May 06, 2014

Educating Princeton's privileged kid

Tal Fortgang the white privileged Princeton freshman gets schooled about his advantages:

To the Princeton Privileged Kid






We don’t need your apology, Princeton kid

Tal Fortgang wrote an essay saying he's not sorry for being male and white--but who asked him to be?

By Mary Elizabeth Williams
Tal Fortgang would like you to know he’s not sorry. Sounds fine to me, because I don’t remember anyone saying they wanted a mea culpa anyway.

In an April essay for the Princeton Tory that was republished last week in Time, the Ivy League freshman proved yet again why his university leads the nation in trolly op-eds by declaring authoritatively, “I have checked my privilege. I apologize for nothing.” Just what the world needs—more unrepentant affluent people. Unsurprisingly, the notion of a white male from an expensive school, a young man who likely has not personally experienced much racism and sexism in his life, using his already privileged platform to announce to the world that he disputes “that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies,” was met with a mix of derisive laughter, fuming rage and well-articulated rebuttals.

Fortgang, a man for whom high school graduation is still a recent memory, is already world-weary of “the phrase, handed down by my moral superiors,” that he check his privilege. In his essay, Fortgang goes on to do just that, and decides he’s totally fine with his privilege, a privilege dearly paid for by the grit of his great-grandparents and grandparents, and the hard work of his father. He further mentions, by the way, “everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life,” with no specifics. His piece has exactly the combination of naiveté and obnoxiousness you’d expect from a cocky white kid who pens essays that use the word “Weltanschauung.”

Right-wing wunderkind syndrome: What’s really behind the popularity of Tal Fortgang?

A Princeton freshman pens a defense of white privilege and gets famous. But why him? And why now?

By Peter Finocchiaro
One thing that is abundantly clear from reading Fortgang’s essay is that he is, yes, a freshman in college. There’s a guilelessness at the core of his argument—that he will not apologize for his privilege, because his privilege is awesome—that makes loads more sense when you consider that only a few short months ago he was living at home with his parents. His life experience, one presumes, is fairly limited. So in that sense, he doesn’t really know any better.

This isn’t to say that Fortgang’s ignorance is justified. (Better writers than myself have already explained why it’s a huge, and emblematic, deficiency.) However, it is to say that Tal Fortgang is a young guy with, by all appearances, a comfortable and insular upbringing. And his relative dearth of empathy can at least partially be explained by that very fact.

Should he know better? Yes, of course. And all the many angry rebuttals are a necessary counterpoint. But again, there’s nothing new about the argument he’s making or the obstinate privilege he extols. He is an ignorant 19-year-old white guy from Westchester, and in that way he is wholly unremarkable.

Which begs the question: Why is Tal Fortgang a thing in the first place? Why did an essay he published in the Princeton Tory suddenly become a national news story? Why was it republished by Time magazine? People have been writing regrettable college op-eds since the beginning of time. So why him? And why now?
The answer:While Fortgang insists in his essay that “my appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story,” it turns out that—where his current popularity is concerned—he actually has it backwards. His meteoric rise to fame owes entirely to his biographical data. His youth is the entire point.

What really draws conservatives to Fortgang is an idea about what young people like him represent—that they don’t need to reassess their ideological assumptions on everything from gay marriage and immigration to inequality and systemic racism; that their attitudes actually aren’t out of touch with the times; that there’s still a future for their paleolithic worldview, because there are young people to carry that torch.
Related topics

The 5 most regrettable student op-eds

Tal Fortgang is not the first undergrad to pen a polemic that will surely haunt him for many years to come

Princeton, check your privilege (or at least your PR strategy)

From Susan Patton to Tal Fortgang--what is going on at Princeton?

Comment:  I posted the following in Facebook:

I'm a self-made man if you don't count the million dollars of housing, education, and healthcare I received.

That's not even hyperbole. I figure I got about a million dollars' worth of benefits in those areas over someone who's poor.

For more on white privilege, see Bill O'Reilly's White Privilege and Educating DMarks About Systemic Racism.

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