Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang incited a national firestorm when he penned the partially understandable, mostly nonsensical diatribe about racial and gender politics in America titled “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis for Privilege” in the school newspaper that was beamed out to the world through Time magazine.
It was this white male’s privilege to, of course, make the erroneous declaration that America is “a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character.” The regurgitation of this statement illuminates either his ignorance or dishonesty.
As such, it was Fortgang’s supreme privilege to then recall, in great detail, the Hitler-enforced Jewish Holocaust that was based upon religious hatred, but also his privilege to conveniently forget the American Holocaust called slavery that was based upon racial and cultural hatred. How convenient. But that is his privilege.
It is his privilege to forget — or better yet, not ever know — what the words “Jim Crowism” or “segregation” mean, to never know what it’s like to have to use the “colored” toilet and the “colored” water fountain and to experience the wrath brought upon those unlucky souls who were found in violation of the violently enforced caste system of the South.
It is Fortgang’s privilege to not notice why many of his Jewish countrymen settled in the North when they came to America; there is a reason large quantities of Jews chose not to live in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia or Florida during the first half of the 20th century. In fact, there were two young Jews, along with a black man, who noticed that America did indeed care very much about religion and race and journeyed alone to the Deep South in 1964 to help. The three were never seen alive again, but their story lives on in history books and the movie Mississippi Burning.
Luckily, there are reasoned and rational individuals who are present to counter this academically accomplished but socially and historically illiterate young man’s reckless assault on common knowledge and common sense.
Nathan McCall (pictured above) a senior lecturer at Emory University and the author of the best-seller Makes Me Wanna Holler, discussed white privilege and the horrors of gentrification with his third book, the award-winning novel Them, in an interview with rolling out.
McCall, a former Washington Post reporter, began to construct the entertaining novel Them based upon the recent trend of whites moving back into the city, oftentimes displacing the entrenched black culture that was firmly established.
“I wrote it because I began to see it happening years ago, right before I left D.C. and I began thinking about it then. So when I came to Atlanta, I began to pay more attention to it because I saw the trickle here. I decided to do research on it and I saw what happened in the 4th Ward [in Atlanta] and as I wrote about it, if I wrote about as research it would probably be dry. I felt that the best thing that I could do is write as a novel.”
