From Rob Henderson’s Nov 2024 interview at Wellesley College, transcribed in Henderson’s substack post:
A lot of graduates and students of elite universities will attempt to co-opt the suffering of marginalized people. They’ll identify whatever commonalities they share with historically marginalized groups and then essentially co-opt the suffering of those people, even if they themselves haven’t suffered.
They say, “Well, the category I belong to, there’s been this long history of mistreatment.” And then from there claim that anyone who doesn’t understand what they’ve been through or what these marginalized communities have been through, they must be privileged.
But I mean, ironically, the less marginalized or the more privileged you are, the better positioned you are to accentuate your own marginalization because you can communicate it in a way that’s palatable to upper-middle-class people.
Often what you’ll find — and I struggled with this myself, and I speak to young people who have recently applied to college — if you’ve truly been through something stressful or traumatic, there’s a reluctance to speak about it. You don’t want that to be your identity. You want to rise above it by embracing a different aspect of your identity.
You want to talk about your interests or your intellectual preoccupations or the hobbies that allowed you to distract yourself from, or allowed you to draw your attention away from, those negative experiences. And if you ask them to talk about those experiences, they don’t know how to put it into words that are sort of just the right amount of uncomfortable for the reader, the kind of Disney version of the story rather than the real thing.
Whereas people who have grown up relatively affluent and privileged, and maybe they’ve experienced some mild adversity, they know how to use the right language and the right jargon and terminology, hitting all those right buttons so that another privileged person can read it and say, “Okay, you’re the right kind of marginalized, you’re the right kind of person who knows how to communicate your suffering in a compelling way.