Excerpt:

Young Lord Stancil here is a reliable instrument for unwittingly illustrating the internal contradictions of contemporary social justice politics. In theory, the concept of privilege checking is inherently introspective - it’s a way for the individual to ask him- or herself whether his or her perspective is impacted by privilege in such a way as to cloud judgment or create prejudice. That probably sounds unobjectionable, and (again in theory) it more or less is. The concept of “privilege” is typically abstracted so much as to be useless, but looking at your own perspective and what influences it is a useful exercise.

So what’s the issue? Look at Stancil here: what is introspective for him in these tweets? Where is his introspection? If privilege checking is a self-critical exercise, where is the self-criticism here? There’s literally none to be found, just like there’s none in anything Stancil ever says about social justice issues. He’s a man who has never met an intersectional analysis he could not bend into an advertisement for himself. I suppose we’re meant to presume that he’s been busily doing all of “the work” in the background, but as a public figure he exists in a state of total and ceaseless certainty about everything, all the time. What’s so wild here is that he parrots the standard-issue line that race and gender color people’s perspectives, but he appears totally incurious about how his white maleness influences his own performance of being an ally. Because people of his type are incapable of second-order thinking, he can’t ask himself if there’s more than one way to be influenced by your race and gender. Specifically, he’s a guy who’ll never wonder whether the way that he’s bent the critique of white men into a tool to glorify himself might not be, itself, an expression of white male privilege. This was the whole point about Good White Men: they have critiques of white men that they think are quite cutting, but they inevitably exempt themselves from those critiques in effect if not explicitly, which perversely means that complaining about white men advances their careers and interests as white men. I find that gross.

This is of course much greater than Stancil and greater even than privilege checking: modern identity politics contains a vast set of discursive tools that are meant to prompt self-critique but which are used, in practice, for the valorization of the individuals who most aggressively and shamelessly beat the drum. The person who would go on Tumblr to declare their white privilege would be aping a self-flagellating act, but would do so knowing full well that in the contrast they were drawing with peers, they were in fact participating in self-celebration. He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted. And this is why privilege checking, in practice, is horseshit. I did six years in grad school in the humanities. Trust me: though conversations about failing to check one’s privilege grew like crabgrass, none of those conversations were inwardly focused. They were all inevitably about how some other person didn’t perform the necessary ablutions. Whatever theoretical value privilege checking might have collapses under the weight of its use as a tool for competing white people to assert greater virtue. If Stancil actually believed in the concept of privilege checking, and had integrity, he’d check his own privilege in private and then shut the fuck up about it. That would be actual introspection! Instead it’s all just part of his sales job.

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