An Open Letter to Tal Fortgang

Re: “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege”

See the original piece at sudfemdad.tumblr.com.

Dear Mr. Fortgang,

We’ve all read it by now: your piece in Time entitled “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege”.

In it, you call the admonition to check your privilege “a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic” and an assumption that “simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively along with it”. You accuse the people who call you privileged of “diminishing everything I have personally accomplished” and go on to assert that your story cannot be defined simply by your race and your sex.

(You also can’t resist slipping a snarky and completely irrelevant shot at President Obama into the first paragraph. Protip: don’t give your detractors the luxury of dismissing you as a partisan honk.)

You are, of course, absolutely correct that your race and sex do not define you, and you are right to be proud of your accomplishments. I certainly wouldn’t have made it into Princeton, and I’m just as white and just as male as you are. You make a fundamental mistake, though, when you equate the suggestion that you have privileges with an attack on you as a person.

It is a very popular and very dangerous mistake to believe that telling the truth constitutes an attack on those who don’t see or don’t like the truth. We heard it in the 1950s and 1960s from Americans who called the truth that black people have the same rights as white people an attack on their way of life. We hear it today from creationists who call the truths revealed by modern science an attack on their religion. You, Mr. Fortgang, are making the same mistake.

When people ask you to acknowledge your privileges, they are not attacking you. They are not calling you evil, they are not accusing you of cheating, and they are not chalking everything you have ever accomplished up to privilege. They are simply asking you to see the truth.

It is a truth, by the way, that shouldn’t bother you nearly as much as it seems to. Seeing your privileges for what they are does not take away your right to have pride in your own accomplishments. It might take away your right to criticize those who face challenges you don’t understand, but (to your credit) I don’t see you doing any of that in your piece, so I don’t think you have much to lose.

I could have written almost all of this without reading any of your piece except for the title. The mistake I’m talking about glares out at me even from those few words: “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege”. No one needs you to apologize for your privileges, Mr. Fortgang, only to acknowledge that you have them and that some others don’t.

Now, I know enough about journalism to know that it is possible, even likely, that you did not write that title. Time is probably to blame for that, and that brings me to my next point.

Please, please, do not make the mistake of thinking because Time has enshrined your ideas in print that you must have it all figured out. Time published your piece because they knew Facebook and Twitter would talk it to death and generate a great deal of readership for them. Ask anyone over the age of 28; they’ll invariably tell you that they were just starting to figure out themselves and the world around them as college freshmen. Do not discount the possibility that you still have a great deal to learn about privilege and how it shapes your world.

You worry about being defined by your race and your sex. The truth is everyone has that problem, and a lot of people have it worse than you do. If I were you, I would be much more worried about being defined for the rest of my life by a single op-ed piece I wrote when I was a freshman in college. That problem is uniquely yours, and you have Time to thank for it. You’re obviously a smart guy and a darn good writer; it would be a great shame for you to spend the rest of your life stuck in the box that you have built in “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege”.

Good luck, and thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Matt (SudFemDad)