"the white privilege of appearing"

Dear Dr. Bones,

THEIR surmise about the Law Squaw  is (( fold here )) available from Paddy McTammany’s old buddy Dr. Tarantula of the Wall Street Jingoe: Our surmise is that Warren downplayed her alleged Indian roots after coming to H*rv*rd to avoid the stigma of "affirmative action." ... [E]arly in her career, "minority status" would have been useful to her advancement. But once she was on the tenure track at an Ivy League law school, she had more or less reached the pinnacle of academia. At that point, if people thought of her as white, they would assume she got the job entirely on the merits, without benefit of racial preferences. Not all minority professors could pull that off. If Warren were black, for instance, everyone would know it, and there would be no way of escaping the stereotype. Because she is--or can pass for--white, she was in a position to have the best of both worlds, advancing through affirmative action, then enjoying the white privilege of appearing to have gotten ahead solely on the merits. [*] The Blue Class Group have been wishing so pathetically (and at such length) that this cup would pass from them prontíssimo that to pile on some wampum a little heavier than Sachem Howie’s [**] seems advisable and lures irresistibly, though his freelordship of Carr did in fact supply the critic bit of "intellectual foundation" that Their Worships are resolute to overlook, viz., "It’s about Affirmative Action, mostly." Happy days. _____ [*] Though it is not Paddy’s rôle to do the work of othervolks’ Thought Police, yet ¿does not the good Doctor’s bottomline savour of heresy? Perhaps the exact wordin’ of the freelordly an’ kiddiemagisterial contribution was simply not given enough thought, yet it sounds to me as if a loophole is here bein’ left deliberately for the possibility that sometimes this "white privilege of appearing" falls into C.V.’s that do not strictly merit it. Now that possibility was, as I understand these things, more or less why the obamanation of Affirmative Action was invented or discovered in the first place, so I am puzzled that Dr. Tarantula should want to mention it. More puzzled, that he mentions it thus in passing, for if his freelordship genuinely believes what I take to be hinted at, it would take at least a dozen full _Jingoe_ op-ed sections to persuade the rest of the pack that they have been makin’ a mistake about A. A. all these many moons. [**] "A *little* heavier," I have written, for by definition to be an op-ed Jingoe is to be a clown in the path of Lord Mammon. Nobody could plausibly maintain that Dr. Tarantula has not earned his cap an’ bells fair an’ square.an’ not by marryin’ the boss’s daughter. In what I have ‘borrowed’ above, there is the delightful suggestion that Her Beatitude can probably escape stereotyping and ‘pass’. As for the part I passed over, but which all loyal devotees of "intellectual foundation" will study conscientiously, his freelordship begins with a funny: To judge by photographs, Elizabeth Warren, the leftist Democratic professor running for Scott Brown’s Senate seat, is as white as a polar bear’s ghost after a dental bleaching in a snowstorm. Once again it sounds like some room for doubt is bein’ left, that if Dr. Tarantula were ever actually admitted to the Effulgent Presence, he might change his mind. In this case it is plain, however, that his freelordship is spoofin’ his fishwrap’s customer base. The "dental bleachin'" gag an' the "can pass for a Cauc[k]" gag are not easy to reconcile in logic, but I assume that just goes to show that neither the one nor the other was original-intented as more than a gag. Notice, incidentally, that when Party neocomrades are talkin' to one another, they say "Scott Brown’s Senate seat," with no pious viennsausage about that article of political furniture really belongin' to The People.

Having gone that far, Paddy and Eye decided that there would be no point in troubling the Blue Blazers’ dogmatic slumbers with a scribble so easy to dismiss as merely uppity.