White folx, particularly those performing as cisgender men, tend to omit all the conditions of privilege they have.
Rather than seeing them as an aspect of sociocultural blessing, they “naturalize” the conditions. This means they can see the accidents of their raising as the way things should be while simultaneously painting other sociocultural arrangements as lacking or even unnatural. Michael Harriet calls Mayor Pete our on just such behavior eight years ago in his first mayoral run. And Harriet sees Buttigieg in 2019 being complicit with that behavior by omitting from his public discourse any recognition that the challenges the former Navy SEAL faced in life, outside of being Gay, came from those he chose to take upon himself rather than those with which he was born.
Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is a lucky motherfucker, too.
He attended one of the best private schools in the country that was quite literally on the campus of one of the best colleges in the country, University of Notre Dame, where his father worked as a professor for 29 years. His mother taught at an even better, more elite school. And if you ask how he got into Harvard or became a Rhodes Scholar, Mayor Pete would probably insist that it had nothing to do with whiteness. He would likely tell you that he valued education and had great role models, both of which are probably true. There is no question that he is intelligent, hard-working and well-educated.
But he didn’t have to jump a ditch.
CALL ME MAGGIE 