At some point, if you lecture and wag your finger at me enough, I’ll shrug and walk away.

I had this great post all lined up, or so I thought. A black chick – excuse me, Young Person of Color (POC) – maybe half as old as my favorite knife but not nearly half as experienced, took the time from her busy schedule to write a lengthy screed explaining just how all whites are racist, maybe especially the ones who spend great time and effort to show they’re not. It’s White Privilege, you know. There’s nothing it can’t do.

It was a great piece, well written but with such hackneyed unsupported-assertions-posing-as-arguments that I could have gone 700 words on it easy without ever repeating myself or resorting to profanity. Oh this kid was ripe and ready.

And I should have been mentally framing the fisk of the week, but I just couldn’t get into it. I’m from Detroit, I’ve heard this “white privilege/whites can’t not be racists” shtick in one form or another all my adult life. It makes me tired to still be hearing it.

In the sixties, institutional racism was a very big and a very valid topic of discussion. I absolutely don’t deny the existence of institutional racism. It existed and it needed to be knocked down. But what people like this kid want to argue now isn’t institutional racism, though that’s the term they insist on using. It’s legacy racism – I must agree to the fiction that I am privileged over you, no matter what the facts may show, because my father or grandfather may well have been institutionally privileged over your father or grandfather. That right there is the death scream of the efforts of three generations or more of civil rights activists, not one of whose shoelaces this glib kid is worthy to tie.

And the only real response I can raise is…boredom. Go away, kid. Come back when you have something to say. Something that’s not about “white privilege.”