Privilege is real. But being a white man shouldn’t disqualify me.

All this is by way of saying to women: I’m on your side. But when I see op-eds, such as the one recently in the New York Times that states in the headline that the Metropolitan Museum of Art should not have appointed “yet another white, male director,” I recoil. That’s just another way of saying that white and male is a disqualification. Diversity in the workplace is an overdue goal, but it can amount to a quota by another name. Choose a woman because she’s a woman and you’ve eliminated a man because he’s a man.

It’s not that anyone is fooled by obfuscation. Some of the resentment in the white, male electorate is based on the conviction that the deck is suddenly stacked against them. That’s Trump’s constituency, right there. (He got about 63 percent of the white male vote.) Someone has to tell those guys how deceived they are, how they have benefited all these years from being male and white. Forgive them if they do not understand.