Privilege

First, white male privilege:

Many of my peers of color and their progressive allies said I had no right to offer my opinion because I am a male with white skin, so according to them I don’t know what it’s like to face challenges. I should just shut up and support them.

Yes, I do enjoy privilege — as an American. I live in the greatest country in the world with the most opportunity and fairness.

But my critics incorrectly assumed that my male whiteness gave me some special attributes that made my argument meaningless. I was just another dissenter whose critics racially condemned me without knowing anything about me.

My alleged privilege does not mean money grows on trees in my family. They have no idea that I worked part-time at a sandwich shop during high school to save money for college. This is in addition to taking mostly AP classes — prompting three-plus hours of homework a night. I also managed to squeeze in playing a varsity sport.

My alleged privilege did not allow me to skate through high school. My nights, weekends and nearly all of my spare time was spent either writing essays for AP classes, asking a customer if she’d like her sandwich “Mike’s Way,” or spending another four hours of my day on the golf course (with clubs I paid for myself after using my grandfather’s old hand-me-down set).

My alleged privilege did not make it any easier for me to get into a college after high school. Like my Asian-American peers, if you’re white, it’s well understood that your ACT or SAT scores must be much higher than peers of color. So I spent roughly 10 hours a week for over a month preparing for the ACT in addition to everything else I had going on.

My alleged privilege still wasn’t enough for me to afford to attend Chapman all four years. It simply was not financially feasible for my family and me, despite the fact that I was admitted as a freshman and had been offered a very generous, partial academic scholarship. Unlike my privileged critics at Chapman University, I was not able to attend the same school as them for all four years and live on campus.

So with my alleged privilege, I started at a community college my freshman year to save money...

Go read the whole thing.

I, too, didn't start out with much in life. Growing up I didn't do without as far as food, clothing, or shelter (although, for several years, 5 and then 6 of us lived in a 3BR, 1BA, 925 sf house), but I had some other disadvantages.  I guess they don't count, either, because I lack melanin?

But on to female privilege:

The way the news is these days: In the middle of a storm of disgusting national stories about male sexual predators, we get our own local countercase — a fired Dallas County assistant district attorney, sobbing on camera, offering every conceivable excuse in the book for her terrible behavior with a young Uber driver.

District Attorney Faith Johnson fired Jody Warner, 32, an experienced assistant prosecutor, on Monday after Johnson reviewed an audio recording of Warner drunkenly threatening and abusing 26-year-old Uber driver Shaun Platt over the weekend. In a press conference Tuesday, Warner set some kind of new world record for the least apologetic apology since Donald Trump did Access Hollywood...

And here’s the thing: The guy even gave you a break for being totally sloshed. Platt, the driver, told reporters he was sure you were a nice person when you were not drunk. Well, guess what. He was wrong.

You’re a worse person when you’re sober. Sober, you are mean-spirited and brutally callous, willing to slime a young man’s name by suggesting he’s a predator and doing it just to give yourself some wiggle room that you richly do not deserve...

I listened to the recording. In that state, I don’t know I would trust you to know the difference between a sexual predator and a stop sign. Isn’t that what we’re really talking about? Hey, maybe you saw a stop sign, and you thought it was coming on to you. I can’t know what was in your heart because your heart was pickled in alcohol.

But I do know this: A man in your position would not get away with your behavior at the press conference. He would not be able to stand in front of the cameras, wipe away tears and make all kinds of simpering little-boy-lost sexual suggestions about the woman he had just drunkenly and verbally abused on tape.

You abused your office that night, and it got way worse later when you did your press conference after you got canned. You exploited your status as a woman in a way that I suspect was cynical and calculated.

Hey, how many dozens and dozens of times have you stood up in court and appealed for somebody to get sent up the river while his loved ones sobbed in the pews? I bet you never shed a tear then. But when you were appealing your own plight, you couldn’t turn off the waterworks for five seconds? 

She only tried it because she thought it would work--and it probably would have, were it not for the audio recording.