The American Scholar: The Privilege Predicament - Robert Boyers: "Does privilege exist? Of course it does. Only a fool would deny that advantage is real and that some people have what others lack. Though advantage is unevenly distributed in any population, or within any racial or ethnic group, it is legitimate to assert that whiteness—like maleness—has long been an advantage, however little some wish to acknowledge it. Just so, other kinds of privilege often determine, unfairly, the way people live, and suffer, or thrive. But then these are commonplaces, and if not everyone is as yet prepared to accept them, that is hardly a good reason to employ privilege in the way it has lately been used. The culture of grievance that has taken shape in recent years has led to what Phoebe Maltz Bovy calls “the fetishization of powerlessness” and the not always “polite bigotry” that makes it acceptable to target groups or persons not because of what they have done but because of what they are.
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