Coming Clean about Motives

When people are trying to convince you of something, it’s important (and natural) to ask: Whose interests are they serving? How will they profit from their proposal? Such suspicions go to the heart of ethical arguments.

In a hugely controversial essay published in the Princeton Tory, Tal Fortgang, a first-year student at the Ivy League school, argues that those on campus who used the phrase “Check your privilege” to berate white male students like him for the advantages they enjoy are, in fact, judging him according to gender and race, and not for “all the hard work I have done in my life.” To challenge stereotypical assumptions about the “racist patriarchy” that supposedly paved his way to Princeton, Fortgang writes about the experiences of his ancestors, opening the paragraphs with a striking parallel structure:

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running. . . .

Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive. . . .

Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other. . . .

Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most — his wife and kids — to earn that living.

— Tal Fortgang, “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege”

Fortgang thus attempts to establish his own ethos and win the argument against those who make assumptions about his roots by dramatizing the ethos of his ancestors:

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That’s the problem with calling someone out for the “privilege” which you assume has defined their narrative. You don’t know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are. Assuming they’ve benefitted from “power systems” or other conspiratorial imaginary institutions denies them credit for all they’ve done, things of which you may not even conceive. You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression. You don’t know who conquered their demons, or may still [be] conquering them now.

As you might imagine, the pushback to “Checking My Privilege” was enormous, some of the hundreds of comments posted to an online version accusing Fortgang himself of assuming the very ethos of victimhood against which he inveighs. Peter Finocchiaro, a reviewer on Slate, is especially brutal: “Only a few short months ago he was living at home with his parents. His life experience, one presumes, is fairly limited. So in that sense, he doesn’t really know any better. . . . He is an ignorant 19-year-old white guy from Westchester.” You can see in this debate how ethos quickly raises issues of knowledge and motives. Fortgang tries to resist the stereotype others would impose on his character, but others regard the very ethos he fashions in his essay as evidence of his naïveté about race, discrimination, and, yes, privilege.

We all, of course, have connections and interests that bind us to other human beings. It makes sense that a young man would explore his social identity, that a woman might be concerned with women’s issues, that members of minority groups might define social and cultural conditions on their own terms — or even that investors might look out for their investments. It’s simply good strategy to let your audiences know where your loyalties lie when such information does, in fact, shape your work.

Using Ethos in Your Own Writing