Princeton’s Tal Fortgang ’17 continues to garner public attention for his controversial opinion piece on privilege published in The Tory this April. What do the rest of Princeton students think?
Read more by Press Club’s Gabe Fisher in the New York Times here.
since you ask…
Food for thought: 1) Activists in our Princeton community shed light on the racist, classist, ableist, cisnormative, and heteropatriarchal assumptions that persist within Princeton University (praxis/axis) put up massive bus stop posters on privilege, an art installation on mental health, stickers to make all bathrooms gender inclusive, an alternative newspaper, a manifesto/list of demands, and a protest that turns hundreds of eyes. What do they get? Ridicule, contempt, and one article in the Prince. 2) White male student pens article whining about being told to check his privilege; uses grandparents who survived the Holocaust to claim that he has zero obligation to recognize his structural advantages. What does he get? Some pushback, yes, but then a national platform (Fox news, obviously, but also going viral on the internet) on which to spew his violence.
Let’s examine who has a national spotlight handed to him, and who (“a collective of queer people, poor people, trans people, people of color, and people of faith coming together”) is left in obscurity. Just one more symptom of a culture that gives certain people a voice and shunts the rest aside. Let’s not let this continue as a self-perpetuating cycle.
Let’s change the current state of representation.
Let’s continue the fight!
P.S. Signal boost for the folks over at praxis/axis if you have not yet read the Something Queer That Will Keep On Coming.
http://wearepxa.wordpress.com/
I can’t speak to Tal’s success, (which is likely the result of the fact that intelligent conservatives are such a minority that when even one appears he quickly ascends to the heights of the conservative media sphere) but I can speak to your “failure to be heard”: you guys have no moral authority; there is no sense in which you represent the interests of the majority or even a plurality of students here.