Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the End of Privilege
by Alexander Zubatov
In another stop on her supersonic self-promotion express, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently came up with the following gem on the much-discussed topic of “privilege”:
Almost every single person in this country can acknowledge some privilege of some type, you know? I’m a cisgendered woman. You know, I will never know the trauma of feeling like I’m not born in the right body. And that, that is a privilege that I have — no matter how poor my family was when I was born.
Little did she understand — on this subject as on most others on which she hazards her invariably uninformed opinion — the import of her words. Implicit in her argument, lurking right there under the surface, is a demolition of the very concept of “privilege.”
If “every single person in this country can acknowledge some privilege of some type,” the notion of privilege is fittingly reduced to what it always was, as many, including Jordan Peterson, have observed: “privilege” is no more than an inflated way of saying that people differ from each other in infinite respects, and, as fortune and misfortune would have it, everyone is better off in some ways and worse off in others, with some people broadly advantaged and others drawing lots of short straws. Now is this something we really didn’t know before the privilege-mongers came on the scene to enlighten us?
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, for instance, has admitted she has cisgender privilege. But she has many other privileges as well:
· prominence and influence
· a platform
· being young and able-bodied and — I’ll make an assumption here — being in generally good health
· being a woman many consider attractive (I prefer women with a bit more class, but there’s no accounting for taste)
· a college education
· a well-paying job for which she has no apparent experience or qualifications
· being more articulate than most … even if most of the things she says aren’t necessarily a piece with the best and brightest
· having been born in the U.S. and not in some dangerous, impoverished, war-torn, third-world country
· belonging to a minority group in an age when that status opens many doors that might otherwise be closed (and, yes, being white in America today might still confer some limited advantages in certain ways, but in the end, if I had to choose to be born into a particular racial group with the goal of maximizing how propped-up and sought-after I would be in the upper echelons of our society, “white” is the last choice I’d make in 2019)
· being politically liberal at a time when being politically conservative and as ignorant and uninformed as she is would have gotten her mocked and pilloried by the powers-that-be on a daily basis
Whether you agree or disagree with any of the individual items on my list is entirely beside the point. You can make your own list. The list is potentially infinite. It contains as many items as there are possible dimensions and sub-dimensions in our society upon which individuals can vary and enjoy advantages.
“Whiteness,” the most conspicuous item on many privilege lists, certainly doesn’t deserve its exalted status. The average white person in America makes $33,030, which is a bit higher than the average black person in America ($27,101) but a bit lower than the average Asian-American ($36,152). But the relative differences among these numbers matter much less than the fact that they’re all pretty darned low! If income is a rough proxy for privilege, being white doesn’t get you very much. Besides, if we’re talking about privilege, why beat around the bush? Why talk about race when we can talk about wealth itself? Isn’t being rich a far more obvious and palpable privilege than being white?
And what about being attractive? According to Beauty Pays, a 2012 book by the labor economist Daniel Hamermesh, attractive men out-earn their less attractive peers by 13%. A bunch of studies have concluded that beauty confers numerous other advantages, including an expected huge advantage in the dating-and-mating game but also a host of less obvious ones, such as better health, persuasiveness, likeability and trustworthiness. Isn’t attractiveness, then, a lot more of a factor than race in determining our ultimate lot in life?
And, then, speaking of genetic gifts, how about another factor that might confer an advantage still bigger than comeliness: intelligence. Some geniuses are made rather than born, and yet expert estimates of the heritability of IQ (though I’m not sold on the idea that “heritability” is a scientifically sound notion) range between 57% and 86%. Not only does high IQ get you a lot more money, but it even yields a threefold difference in your mortality. So smart privilege? Yes.
You want to talk about intersectionality, the trendy idea that some groups live in a matrix of oppression, where, for instance, black women — being both black and women at once — are supposedly doubly damned? Okay, sure, let’s talk about intersectionality. Here we go: all of us both enjoy and suffer from countless, intersecting axes of advantage and disadvantage. Done. Next.
There’s no next. There’s only reality. Reality is complicated. It is, alas, far more complicated than the minds of most of us who are trying to make sense of it and end up reducing it to the kinds of simplistic, divisive categories — race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. — that come most readily to mind.
“Privilege” is a sham, a boogeyman, composed of incoherent rage and resentment and perpetuated by politically motivated hacks to scare and shame those on the other side of the tracks … or just on the other side of the aisle. We have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to thank for inadvertently helping us see the sham for what it is. Now the next time they tell you you’re “privileged,” you can have your zen koan-like rejoinder at the ready: “Yeah, I’m privileged, and I’m not. You’re privileged, and you’re not too. And so are — and aren’t — we all.”
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Tablet, Times Higher Education, Quillette, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
