Check your white privilege is attempting to become a catchphrase, though how something both so clumsy and ambiguous will ever find a pulse on other than academic lips is a good question. Yet how many immature, callow and overeager students will listen to this stuff, and actually think it has any intellectual quality? How many will not see it as being a tormented, spurious, divisive effort to assert a racialist reading on just about everything, everywhere?

It is a direct effort to impose guilt where gratification should reign. It is to make those who work hard, try to conduct themselves responsibly, who apply themselves to study, feel that none of these attributes, none of their honest effort, has earned them success. Why should all a young person’s effort and sweat, holding on to a moral code, and determined application to make something of their life be turned against them, be denied its efficacy, and everything praiseworthy about a person be dismissed as merely a gift of their ethnicity?

What’s most obnoxious about this trend is its blatant attempt to chase effort, merit, industry and determination off the field entirely. The privilege movement seeks to sully and taint the commonplace eternal virtues, so that when one of us sees another happy in marriage, perhaps, or successful in business, and maybe temperate and easy in private life , we should all shout in envy and hate. It is bitterly ironic that the anti-racist message has been reduced to this: You have all that you have only because you have white skin.