For the record, the real reason privilege checking fell out of favor is because checking your privilege doesn’t do anything. Like so much of cultural studies-inflected pseudo-left practices, it’s an entirely symbolic and semantic ritual. It turns out that even in the rare event that members of privileged groups actually checked their own privilege, they’re fully capable of going out into the world and deepening that privilege and abusing the people who don’t have it. Just like a lot of people put BLM signs in their windows and then avoided Black neighborhoods, just like a lot of men go to academic conferences and call themselves allies and then get aggressive with women at the conference hotel that night. The problem with making moral hygiene the centerpiece of your political project is that morality is a function of behavior, not of thought or emotion or intention. I’m sure Stancil sits at his laptop and talks about being good and thinks good things and feels good things and mistakes all of that for being moral. But only doing is moral, not being. So let’s do the right thing, yes for Black people and women and the poor and also for everyone else, and let’s forget about who’s performed the empty ritual of privilege checking. Who gives a shit?
Agreed. Where we probably disagree is on what the telos of our "doing" is, which for me is a gradual personal and societal movement toward a transcendental ideal of justice. But like de Boer, I find it impossible to take this kind of performative moralism seriously. It changes nothing except to ingrain more deeply in the performer the delusion of his being a good person if he's conformist enough to have the right attitudes and to say the right things and to wear the right t-shirts.
BTW, what de Boer is saying here is pretty much what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was describing in Christian terms in The Cost of Discipleship. B distinguishes between cheap grace and costly grace. He lived the latter and paid with his life, as did MLK. Paying with your life isn't the only proof of moral seriousness, but having something in your life that defines your moral horizon and that is worth dying for is.
I think that's why the military is so attractive for a certain kind of idealistic young man or woman. I've met many over the years as students in my classes whom I have deeply admired despite their politics being completely different from mine. I see their idealism as too often having been manipulated by the venal or grandiose or moronic militarists who have brought us absurdities like the invasion of Iraq or the American Civil War. These kids have the guilelessness of doves but who need a little more of the shrewdenss of the serpent. But what makes them admirable is that willingness to pay the cost. There is a seriousness there that is lacking in almost all their far more liberal classmates.