The Liberal Concept of Privilege Is Backwards and Hypocritical

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”

– Matthew 7:3

I am overweight and I can attest to the fact that it’s not a lot of fun. People, often times unfairly I think, consider you to be weak-willed and lazy if you’re obese. You don’t necessarily want to go swimming or get to buy the most stylish clothes. Riding on an airplane? It really sucks. You already knew that, but it especially sucks if you’re overweight.

That’s why this video about “thin privilege” caught my eye.

Michaela on what thin privilege is and how it impacts her life…

Huge thanks to @cardiffornia_ pic.twitter.com/UCe9pRbIP1

— BBC Sesh (@bbcsesh) February 6, 2019

I love how everyone’s personal problems have now been turned around so that the real issue is supposed to be everyone else. In this case, the issue isn’t that SHE FEELS uncomfortable being fat and needs to change that or deal with it; the real problem is other people’s “thin privilege.”

In other words, she’s making her problem everyone else’s problem.

I hate to say it, but I can tell you from hard experience that overweight people are not particularly sympathetic figures in our society. So, let’s up our game a bit with transsexuals, a group of people having a similar problem to the woman in the video.

Transsexuals have a problem. They’re mentally ill and believe that they’re the opposite sex. Like depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other types of mental illness, that’s a terrible thing that has a negative impact on their lives. But in this case, their problem has been made into EVERYONE ELSE’S PROBLEM. We have men being allowed to go to the bathroom with women, men competing against women in sporting events, colleges and workplaces penalizing people for correctly noting that men are men instead of the new gender they’ve taken on. In fact, we now have people being taken to JAIL for “deadnaming,” which means they correctly noted the name and gender of the transsexual instead of using the new name and false new gender they currently wish to be identified as.

This is quite interesting, in that when you look up transsexual privilege, it’s almost entirely undiscussed other than with articles that are variations of things like, “100 Women: ‘I transitioned and lost my male privilege’” or “Do Trans Women Have Male Privilege?” This seems rather remarkable given that you could make a decent argument that in many ways, THE MOST PRIVILEGED PEOPLE in American society are transsexuals.

When you look at what is decried as “privilege” on the Left, you inevitably find this kind of heavily skewed reasoning. They’re willing to take a flying leap across the Grand Canyon to grab at some extremely weak example of supposed privilege held by a group they don’t particularly like, but they can’t see an example as big as a billboard staring them right in the face.

For example, if you want to talk about “white privilege,” I would certainly agree that there are a few people at the very top of the pyramid who have life wired in a way that most of us don’t. Money practically falls into their pockets; their kids get into the best schools and they have far more opportunities to succeed than the rest of us. I’m talking about families with names like Bush, Kennedy, Clinton, Gore, Trump, Zuckerberg, Rockefeller, and Rothschild. Granted, another name that could fairly be added to that list at this point is Obama, but percentage-wise, there are fewer minorities in that exclusive club than you would expect given their percentage of the population. But, keep in mind, we’re talking about a teeny, tiny percentage of the population here. Lump in the well-connected political families, the people worth more than $50 million, and a few other people who somehow took a bite of the golden apple in their lives and you’re still talking about less than one percent of the population. When you’re talking about “white privilege” or even “male privilege” in a meaningful sense, these are the people you’re really talking about.

When you get away from those guys and get to West Virginia coal miner Joe Smith or Target assistant manager Jim Johnson, pretty much all the “privilege” worth having is gone. Sure, you can still take those flying leaps across the Grand Canyon and say that Joe and Jim benefit because there are a lot of white people on magazine covers or they were fortunate enough to hear more about successful people of their race in school, but that’s weak tea compared to privileges that the average black Americans get. For example, no one would care about Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown if they were white. If a black man and a white one get into a dispute, no one automatically assumes that the whole problem is that the black man is a racist. Nobody hires white people for the sake of “diversity” or has to go through all sorts of extra documentation to fire them out of fear of a discrimination suit. There are an awful lot of uninteresting black liberals on cable news who have nothing of value or interest to say and are only on TV because they’re willing to hurl insults and accusations of racism at white people.

You can go on and on with this, point being that if you call a particular group “privileged,” it’s worth asking, “In comparison to what?” If you’re a white or Asian kid who doesn’t get into the college of his choice while a black or Hispanic student with less impressive grades gets in because of his skin color, I think it’s fair to question who’s really privileged. I know a kid whose mom is white and his dad is Hispanic. He considers himself to be Caucasian. I had a conversation with him at the behest of his mom and told him that until he gets a scholarship, he is Hispanic and then after he gets out of school, he can consider himself to be as Caucasian as he wants to be. So, which race is really privileged in that situation? Why did Elizabeth Warren rather famously lie about being an Indian if white people have so much privilege? It’s because Native Americans have privileges Caucasians don’t.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about straight, gay and transsexual, white, black, Hispanic and Asian, Christian or Muslim, male or female – the people obsessing over privilege inevitably end up engaging in enormous hypocrisy that doesn’t go unnoticed by the people they’re trying to falsely turn into victimizers of the supposedly oppressed based on their skin color, gender, or religion.  This sort of thinking is inherently tribal and it’s corrosive to our society. The more Americans excuse their own failures by pointing the finger at other groups and hypocritically complaining about their supposed “privilege,” the worse-off all of us will be.