### Or, On the Unfortunate Business of Having Privilege and Being Human
*For everyone who was made to apologise for the conditions of their existence, and everyone whose suffering became someone else's social capital.*
My dearest undesirables,
I am writing to you because somewhere in India, at this very moment, somebody is being informed that they are too privileged to suffer.
Perhaps it is you.
Perhaps you attended an English-medium school. Perhaps your parents owned a house. Perhaps you possess a surname, an accent, an education, a vocabulary, a complexion, a neighbourhood, or a set of cultural references that have been entered into evidence against you.
Perhaps you have read a book.
God help you if you have read two.
Somewhere, somebody is assembling an indictment of your existence, and the remarkable thing is that they believe they are performing an act of emancipation.
You have been found guilty of privilege, an offence for which there is no acquittal, only an indefinite sentence of public self-abasement.
You may apologise, but that will merely confirm the original charge. You may refuse, but that will demonstrate your entitlement. You may acknowledge your advantages, but you will be told that acknowledgment is insufficient. You may attempt to change the conditions that produced those advantages, but somebody will explain that your participation is itself a form of appropriation.
You have entered a political theology in which original sin has been retained, redemption has been abolished, and the priesthood has acquired a social media account.
Welcome, my loves, to slopulism.
***
I want to begin by telling you something that should not be politically controversial.
You are allowed to have had a fortunate childhood and an unhappy life.
You are allowed to possess economic security and experience profound loneliness.
You are allowed to inherit cultural capital and remain estranged from the society that bestowed it upon you.
You are allowed to benefit from an unjust institution while working to abolish the injustice it perpetuates.
You are even allowed to be wrong without your mistake becoming proof of the moral degeneracy of an entire social class.
None of this means that privilege is imaginary.
Caste exists. Class exists. Inherited wealth, social networks, English-language fluency, gender, religion, and access to institutions distribute opportunities with terrible inequality. There is no serious emancipatory politics that can dispense with an analysis of these arrangements.
But you, my dear, are not an arrangement.
You are a person.
And the distinction is more consequential than the contemporary economy of indignation would have us believe.
For somewhere along the way, a necessary critique of structural privilege was converted into the pleasure of punishing its presumed beneficiaries.
The object of politics ceased to be the transformation of social relations and became the moral degradation of individuals.
An inherited advantage became an inherited guilt.
And a theory of power became a competitive sport in which the most sophisticated political intervention was to tell somebody to check their privilege.
Preferably before checking the facts.
***
My loves,
I have watched a peculiar revolution unfold in the digital public sphere.
It has all the rituals of radical politics and remarkably few of its material ambitions.
There are denunciations, confessions, tribunals, purges, and periodic revelations that somebody once said something objectionable in 2014.
There are manifestos composed almost entirely of adjectives.
There are people who can identify the caste implications of a dinner invitation but cannot explain who owns the building in which the dinner is taking place.
There are people who have turned intersectionality into a seating arrangement.
There are people who believe that speaking with sufficient hostility to an upper-class person constitutes a redistribution of wealth.
And there are people who have become extraordinarily influential by announcing that influence is itself a form of oppression.
What a magnificent economy.
The currency is moral indignation. The commodity is credibility. The means of production are a smartphone, a grievance, and a sufficiently obedient audience.
The product is slop: endlessly reproducible political language, stripped of history, institutional analysis, and the difficult business of changing anything.
And because slopulism requires the constant appearance of political urgency, it must manufacture an inexhaustible supply of moral emergencies.
A badly phrased sentence becomes an event.
A disagreement becomes violence.
A social embarrassment becomes evidence of structural domination.
A person's cultural tastes become a reliable index of their political virtue.
Everybody is guilty, everybody is performing, and everybody is watching.
Meanwhile, the landlord collects the rent.
***
To those of you who have been humiliated in the name of social justice, I want to offer neither absolution nor revenge.
I do not wish to tell you that you have no privilege. Some of you have a great deal of it. Some of you have inherited advantages whose history includes the dispossession of others.
Those histories matter.
But you are not obliged to spend your life performing a ritual of shame for an audience that has no intention of permitting your transformation.
Guilt can be politically useful when it produces responsibility.
It becomes politically reactionary when it produces only obedience.
And the demand that you publicly hate yourself is not necessarily an invitation to justice.
Sometimes it is merely somebody else's desire to exercise power over you, dressed in the respectable vocabulary of liberation.
I would like you to recognise the difference.
You may owe restitution. You may owe solidarity. You may owe a redistribution of opportunities, a surrender of institutional monopolies, a reconsideration of the assumptions by which your advantages became invisible.
But you do not owe strangers the spectacle of your psychic destruction.
And you do not owe anyone the right to define the totality of your existence through the circumstances of your birth.
A society committed to emancipation must make it possible for people to change.
Otherwise, social justice becomes indistinguishable from a doctrine of hereditary damnation.
***
And now, my dearest, a word about India.
What an extraordinary country in which to misunderstand privilege.
Here, hierarchy has been refined over centuries into an elaborate architecture of graded inequality. Caste does not simply determine who stands above whom. It determines who may claim dignity, whose labour is visible, whose knowledge is credible, whose suffering is recognisable, and who is permitted to consider their social position a personal achievement.
Ambedkar understood that the problem was not merely the arrogance of a few people at the top. It was a social order that distributed status through relations of superiority and inferiority.
To oppose such an order requires more than teaching its beneficiaries to feel embarrassed.
It requires dismantling the arrangements that reproduce it.
Yet slopulism has discovered a cheaper alternative.
Why struggle over land, wages, educational access, housing, public institutions, or the ownership of productive resources when one can instead prosecute somebody's accent?
Why organise workers when one can organise a pile-on?
Why examine the relation between caste capital and contemporary capitalism when one can announce that somebody's taste in literature is elitist?
It is not that these smaller cultural signs are meaningless. Language and taste can reproduce class power. The problem is the grotesque disproportion between the intensity of their prosecution and the poverty of the political programme attached to it.
The social order is left almost entirely intact.
Its beneficiaries are simply required to become more apologetic.
And its critics acquire an audience.
One could scarcely design a better arrangement for the preservation of inequality.
The privileged remain privileged, the dispossessed remain dispossessed, and the intermediary class of moral entrepreneurs becomes professionally indispensable.
Somewhere, a person is being denounced for enjoying French cinema.
The bulldozers continue their work.
***
I am especially writing to those of you who once believed that your education might provide a vocabulary for solidarity.
Those who studied history and found themselves accused of historical guilt.
Those who read theory and discovered that theory had become a series of accusations rather than a means of understanding the world.
Those who imagined that cosmopolitanism might produce an encounter with difference, only to find that difference had become a bureaucratic classification determining who was authorised to speak.
Those who tried to escape the provincialism of their upbringing and were informed that their escape was itself a privilege.
I know how tempting it must be to respond with contempt.
To conclude that the people invoking social justice are frauds, that the language of oppression is irredeemably corrupt, that egalitarian politics has been reduced to resentment.
But do not allow the vulgarisation of emancipatory language to persuade you that emancipation itself is vulgar.
The historical injuries are real, even when their contemporary interpreters are ridiculous.
There are people whose exclusion is not metaphorical, whose deprivation cannot be remedied by acquiring the correct vocabulary, whose lives are materially constrained by structures you may have been fortunate enough never to encounter.
They are not your enemies.
Nor are they necessarily represented by the person currently humiliating you on the internet.
This is the tragedy of slopulism: it converts legitimate demands for justice into a theatrical economy of antagonism, then presents the exhaustion and resentment it creates as proof of its political importance.
In its most destructive form, it manufactures reactionaries out of people who might otherwise have become allies.
And it mistakes this achievement for progress.
***
My beloved victims of privilege-bashing,
I want you to retain the capacity for embarrassment, but recover the capacity for thought.
I want you to be able to acknowledge your social advantages without collapsing into self-hatred.
I want you to recognise injustice without treating every personal encounter as an occasion for a moral census.
I want you to love literature without having to submit its author to a retrospective eligibility examination.
I want you to be able to speak English beautifully without believing that beauty is a crime.
I want you to learn another language, not because somebody has humiliated you into doing so, but because another world becomes available through it.
I want you to be able to enjoy a painting, a raga, a ghazal, a stupid film, an expensive meal, or a particularly bad joke without first calculating whether your pleasure is sufficiently representative of the Indian population.
And I want you to recognise that the freedom to enjoy these things is worth defending precisely because so many others have been denied it.
The solution to unequal access to culture is not the universal impoverishment of aesthetic life.
It is the expansion of that life.
The solution to elite education is not contempt for education.
It is the destruction of the conditions that make intellectual opportunity an inherited possession.
The solution to inherited privilege is not inherited humiliation.
It is a society in which the circumstances of birth cease to determine the possibilities of life.
Imagine that.
An emancipatory politics that actually emancipates.
***
There is also something I must say to those who have been genuinely deprived and subsequently offered privilege-bashing as compensation.
My dearest, you have been cheated twice.
First, by the social order that denied you access to the goods it distributes so unequally.
And second, by those who offered you the humiliation of its beneficiaries as a substitute for obtaining those goods yourself.
You deserved schools, housing, healthcare, employment, leisure, security, and the material freedom to determine the course of your own life.
You were offered the opportunity to call somebody an elitist.
You deserved an alteration in the distribution of power.
You were offered a redistribution of shame.
You deserved a future.
You were offered an enemy.
And because the pleasures of moral superiority are immediate, while the achievements of structural transformation are slow, the exchange can begin to feel like a victory.
But humiliation is a poor substitute for justice.
It can be pleasurable, even intoxicating, to watch somebody who once possessed social authority become an object of public ridicule.
Yet their embarrassment does not pay your rent.
Their apology does not improve your working conditions.
Their expulsion from a literary festival does not automatically open the institution to people who were previously excluded.
The destruction of an individual's reputation is not, by itself, the destruction of a hierarchy.
And a politics that cannot distinguish the two is not revolutionary.
It is merely punitive.
***
My loves,
I fear that India has become very good at confusing the circulation of political feeling with the practice of politics.
The feed is full of people having the correct emotional response to the incorrect object.
We are furious at strangers, tender toward abstractions, suspicious of complexity, and extraordinarily generous to anyone who can translate our private disappointments into public accusations.
The market has understood this perfectly.
It has discovered that resentment is scalable, outrage is renewable, humiliation is shareable, and ideological certainty requires almost no investment in public infrastructure.
Slopulism is not an interruption of neoliberal capitalism.
It is one of its most successful cultural products.
It turns the subject into an entrepreneur of injury, the audience into a tribunal, and political recognition into a form of competitive accumulation.
Even dissent becomes a performance indicator.
And the great achievement of the system is that everyone begins to experience their neighbour as the principal obstacle to freedom.
Not the employer who exploits them.
Not the institution that excludes them.
Not the state that abandons them.
Their neighbour.
The woman who speaks with the wrong accent.
The man who went to the wrong school.
The student who read the wrong book.
The person who has failed to display the correct quantity of remorse for a social position they did not choose.
And so we fight.
Not over the ownership of the world, but over who is entitled to feel most injured by it.
***
I would like to end with a declaration of love, although I suspect that love itself will shortly be denounced as insufficiently intersectional.
I love you not because you are innocent.
You may not be.
I love you not because you are oppressed.
You may not be.
I love you because the possibility of emancipation depends on the proposition that human beings are not reducible to their location within a hierarchy.
Your caste matters, but it is not the totality of your being.
Your class matters, but it cannot exhaust your moral imagination.
Your privileges matter, but they do not render your suffering fictitious.
Your injuries matter, but they do not confer unlimited authority over the lives of others.
And your political convictions matter, but their sincerity is no guarantee of their truth.
I want a country in which we are capable of making these distinctions again.
A country where the criticism of privilege produces institutional change rather than competitive humiliation.
Where solidarity is not a demand for confessions but a commitment to shared freedom.
Where people can admit complicity without surrendering their humanity.
Where the poor are not required to be virtuous, the rich are not presumed to be wise, and neither is encouraged to regard the other's degradation as a political accomplishment.
Where the vocabulary of liberation is rescued from those who have mistaken moral aggression for historical materialism.
And where a person may encounter another person without first asking to see their credentials as a victim.
Until then, my dearest undesirables, remain difficult.
Refuse the innocence that comes from denying your advantages.
Refuse the guilt that becomes a substitute for changing them.
Refuse the invitation to turn your injuries into a permanent professional identity.
Refuse the consolation of watching somebody else suffer.
Refuse the slop.
And should somebody demand that you check your privilege, by all means, check it.
Examine where it comes from. Ask what sustains it. Consider what you might do to alter the arrangements that reproduce it.
But when you have finished, do remember to check whether the person demanding your humiliation has mistaken their own appetite for power for the cause of justice.
**For you were not born to be somebody else's moral currency.**
You were born into history.
You are entitled to participate in changing it.
And you are allowed, in the meantime, to be human.
With all my love, and absolutely no request for a public apology,
*Clout Economics*
**P.S.** If they tell you that enjoying this letter is a sign of privilege, ask them whether disliking it counts as praxis.
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