I have noticed lately that my liberal-progressive friends have begun casually adopting the tools of gender and race studies in their daily lives, scrutinizing not just American society as a whole, but their own personal relationships through the lens of feminism and other critical disciplines.  It is more and more common for me to see discussions where an argument is not answered with a counter-argument, but with an accusation of blindness based on the arguer’s “unchecked privilege.”  (I do not deny that I find many of these accusations to be high comedy.  This spring’s anti-microaggression campaign at St. Olaf College – already a bastion of political correctness – was perhaps the silliest thing that has ever happened, ever.)

There’s much truth to be gleaned in all this talk of privilege.  In general, I think it’s easier to be white than black in today’s America.  In general, I think it is easier to be a man in the workplace, and it’s certainly easier to be a male gamer or a male citizen of the Web, given the intense, irrational, and openly evil retaliation against many females who try to occupy those spaces.  Now, I don’t think much of the responses the intersectional Left offers to these problems. Nevertheless, these unearned blessings for some are unearned difficulties for others, well worth pointing out and, where possible, leveling out as well.

However, the very same people who spread the light of critical analysis to race, class, gender, disability, and sexuality seem to have a blind spot.  When a conservative (regardless of race, class, or gender) observes the very considerable privilege that progressive leftists wield as their birthright, and which we must muddle through without, we are met with ferocious denials, which, in some settings, amount to taboos.  Often our interlocutors immediately attempt to derail the discussion (a handy term I learned from contemporary feminists), accusing us of having our own privileges – which, of course, we do (in America, everyone has some privilege!), but which doesn’t help us acknowledge, lessen, or end specifically progressive privilege.  Even if a liberal does, in conversation, acknowledge that conservatives are in many ways socially disadvantaged, I’ve often noticed that they are unwilling to make the concomitant admission that liberals are themselves overprivileged.

As a white person, I’ve been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but I’ve not been taught to see the corollary: white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.  I think that, much like the members of any other privileged and powerful identity group, left-wingers are not taught to recognize progressive privilege – and, sometimes, that they are quite carefully taught to be blind to it.  Nevertheless, it’s there.  Like Ms. McIntosh’s “invisible knapsack,” liberal-progressivism brings with it an invisible package of unearned assets, which progressives can count on cashing in each day, but about which they are supposed to remain studiously oblivious.  Progressive privilege is like an invisible weightless tote bag of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks, granting left-wingers freedom of movement through the elite circles of American life that non-liberals simply do not have.

After I realized the extent to which progressives work from a base of unacknowledged privilege, I understood that much of their oppressiveness was unconscious. Conservatives often talk as though the leftists are quite consciously running a grand conspiracy to silence, disempower, and disenfranchise them in the grand bazaar of American culture, but what we see on the ground is that leftists are far too oblivious about their privilege to be conspiring in that way.  As I read Ms. McIntosh’s paper for the first time some years ago, my observations of progressive privilege came immediately to mind.  Those observations helped me to understand Ms. McIntosh’s articulation of white privilege (to which I was at first very resistant).  It was in recognizing progressives’ unearned ideological privilege, which is too often wielded against me and mine, that I came to realize that, in many ways I, too, have enjoyed privilege – skin privilege – without having realized it.

Unlike Ms. McIntosh, I’m a young person living in the era of race’n’gender studies:  my schooling gave me some training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, and as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended not just on my own individual moral will, but also as a member of a class, whose overall moral state depends on its lack of advantage over other classes.  However, this critical analysis of privilege, oft touted by liberals, does not yet extend to liberalism itself.  Liberal schoolchildren are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when they work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow everyone else to be more like them.

I decided to provide a very small service for the broader field of critical studies by identifying some of the daily effects of privilege on the life of a liberal-progressive.  I have borrowed liberally (ha!) from Ms. McIntosh’s original article, identifying those conditions that I think are clearly associated with specifically ideological privilege, rather than mere ancillary privileges of class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location – although, as third-wave feminism insists, all those other factors are (of course) intricately intertwined.  At least here in my overwhelmingly white, deeply progressive, dearly beloved Twin Cities, here are a few conditions that my liberal friends, family, and acquaintances can count on… while conservatives cannot.

If I were a liberal-progressive…

1. I could, if I wished, arrange to be in the company of people of my ideology most of the time.

2. I could be pretty sure that my neighbors, knowing my ideology, would be neutral or at least pleasant to me.

4. I could turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my ideology positively represented.

5. When I am told about our national heritage or about civilization, I would be shown that people of my ideology made it what it is.

6. I could be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the the existence of their ideology – as something other than an evil or a disease.

7. I could go into a music shop and count on finding music that affirms or at least represents my ideology.

8. I could curse, have extra-marital affairs, or otherwise be a terrible person without having people attribute these bad choices to the hypocrisy of my ideology (and everyone who follows it).

9. I could speak in public to large groups without putting my ideology on trial.

10. I could successfully communicate my reasons for adhering to my ideology without expecting to be called “one of the few sane ones”.

11. I would rarely, if ever, be asked to speak for all the people of my ideology.

12. When I erred or said something odious, my entire ideology would not be held responsible for my error.

13. I could remain oblivious of the language and customs of conservatives, who constitute the nation’s plurality, without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.

14. I could criticize our president and talk about how much I fear his policies and behavior without being accused of racism (or, under President Hillary, sexism).

15. I could be sure that if I asked to talk to “the person in charge” I would be facing a person of my ideology. (EDITOR’S NOTE: This may vary greatly by geography.  Here in the Twin Cities, though, it’s the gospel truth.)

16. If the IRS audited my tax return, I ccould be sure I hadn’t been singled out because of my ideology.

17. I could easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines that portray my ideology positively.

18. I could go home from most meetings or organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in rather than isolated, out of place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.

19. If I were passed over for a new job, I could be sure it was not because my would-be employer objected to working with someone of my ideology.

20. I could choose public accommodations without fearing that people of my ideology are mistreated or cannot get hired in the places I have chosen.

21. I could be sure that, if I needed to appeal to the University’s justice system to appeal a grade or report inappropriate behaviour by a professor, my ideology would not work against me.  (Fortunately, I am no longer a student.)

22. If my day, week, or year were going badly, I would not need to ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had ideological overtones.

23. I could participate openly in politics and work for equal justice without fearing for my job, my spouse’s job, or the welfare of my children.

24. I would have positive and accurate media images of other adherents of my ideology, with whom I could readily identify.

25. When I met people, they would correctly assume my ideology; I would not ever have to “come out” as conservative.

26. When I want to talk about justice issues that matter a great deal to me, I could be confident that they would not be dismissed as irrelevant, optional, or – above all – “too controversial.”

In unpacking this invisible tote bag of liberal privilege, I have listed conditions of daily experience that, for the most part, liberal-progressives in my life take for granted.  I do not mean to imply that any of these perks are bad for the holder. Some of these varieties of privilege are only what one would want for everyone in a just society.  A few others, however, give license to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive. Even if not harmful for the holder, we ought to do what we can to eradicate them.

Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your ideology will not count against you in employment, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

At about this point, Ms. McIntosh and I substantially part ways.  Her reaction to the discovery of white privilege was to import her feminist “outrage” (her word) into her racial analysis.  My reaction to the discovery of white privilege, on the other hand, was to get a lot more chill about ideological privilege, which I had hitherto seen as a conspiracy of oppression, but which I now recognize as something very similar to the unearned benefits of my skin color – something to watch out for, but nothing to lose my temper about.  I am not “truly distressed” by systemic, unearned privilege of any kind, including ideological ones, as Ms. McIntosh demands I become.

I think it’s good to be aware of these privileges, so that we can keep ourselves from spiraling into patterns of oppression.  I also think it’s important to examine the interlocking nature of these privileges, as third-wave feminism instructs.  For example, it is infinitely more difficult to be a black conservative or a female conservative than it is to be a straight white male conservative like me (just look at Maggie Gallagher or Clarence Thomas!), and this is terribly unfair.  In short, I am fully on board for the discussion of intersectionality.  And I think it’s important to search constructively for ways to level the national playing field for all disempowered groups.  Unlike Ms. McIntosh’s generation, my generation has been taught from the cradle that America’s meritocratic ideals are aspirational, not actual, and I’m sure there are plenty of ways we can correct these imbalances without employing the tools of coercion and discrimination.

But that has to begin with acknowledging all forms of privilege that define elite power structures in the United States – not just the ones that have university departments devoted to them.  One of those overlooked species is liberal privilege, which I have begun to articulate here.

In reality, of course, they’re not fighting censorship at all.  They can’t, because censorship doesn’t exist in this country.  Any book can be published, any book can be sold.  There are no “banned books.”  The ALA is actually fighting parents, many of whom have the temerity to request changes to their school curricula or even, in the worst cases, ask their communities to make it slightly more difficult for children to access certain books that, in the parents’ opinion, could cause harm to those children.  Access will not be denied, of course: again, censorship, the actual suppression of speech such that it cannot be heard, does not exist* in this country, and has been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional in a variety of contexts.

“Libraries Against Parenting”, however, lacks the same popular appeal as “Banned Books Week”, so America’s librarians construct an elaborate fantasy in which any attempt whatsoever to require or merely encourage a library to act in loco parentis (like any other responsible adult member of the community) is, through some arcane ritual of linguistic alchemy, a form of “censorship.”  Indeed, the ALA is either unwilling or unable to draw any moral or practical distinction between a few powerless parents asking libraries to put books with significant adult content in the adult section and public burnings, official sanctions, and credible threats of violence against authors [scroll to “Aylisli, Akram”].  Indeed, the ALA’s “heroes” for this year do not appear to find any distinction between book challenges and literal Nazism.  This is dogma substituting for reason.

The ALA and its cohort are also waging a propaganda war against taxpayers.  The problem, you see, is not any actual censorship — since, again, the actual banning of books is legally and culturally unthinkable in this country.  The problem is that there are some works of art — indeed, even, some ideas! — which the taxpaying public in our putative democracy is perfectly fine with permitting, but which they do not wish to subsidize.  It is not unreasonable for them to oppose such subsidies.  Libraries are publicly funded because they ultimately benefit the public, by providing us with an educated, humane, and happy citizenry.  Works that do not tend to promote an educated, humane, and happy citizenry don’t need to be (in fact, should not be) carried by libraries.  Libraries can and should discriminate against them.

This sounds much more controversial than it is.  Your local public library has at least three copies of every Harry Potter book.  (My local system has 21 copies of Chamber of Secrets.)  Your local elementary school library has a copy of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day.  I don’t care who you are or what state you’re from: those sentences are true.  However, how many copies of the 1916 Chicago phone book does your public library have?  (Not even Chicago’s libraries carry phone books that old.)  How many copies of 50 Shades of Gray are stocked in your nearest K-6 grammar school?  What about Enrico Rodrigo’s excellent The Physics of Stargates, a solid text for introducing college-level liberal arts majors to modern wormhole physics?  How about the infamous Anarchist Cookbook? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess zero.  (Especially that last one, in a post-Columbine world.)  The plain fact is that librarians, both school and public, have limited resources, so they use their substantial powers of intelligence and discretion to pursue donations and purchases that actually serve their readers — in other words, they massively discriminate, ignoring 99.99% of all books that have ever been published in favor of the 0.01% of books which, in their opinions as library professionals, serve the goals of the public or school library where they work.

If they did this with their own private money, there is nothing the public could do if it decided that, sometimes, the librarians picked the wrong books.  But, of course, public and school libraries don’t rely exclusively on private funding; they rely, in very large part, on the income we give them through taxation.  In a normal, healthy, functioning democracy, our involvement in keeping libraries alive would give us some say in what libraries do with the money we give them.  “Banned Books Week” is largely designed to lock us out of the process, so that librarians can continue to discriminate against and in favor of whatever books suit their judgement, without taking ours into consideration.

But “Librarians Against Accountability Week” lacks persuasive power.  Thus, when Arizona voters announced, through their elected officials, that they wanted their public school system to teach their children “to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races” (which, in turn, led to the suspension of a popular Mexican-American studies program which, according to the Superintendent of Schools, did exactly the opposite), the ALA jumped through some extraordinary mental hoops in order to construe it as — you guessed it — censorship, despite the fact that the law neither targeted individual books nor banned any of them from Tucson school libraries or curricula.  (Some books were removed and stored or sold simply because the classes that used them no longer existed.  Despite shoddy reporting, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Howard Zinn’s bibliography remain readily available throughout Tucson.)  In the ALA’s strange world, it’s not enough for racial hatred to be available on bookshelves in stores, public libraries, and even school libraries; nay, unless actively teaching it, the ALA officially maintains, you’re attacking the “freedom to read.”  Of course, the ALA’s opposition to “purging” and “limiting” certain books on the basis of “doctrinal disapproval” does not appear to extend to books that question ALA’s own doctrines.  Those can be purged without ALA or Banned Books Week emitting a peep.

None of this is why I hate Banned Books Week.

The story of public servants scrabbling for money and power while imagining themselves noble warriors for liberty and goodness is probably as old as democratic government.  As abuses of power go, the ALA’s annual public relations / fundraising scheme has relatively pure motives and is blessedly free of cynical self-awareness.  The effect is very slight; the ALA’s disapprobation simply doesn’t have very much effect on the real world.  Most schools and districts do listen to their stakeholders, and many have formal processes in place for reviewing book choices at the prompting of their communities.

More importantly, the intent is not entirely misguided.  The vast majority of the books featured in “Banned” Books Week really oughtn’t be challenged; students are, generally speaking, being assigned appropriate books at appropriate grade levels.  A brief review of the annual “Banned” Books report illustrates this.  If you, as a parent, believe your twelfth-grader can’t, under a teacher’s guidance, read the sex scene in The Handmaid’s Tale without being seriously harmed, then you’ve made some mistakes as a parent. The ALA calls out these over-protective parents during “Banned” Books Week, and that’s not really a bad thing.

(SIDE NOTE: The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the worst books I’ve ever read.  I would never use it in an AP course.  But that’s because it is a clunking, didactic, trope-driven literary failure, not because of the sex scene, which is as far from erotica as Watchmen is from Christopher Reeves’ Superman movies.)

Occasionally, the ALA even raises awareness of genuine censorship overseas. Fighting actual censorship is a good thing, whether it’s the aforementioned Azerbaijani author Akram Ayisli, or Manji Irshad’s book about Islam and Liberty that was banned in Malaysia, or the continuing lawsuit in Belgium that aims to ban the classic Tintin in the Congo, or those Cuban dissidents imprisoned for trying to share ideas about… oh, wait, skip that last one!  But these are never the marquee topics of Banned Books Week, which tries desperately to focus on instances of American “book bannings” (which do not exist).

So, yes, the ALA and its allies are making a huge effort to complain about the fact that some parents in some places don’t want their children to have instant, maximally convenient access to — or be forced to read as part of a curriculum — certain books.  Yes, their pretension that they are in a fight against actual censorship is pretty much a lie — and a lucrative one, at that, given Banned Books Week’s success at raising money for them. But, in the grand scheme of things, the ALA’s mild hypocrisy and dishonest self-portrayal are pretty minor sins in a country where much bigger lies are being told every day.

Despite all that, I hate Banned Books Week.  Not because of the magnitude of the lies, but because of the people who are telling them.

Librarians belong to one of the most noble professions.  I write computer code for money; they are stewards of knowledge, enkindlers of humane passions, and guardians of the rational logos.   A single library is more of a treasure trove than all the gold in Crystal Cove — a storehouse of truth, or at least the pursuit of truth.  Librarians have a special duty, then, to tell the truth, even about themselves.  They must be honest, sincere, and neutral guides whenever they are drawn into disputes in their professional capacity.  Otherwise, they’re not librarians, but barbarians — not stewards of information, but vandals who control and manipulate it.

For seven days out of every year, that’s exactly what librarians across the nation become.  I expect manipulation, politicking, power-seeking, and narcissistic fundraising scams from, say, politicians.  I expect much more from my librarians.  I held this post over until Sunday so as to avoid interrupting this year’s festivities, because nobody likes a party pooper.  But today is the first day of my annual hoping that, by this time next year, librarians will have come to their senses, smacked “Banned” Books Week with the banhammer, and firmly resolved to work with parents and taxpayers to determine what books our public libraries should present (and how), rather than engaging in a long propagandistic power struggle that benefits no one but the ALA’s accounting department.

*It must be admitted that, technically, under U.S. law, it is theoretically possible to suppress hardcore pornography, which is, according to some people, a form of expression, not a form of abuse.  However, the standard of evidence for proving “hardcore pornography” is so high that the only porn that is actually suppressed in the U.S. is child pornography.  Hardcore porn is freely and openly sold in stores, on cable, in hotel rooms, and is responsible for a sizable portion of all internet data traffic.  Censorship does not exist in the United States.

DISCLAIMER: My wife, an aspiring librarian, has not read this post, and, having heard the topic, notes that she “expects to be offended” by it.  If she writes a counterpoint, I will, of course, publish it.