Understanding The Guardian’s error in judgment requires some background information. Thirty years ago, when the feminist academic Peggy McIntosh published White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, she hoped the book would spur readers to self-reflection, enhancing their capacity for empathy and compassion. “What I believe is that everybody has a combination of unearned advantage and unearned disadvantage in life,” she once commented. “We’re all put ahead and behind by the circumstances of our birth. We all have a combination of both. And it changes minute by minute, depending on where we are.”

Her ideas spread through academia and beyond. Like many, I’ve found value in them and endorse the project of reflecting on one’s unearned advantages. Alas, the privilege framework has long since been corrupted in popular discourse.

With the rise of social media, where nothing spreads faster than pretexts for treating others cruelly while performing righteousness, privilege has been twisted into an accusation, or worse, a rhetorical tool to diminish or dismiss the pain of others—as though unearned advantage voids a person’s claims to sympathy.

As those modes gain footholds in journalism, many outlets have published ill-considered claims that promote reductive, essentialist beliefs about race and gender.