,” Mr. Trump replied, “No,” and added, “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

The NYT characterizes that as a failure to be "reflective."

"This girl should be the poster child for white privilege... I wonder how her rich parents feel about their daughter. How would they feel if they graffitied their townhouse?"

Said a cop quoted in "Wealthy NYC woman busted in BLM rampage" about the arrest of "Clara Kraebber, 20... one of eight people arrested Friday night after a roiling, three-hour rampage... from Foley Square up to 24th Street.... 'Every city, every town, burn the precinct to the ground!' the group chanted as it moved up Lafayette Street while busting the plate glass facades of banks, Starbucks and Duane-Reades."

It's not surprising that privileged young white women would get caught up in Black Lives Matter. It's a classic theme. Haven't you read "American Pastoral"? Don't you remember Patty Hearst? Haven't you looked at the photos of who's out rampaging on the streets this year?

Here's my teaser line for a movie about a young white woman in the BLM protests of 2020: Sometimes protesting against white privilege is the most white-privileged thing you can do.

I just encountered a perfect example of white privilege in real life, here in Madison, Wisconsin.

Today, I saw a UW University cop confronting a young white guy who had a bike on the trail in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve — where there are no bikes allowed. The guy had become really confrontational — in the style of a person who viewed the police as illegitimate — but then, and at one point, he said: "This is an $8,000 fucking mountain bike — do you think I have a warrant due?"

Do white women command special care? — I wondered as I got snagged on Jonathan Turley's typo.

I'm reading Turley's blog post about the 2 Madison women who were arrested in the attack on state senator Tim Carpenter.

What is interesting is that the punitive measures are not just criminal charges against the women. [Samantha R. Hamer, 26] is particularly likely to suffer immediate employment consequences as a teacher. She is a specialist in helping kids with “social-emotional needs” and “behavioral issues.”... According to reports, Hamer works as a licensed social worker for the Mount Horeb School District in suburban Madison and [Kerida E. O’Reilly, 33] is a licensed physical therapist in Madison with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy program from Marquette University....

Both women however also fall under licensing authority of the Department of Safety and Professional Services, which will now review their licenses for possible revocation. One issue may be whether the concussion is treated as “serious” or “great” bodily harm under the statute....

Given the serious injury to the senator and the evidence that he did nothing to provoke the assault, this would seem a care almost certain to be handled in a plea agreement if prosecutors are in the bargaining mood....

It's obvious to me now that Turley meant to write, "this would seem a case," but I watched myself in real time getting caught up in the word "care" and trying to understand it. Who knows when a typo is a Freudian slip?

A Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is an error in speech, memory, or physical action that occurs due to the interference of an unconscious subdued wish or internal train of thought. The concept is part of classical psychoanalysis. Classical examples involve slips of the tongue, but psychoanalytic theory also embraces misreadings, mishearings, mistypings, temporary forgettings, and the mislaying and losing of objects.

Whether Turley was revealing what he really felt or not, his typo made me think about the ideas of caring that could have been flowing about in the mind of the typist. The conscious, scrupulous Turley would not come out and say that these 2 women matter more than other people.

They are educated in the helping professions! They have so much to give! They made an unfortunate decision in a moment of weakness and surely we don't want to deprive society of all they have to give! We need to care about them because they care! They are carers in caring professions! They cared about social justice, so they were out on the street caring with other carers, and, yes, they cared too much in that instant about whether Senator Carpenter might hurt their cause — their caring cause —but in the grand scheme of caring we should care that the carers could be prevented from giving us all the care they embody.

And that's why the slogan is Black Lives Matter.

"[W]hen things get real — really murderous, really tragic, really violent or aggressive — my white, liberal, educated friends already know what to do. What they do is read."

"And talk about their reading. What they do is listen. And talk about how they listened. What they do is never enough. This isn’t the time to circle up with other white people and discuss black pain in the abstract; it’s the time to acknowledge and examine the pain they’ve personally caused. Black people live and die every day under the burdens of a racism more insidious than the current virus that’s also disproportionately killing us. And yet white people tend to take a slow route to meaningful activism, locked in familiar patterns, seemingly uninterested in really advancing progress. Theirs is still a world of signs and signaling, where actions like joining book clubs — often based in some 'meaningfully curated' readings that are probably easy to name: 'White Fragility,' 'How to Be an Anti-Racist,' 'Between the World and Me,' maybe even 'All About Love' — take precedence.... [In social media] people write long posts about the need to examine white privilege, to 'name white supremacy,' and to either proudly denounce family members or call them in to conversations.... ... I know what happens next. In a handful of Sundays, my social media feeds will no longer have my white allies 'This'-ing, or unpacking their whiteness or privilege, or nudging their kids to put down their tablets and march. Their book clubs will do what all book clubs do: devolve into routine reschedulings and cancellations; turn into collective apologies for not doing the reading or meta-conversations about what everyone should pretend to read next; finally become occasional opportunities to catch up over wine...."

From "When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs/I’m caught in a time loop where my white friends and acquaintances perform the same pieties over and over again" by Tre Johnson (WaPo). If you're wondering what, in Johnson's view, is the right response, I can pick out the 2 words where he says it, and when you see them, you may think it's no wonder white people don't just snap to it and do what needs to be done: "dismantle systems."

ADDED: I read the top few highest-rated comments at the link, and they were all taking issue with Johnson's stereotyping of white people. What percentage of white people react to racial strife by cuddling up in book clubs murmuring about "White Fragility" and "Between the World and Me"?

What would we do without sociologists?

From "The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans/Recent lawsuits suggesting reverse discrimination have aligned the interest of white Americans and Asian Americans, raising complex questions about identity and privilege" by Iris Kuo (The Atlantic):

This alignment of certain Asians with whites evokes historical instances of ethnic groups migrating from minority status to becoming part of the majority racial group. Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon: “whitening.” It refers to the way the white race has expanded over time to swallow up those previously considered non-whites, such as people of Irish, Italian, and Jewish heritage. In the next wave of whitening, some sociologists have theorized, Asians and Latinos could begin to vanish into whiteness, as some assimilate culturally into white norms and culture, and become treated and seen by whites as fellow whites. “The idea of who is white and which groups belong and don’t belong to it has been malleable and has changed. It is different across place and time,” Jonathan Warren, a University of Washington sociology professor who has written about whitening, told me....

I’ve always been proud of my Taiwanese roots, but lately, I’ve started to question how much of my culture I’ve voluntarily released in the effort to belong in a country dominated by white people. American society is built around what white people like and don’t like. They decide which foreign foods are “in” (bubble tea, burritos) and what’s “gross” or “exotic” (menudo, say, or marinated pig ears). American standards for acceptable behavior—the way people talk, the language they use, the food they eat in a mainstream company—are carefully tailored to the tastes of white people. It makes sense. White people run the country and the vast majority of its institutions. They hold most of the wealth. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that some Asian-Americans are aligning themselves with white people when it comes to university admissions. Appealing to white taste, after all, is a baseline requirement for advancement. But at what price?

I don't think it's fair to say that the lawsuit is "some Asian-Americans... aligning themselves with white people." The plaintiffs are showing that Asian-Americans are, because of race, being treated worse than white people. And they're hearing the argument that for them to succeed will require other non-whites to lose out. So why don't they back off and accept the worse treatment? Just be nice.

Which actually, ironically, sounds like a demand that they act white.

How to lose your job in higher education: Speak freely and cause offense... about white privilege.

1. The University of Delaware is declining to rehire the "part-time professor" Katherine Dettwyler who wrote on Facebook (and later deleted): "Is it wrong of me to think that Otto Warmbier got exactly what he deserved... His parents ultimately are to blame for his growing up thinking he could get away with whatever he wanted. Maybe in the US, where young, white, rich, clueless white males routinely get away with raping women. Not so much in North Korea. And of course, it's Ottos' parents who will pay the price for the rest of their lives." She spoke of privilege, perhaps relying, ironically, on the privilege of freedom of speech.

2. Essex County College fires adjunct professor Lisa Durden after she defended a blacks-only Black Lives Matter event (on Tucker Carlson's show). She said: "What I say to that is, boo hoo hoo... You white people are angry because you couldn’t use your white-privilege card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter all-black Memorial Day celebration." She said white people have had "white days forever," and this was one day when black people were saying "stay your asses out... We want to celebrate today. We don’t want anybody going against us today."

Both women voiced a critique of "white privilege." Is it evidence of white privilege that this is the offense that gets you fired? I observe that both of them spoke clearly and with edge but were inviting or participating in dialogue.

Dettwyler posed a question, beginning "Is it wrong of me...?" Are people so afraid to have that conversation? Yes, it was a time of overflowing empathy for the unfortunate man and his grieving family, but Dettwyler wasn't showing up to yell at Warmbier's funeral. She was showing her thoughts on Facebook and exposing an issue that some people might want to discuss, even if others want to slam the door on that line of inquiry.

Lisa Durden had the nerve to go on Tucker Carlson's show, where guests must know they are going to be hounded. Carlson had the easy side of the debate: Racial discrimination is bad. And Durden gamely jousted: The traditionally discriminated-against group is justified promoting and participating in a one-race festivity; can't you white people back off for one day and give us that?

Dettwyler and Durden should not have lost their jobs over this.

"Over and over grandparents have whispered to me, 'Don’t use our name, but we bought their house' or 'We pay their rent.'"

Writes the "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl in a NYT op-ed about grandparenting.

[M]y generation is spending more money on our grandchildren, 64 percent more than grandparents did just 10 years ago.... One reason we pioneers have become the family piggy bank is a generational inversion: It used to be that the middle-aged took care of their elderly parents; more and more it’s the other way round....

Many of us want a second chance. As working mothers, we carried around bales of guilt because we felt (or were made to feel) we weren’t there enough for our kids. We know what we missed out on, so we’re making up for it by pouring not just money but also time into our grandchildren. My daughter likes to remind me how much I loathed taking her to the park. As a workaholic reporter in Washington covering the White House, I would push her on a swing and read a research paper at the same time. Today I love taking my granddaughters to the park, playing tea party, sitting on the floor with them coloring. My attention is all theirs.

Most of the grandparents I know are like me: We’ll do anything to hold those babies. We’re the babysitters who beg to come over, an offer that’s hard to refuse since we don’t charge a dime....

Stahl purports to love this, but she doesn't mention that she is —though we know, and it's obvious — quite rich. It's easy for her and her friends — the "Don’t use our name, but we bought their house" people — to make up for the income insecurity of the younger generation. But what about more average aging boomers? Stahl blithely describes their financial well-being like this: "Grandparents get their monthly Social Security checks; many have paid off their mortgage; and large numbers remain on the job, earning money."

I've read so many articles over the years about Baby Boomer women who are burdened with working, taking care of their children, and taking care of their aging parents. Now that we are older, we're still working, taking care of our aging self, still taking care of our children, and — if we're lucky enough to have any — taking care of our grandchildren. But, Stahl tells us, this is wonderful, because we must have extra money and time, and we must have developed a taste for caregiving, even if we were the sort who "loathed taking [our own children] to the park."

Stahl acts like she's laying down her "bales of guilt," but isn't she imposing guilt on her fellow boomers? Yikes! I was supposed to pay their rent?! I shouldn't have asked for tender care; I was supposed to be giving it? No attention for me; my attention is supposed to be all theirs?

And what's with "bales of guilt"? "Ol' Man River" starts playing in my head.

You an'me, we sweat an' strain,
Body all achin' an' rack'd wid pain,
Tote dat barge!
Lif' dat bale!

A cotton bale weighs 500 pounds. It's lift that bale, singular. Not bales. Even that poor, suffering African American stevedore only lifted one bale at a time. And he had to tote that barge. I'm sure Lesley totes barges. I'm being totes a jerk here now, I know. But making fun of Lesley Stahl is child's play. It's a tea party. It's sitting on the floor coloring.

"Must I first define 'privilege' in its current use, or should I imagine that if you’ve reached this paragraph, you’re already among the cognoscenti?"

"As it is known today and discussed in progressive circles, a jurisdiction Bovy writes about with the knowing weariness that comes with longtime residence, privilege is not just about having special advantages available only to the few, but it is also about those advantages that are entirely unearned, and usually ones of which the privileged party is blissfully unaware or, even better, somewhat defensive."

Paragraph 4 of "The last thing on ‘privilege’ you’ll ever need to read/A new book argues that accusing people of unearned advantages does nothing to address inequality — and may only make things worse," a review by Carlos Lozada (in WaPo) of the book "The Perils of 'Privilege': Why Injustice Can’t Be Solved by Accusing Others of Advantage," by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who, according to Lozada seems to have "scoured the Internet for every overwrought think piece and self-indulgent personal essay about privilege" and "read all of them." She's even "read the comments sections, those swamps of vitriol and condescension that no one is ever supposed to even contemplate or speak of, let alone wade into."

I know you may never click through, since it's in WaPo, and there's a paywall, so let me tell you that there's a lot more of Lozada displaying his exasperation that anyone would do research into understanding what people are talking about on the internet. Bovy herself worried that there might be a problem with a "microhistory" of some phenomenon as it played out on the internet,* and Lozada — noting Bovy's interest in seeing more variety in what's written about economics and inequality — gives her the send-off:

We could, of course, just start reading something else, too. Not all the waters out there are so swampy.

Yeah, stick to mainstream media like The Washington Post where we keep the opinion tidied up and presentable. Speaking of privilege! It seems to me that Lozada is the privileged party... blissfully unaware or... somewhat defensive. Why is anyone wading the swamps of vitriol and condescension, when we've got these nice, clean newspapers with everything laid out for you?
_____________________

* But I think there's an excellent chance that this is exactly the kind of research historians will need to be doing. This is public discourse preserved. It will not be enough to study what the big newspapers were saying at the time. People were talking and leaving their discussions in writing. Lozado would like to reject all this discussion as illegitimate — a swamp. He'd like to say: That's not the real public discussion. The people who actually matter were somewhere else, and they did not put their thoughts in writing. These are not real people in here talking. Ignore them. They don't matter.

It's a bit like the way Trump voters are portrayed as people whose ideas and opinions can't possibly matter. We've seen that they matter, whether the coastal elites in mainstream media like it or not. And historians can act aloof and swampophobic, but I don't think that will play out any better than the "Great Man" approach that once kept historians above lowly things.

There's what the NYT calls an "ethnic divide" between white and Asian-Americans in "a high-achieving school district" in New Jersey.

The divide is between white parents and Asian-American parents. The headline says "ethnic divide," though the article never refers to ethnicity. The terminology in the article is race:

A packed Board of Education meeting this month at Grover Middle School in West Windsor, N.J., where a districtwide debate that often splits along racial lines is underway about the pressure put on students there to succeed....

[I]nstead of bringing families together, [the principal's] letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines....

Not all public opinion has fallen along racial lines...

I guess a headline saying that a school district was divided along racial lines would get readers hot to see another one of the many stories the Times runs about divisions between black and white people. There are so many of those that I doubt that the NYT wants to dial back the racial divisiveness. Maybe they just didn't want to disappoint readers who hunger for more black-versus-white material.

Anyway, this is a fascinating conflict, with white parents put out that the Asian-American kids are upping the competition. Immigrants from China, India, and Korea have moved to the school district, near Princeton, in large numbers precisely to get their kids into the very best, high level schools. The Asian-American kids are now the distinct majority in the schools — 65%. These families were big supporters of advanced mathematics, instrumental music, and maximizing honors and Advanced Placement credits.

The white parents are agonizing about all the stress on their kids, and the school superintendent, David Aderhold, is responding to them, dialing back the program in what the Asian-American parents tend to see as "dumbing down" and "anti-intellectual."  Aderhold puts his reforms in terms of prevention of mental illness and suicide. He speaks of "a holistic, 'whole child' approach... that respects 'social-emotional development' and 'deep and meaningful learning.'"

Both Asian-American and white families say the tension between the two groups has grown steadily over the past few years, as the number of Asian families has risen. But the division has become more obvious in recent months as Dr. Aderhold has made changes, including no-homework nights, an end to high school midterms and finals, and a “right to squeak” initiative that made it easier to participate in the music program.

So the white people are not the majority nor are they arguing for meritocracy... and yet they seem to be winning. They are winning with the argument that it's not good to have too much winning when they are not the ones doing the winning.

This story made me want to reread Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 article "Getting In/The social logic of Ivy League admissions":

"The 2015 Man Booker prize winner Marlon James has slammed the publishing world, saying authors of colour too often 'pander to white women' to sell books..."

"... and that he could have been published more often if he had written 'middle-style prose and private ennui.'"

At a sold-out Guardian event on Friday night, James said publishers too often sought fiction that “panders to that archetype of the white woman, that long-suffering, astringent prose set in suburbia. You know, ‘older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life’.”...

You know, there are a lot of us white women who don't want to read that kind of crap either, but I guess we have the benefit of the feeling of being the nexus of pandering, even when we don't like what's served.

By the way, let me ask — in a long-suffering, astringent way — Is choosing an "author of colour" for the Man Booker prize another way of pandering to white women?

A graduate student talking about "white privilege" sounds like "a Calvinist explaining the T in TULIP."

In "Politically Correct Holy Rollers: The New Campus Revival," Helen Andrews writes:

Not since environmentalism has the prevailing variety of leftism more closely resembled a religion. John McWhorter calls it Antiracism — “it seriously merits capitalization at this point” — and notes that it has its own clergy in such men as Charles Blow and Ta-Nehisi Coates (friendly vicar and hellfire preacher, respectively). Casting his net more widely to include all talk of “privilege,” from male to cisgender, essayist Joseph Bottum has observed that the concept is functionally equivalent to original sin. “I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose every day to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way,” said a graduate student whom Bottum was able to locate, sounding for all the world like a Calvinist explaining the T in TULIP.

TULIP is an acronym for the 5 points of Calvinism. The T is:

"Total depravity," also called "total inability," asserts that as a consequence of the fall of man into sin, every person is enslaved to sin. People are not by nature inclined to love God but rather to serve their own interests and to reject the rule of God. Thus, all people by their own faculties are morally unable to choose to follow God and be saved because they are unwilling to do so out of the necessity of their own natures. (The term "total" in this context refers to sin affecting every part of a person, not that every person is as evil as they could be). This doctrine is derived from Augustine's explanation of Original Sin. While the phrases "totally depraved" and "utterly perverse" were used by Calvin, what was meant was the inability to save oneself from sin rather than being absent of goodness.

If the explanations of "white privilege" and "total depravity" sound alike, what does that mean? 1. Those who speak in these terms no longer think independently but have surrendered their minds to compulsory doctrine which they strive to incant correctly. 2. Individuals may think independently and find value in recognizing that they have a selfish interest in seeing their usual way of life as normal and appropriate and choose to rouse themselves to the challenge to take a different perspective.  If #2 is correct, why would that happen? 1. They visualize a fearsome authority commanding that the different perspective be taken. 2. They've decided on their own to search for the truth. 3. It can't happen, because it's inherent in the Calvinist doctrine that the individual is incapable of independently choosing to move outside of the depravity that is total.

"Whiteness studies" — college courses with titles like "The Problem of Whiteness."

"At some universities, there are classes dedicated to understanding the notions of whiteness, white supremacy and what the field’s proponents see as the quiet racism of white people," writes Yanan Wang in The Washington Post.

The syllabus [for the Arizona State University course called "The Problem of Whiteness"] described “Critical Whiteness Studies” as a field “concerned with dismantling white supremacy in part by understanding how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced.”....

“White supremacy makes it so that white people can’t see the world they have created,” [the professor Lee] Bebout told The Washington Post. It’s a culture so pervasive that living in it, subscribing to it and upholding it feel as natural to most Americans as breathing air....

Bebout, who is white, said he was promptly attacked for promoting discrimination against white people. Fliers appeared around his neighborhood which featured a photo of him and the declaration that he was “anti-white.”...

The word problem (in the course title) seems intended to provoke, but the actual course may very well have intellectual heft worthy of college-level study. But if universities are dedicated to creating a welcoming climate and overcoming racial strife, they might want to use less antagonistic sounding titles. If, on the other hand, universities want vibrant speech on campus and expect students to handle racial provocation, "The Problem of Whiteness" is no problem at all.

[Bebout] said the class is not a critique of white individuals, per se, but rather whiteness as a form of institutional racism, where the experiences of people of color are rarely validated. In Bebout’s words, this centers around the conviction that “my experience as a white male should be the experience of everybody else, and there is something dysfunctional about them if they don’t see the world in the way that I do.”

Don't let the "my" confuse you. He doesn't mean himself. He's talking about the subjectivity of others.

It can be challenging to teach the shift in perspective that this theory requires.

That's a red flag: There's a required perspective. [OR: Is there?]

While anti-racist in its intent, whiteness studies can often yield counterproductive outcomes.

“We all think of ourselves as decent people,” [said Terrance MacMullan, a philosophy of race professor at Eastern Washington University], “so it’s very disconcerting to see yourself as someone who benefits from systemic racism.... One problem inherent in whiteness studies is that it might become a white pity party.... Instead of talking about how whiteness is problematic, it becomes about the problems of white people.”

That's making it sound as though it's built into the course that you must think a particular way, and you're doing it wrong if you disagree. The professor is strongly dedicated to controlling what the students make of the material they are presented with. It's inherent in the nature of the course that the professor would have to feel that way. It's the problem of The Problem of Whiteness.

ADDED: A "Problem of Whiteness"-type course will have some special problems, I would think, if the university has a race and ethnic studies requirement for college students. I don't think the Arizona State University has such a requirement, but there is a requirement for undergraduates at my university.

Pushback against white-privileged hipsters and their crocheted mural is "spiraling out of control" in Bushwick.

A flea market and some hipster crochet glued onto the side of a building that's owned by one of the pre-gentrification residents of the neighborhood.

In other Brooklyn gentrification news, there's "White Guy Who 'Settled' Downtown Brooklyn Tells Us Why He Lashed Out At Stroller Couple":

"When I came down here, Myrtle Avenue here, it was abandoned. When I used to go down to the liquor store down there, the black people would all run, because they thought I was a cop! So when I tell you I’m having a fight about white privilege with this man, I’m slightly guilty because I’m moving in to gentrify a neighborhood, except I’m the first one here when nobody wants to live here."

"In what is bound to be the most quoted passage from the book, you write that you watched the smoldering towers of 9/11 with a cold heart."

"At the time you felt the police and firefighters who died 'were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.' You obviously do not mean that literally today (sometimes in your phrasing you seem determined to be misunderstood). You are illustrating the perspective born of the rage 'that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.' I read this all like a slap and a revelation. I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in. But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?"

David Brooks addresses Ta-Nehisi Coates. The book under discussion is "Between the World and Me."