In a dispatch from Paris, Ta-Nehisi contemplates privilege, writing that it “is like money–when you have none it is impossible to get and when you have more people offer it to you at every turn”:
We talk about a culture of poverty as a way of damnation, but not as a way of comprehension. America loves winners, and tells us that we can all be winners, and it says this at such a volume that when you do not win, you might believe that something deep in your bones condemns you to losing–and believing that you might take whatever is given to you. You might be thankful for your squalor. You might come to believe that it is a divine plan for you to be under and down. I don’t want to overstate this. I simply want to say that if I punch you in the face enough times, and you lack the power to stop me, you might come to believe that it is what you deserve. Rousseau says that strength must be transformed into right; likewise, weakness becomes destiny.
But the game is rigged. I know this because I loved my craft for many years and it meant nothing to anyone save my mother, my father, my siblings, my wife and a few close friends. At 25 my only noteworthy success was playing some part in the creation of my son. I stayed loyal to his mother. I think I stayed loyal because I could park myself there–perhaps I failed at all other things. But I was a good father and I was a loyal spouse. And then one day a man of some privilege (bearing his own struggles) spoke to another man of some privilege and I became a man of some privilege with a megaphone, which I now employ, across an ocean, to bring these thoughts to you.
Dreher, who spent last October in Paris, chimes in:
I don’t deserve Paris, I don’t deserve my writing career, I don’t deserve my wife and children — and that is reason to rejoice and be glad for having been given all these things by God. And not only given these things, as a divine favor, but given the wherewithal — morally, spiritually, materially — to help make our dreams come true. To believe that the game is entirely rigged, that the only reason anybody ever does well is because of pure chance or cheating, is to deny the active role we play in the creation of our lives, though of course some have more room to act than others. But to believe that we deserve all of it, that everything comes to us as the result of natural justice, is to be prideful, and to risk serious spiritual corruption.
The Dish 