My privilege
Among the signs of our time is a poster mounted by a local “educational” institution. (One must use this term very loosely, these days.) The headline reads: “Check Your Privilege,” and in case you don’t know what the long word means, a definition is offered:
“Privilege: Unearned access to social power based on membership in a dominant social group.”
Naturally, one then wonders what the author means by “unearned,” “access,” “social,” “power,” “membership,” “dominant,” and “group.” But that’s only a beginning.
The graphic design is professional, slick, expensive. Underneath this frankly Orwellian statement, we have a “black list” (quite literally, white type reversed from a black rectangle) resembling a Canadian election ballot. There are nine entries, which the viewer is invited to mentally check off:
[ ] Able-bodied physically and mentally
[ ] Access to education
[ ] Christian
[ ] Cisgender
[ ] Heterosexual
[ ] Male
[ ] Native English speaker
[ ] Canadian citizen (at birth)
[ ] White
The list pleased me greatly. I scored nine out of nine!
And here I’d thought I was just some impoverished old git, or rubby-dubby, drummed out of his hack-writing livelihood for sporting “politically incorrect” views, then pestered by leftwing cyberskunks trying to shut me out of the Internet, too.
I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to learn that I am superior to these people in every possible way.