Weaponized Introspection

Young Lord Stancil here is a reliable instrument for unwittingly illustrating the internal contradictions of contemporary social justice politics. In theory, the concept of privilege checking is inherently introspective - it’s a way for the individual to ask him- or herself whether his or her perspective is impacted by privilege in such a way as to cloud judgment or create prejudice. That probably sounds unobjectionable, and (again in theory) it more or less is. The concept of “privilege” is typically abstracted so much as to be useless, but looking at your own perspective and what influences it is a useful exercise.

So what’s the issue? Look at Stancil here: what is introspective for him in these tweets? Where is his introspection? If privilege checking is a self-critical exercise, where is the self-criticism here? There’s literally none to be found, just like there’s none in anything Stancil ever says about social justice issues. He’s a man who has never met an intersectional analysis he could not bend into an advertisement for himself. I suppose we’re meant to presume that he’s been busily doing all of “the work” in the background, but as a public figure he exists in a state of total and ceaseless certainty about everything, all the time. What’s so wild here is that he parrots the standard-issue line that race and gender color people’s perspectives, but he appears totally incurious about how his white maleness influences his own performance of being an ally. Because people of his type are incapable of second-order thinking, he can’t ask himself if there’s more than one way to be influenced by your race and gender. Specifically, he’s a guy who’ll never wonder whether the way that he’s bent the critique of white men into a tool to glorify himself might not be, itself, an expression of white male privilege. This was the whole point about Good White Men: they have critiques of white men that they think are quite cutting, but they inevitably exempt themselves from those critiques in effect if not explicitly, which perversely means that complaining about white men advances their careers and interests as white men. I find that gross.

This is of course much greater than Stancil and greater even than privilege checking: modern identity politics contains a vast set of discursive tools that are meant to prompt self-critique but which are used, in practice, for the valorization of the individuals who most aggressively and shamelessly beat the drum. The person who would go on Tumblr to declare their white privilege would be aping a self-flagellating act, but would do so knowing full well that in the contrast they were drawing with peers, they were in fact participating in self-celebration. He who humbleth himself wishes to be exalted. And this is why privilege checking, in practice, is horseshit. I did six years in grad school in the humanities. Trust me: though conversations about failing to check one’s privilege grew like crabgrass, none of those conversations were inwardly focused. They were all inevitably about how some other person didn’t perform the necessary ablutions. Whatever theoretical value privilege checking might have collapses under the weight of its use as a tool for competing white people to assert greater virtue. If Stancil actually believed in the concept of privilege checking, and had integrity, he’d check his own privilege in private and then shut the fuck up about it. That would be actual introspection! Instead it’s all just part of his sales job.

Imagine if I said to Stancil, “your certainty that racism/sexism/homophobia are powerful forces in the world is, at best, qualified by your limited perspective.” Do you think he’d agree? No, of course not - the truths he knows are eternal, certain, existential. And it will never occur to him that, in this, he’s just like those white men he’s critiquing.

For the record, the real reason privilege checking fell out of favor is because checking your privilege doesn’t do anything. Like so much of cultural studies-inflected pseudo-left practices, it’s an entirely symbolic and semantic ritual. It turns out that even in the rare event that members of privileged groups actually checked their own privilege, they’re fully capable of going out into the world and deepening that privilege and abusing the people who don’t have it. Just like a lot of people put BLM signs in their windows and then avoided Black neighborhoods, just like a lot of men go to academic conferences and call themselves allies and then get aggressive with women at the conference hotel that night. The problem with making moral hygiene the centerpiece of your political project is that morality is a function of behavior, not of thought or emotion or intention. I’m sure Stancil sits at his laptop and talks about being good and thinks good things and feels good things and mistakes all of that for being moral. But only doing is moral, not being. So let’s do the right thing, yes for Black people and women and the poor and also for everyone else, and let’s forget about who’s performed the empty ritual of privilege checking. Who gives a shit?