whiter than white and cleaner than clean
Official Dexter's Lab climate specialists The Sugarcubes remind you to consider the broad social justice implications of 21st century environmental struggles.
I happened to catch the end of Dave Chappelle's remarkable interview on The Actor's Studio earlier this week - remarkable mostly in that it's been one of the few shows that I've seen in the last couple of seasons that hasn't been a total vanity fair, and that the actor being interviewed actually seemed like a regular human person.
There's this bit from the very end, during the Q&A, where Chappelle briefly talks about the phenomenon of race privilege in America, saying to the young audience member holding the mike that there were privileges he was entitled to that he didn't even know about just because of the color of his skin, privileges that other people didn't get because of this.
Despite the fact that "privilege" - hetero privilege, class privilege, gender privilege, or whatever - is something that gets thrown around alot in activist circles and on campuses, I doubt few people have made it clear as Dave Chappelle managed to in thirty seconds: whether or not you realize it, it means there are things you get that other people don't. The situational scale is tipped in your favor.
Privilege was the first thing (well, second thing, after, "what an asshole") I thought about after I watched Christopher Horner, senior fellow at the gee-whiz-ain't-money-great think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute and counsel for the Cooler Heads Coalition, an anti-climate science front group for leading lights of expanded freedom and wisdom like the Christian Coalition, Grover Fucking Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and The Heritage Foundation, appear on Tuesday's Daily Show to discuss his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Environmentalism (sorry, find it yourself).
Throwing down privilege and privilege alone can be a bald-faced cop-out in a political argument, an anti-intellectual, get-out-of-jail-free card, but it's the only notion that makes sense if you can accept the idea that a white, male, Washington D.C. lawyer that does wetwork for every Tom, Dick, and Harry on the East Coast who wants to burn tires can dismiss outright (in 288 pages, no less) the claims that New Orleans residents, sub-Saharan Africans, or indigenous people living in Alaska have to a sane and happy life free from bodily harm.
Can you think of a better one?
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