My freshman year in high school, the administration's diversity czars lined my whole class across the gym and read a series of statements, each accompanied by a command to step forward or backward. “If you are white, take two steps forward.” “If your parents went to college, take one step forward.” “If you are gay, take two steps back.” Before long, we were sorted according to our supposed privilege—and I'm pretty sure all of us, from the children of real estate moguls up front to the mostly black financial aid students in the rear, felt awful about where we stood.

That was almost nine years ago, and the incident upset many students and parents. Today, the phrase “check your privilege”—that is, to acknowledge your relative advantage—is commonplace, as is the tallying of privilege. A recent Buzzfeed "How Privileged Are You?" quiz asks readers to check off a hundred statements—from "I am white" to "I consider myself to be physically attractive"—and spits out a score between 0 (“under-privileged”) and 100 (“the most privileged”). Last year, Gawker created "The Privilege Tournament," a March Madness–like bracket that included "race" and "gender" regions but also "allergies."

All this has prompted something of an anti-anti-privilege backlash. You'll find no better example of that than Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang's diatribe in The Princeton Tory last month, "Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege."

The essay, which caught The New York Times's attention last week, was Fortgang’s response to comments that he should check his privilege because he is a white man. “I actually went and checked the origins of my privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can’t possibly comprehend,” Fortgang writes. He then recounts his grandparents' persecution during the Holocaust and their hard work in America. People who tell him to check his privilege, he says, are to be blamed for “diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive.”

What Fortgang misses is that the concept of privilege isn't meant to be about history. It’s about the benefits accrued today by members of advantaged classes. When people call Fortgang privileged, they're not referring to his grandparents' escape from the Nazis. They're referring to his status as an affluent white American man who attends one of the top universities in the world. Fortgang may have worked hard to get to Princeton, and he should be proud of that accomplishment, but he did have a head start in the race.