In Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left, I tried to make the case that left-wing activists should spend time learning how to break down the logical structure of arguments and steer clear of logical fallacies. Part of my case involved selling them on the importance of being able to debunk right-wing arguments. Another part of it, though, was about how an indifference to logical precision has contributed to the pathologies of the contemporary left.

Here’s the way I put it:

A left that only knows how to shame, call out, privilege-check, and diagnose the allegedly unsavory motivations of people who disagree with us will lose a lot of persuadable people whose material interests should put them on our side. What’s more, left-wing people who really do share all the same long-term goals often find themselves disagreeing about strategy and tactics. Should we advocate a Universal Jobs Guarantee (UJG) or Universal Basic Income (UBI)? Or are all demands for radical reforms within the current system counterproductive distractions from the fight against capitalism itself? Should social democrats and socialists try to form a labor party? Can we take over the Democratic Party? Should we just focus on non-electoral activism? These are complicated questions. If we’re out of practice using the kind of reasoning skills enhanced and sharpened by the study of logic, if we find that we’re just better at privilege-checking and snark and diagnosing people’s motivations than we are at making compelling arguments for our positions, the inevitable consequence is that when we argue with each other about these points of intra-left disagreement, all of those weapons are turned inward. That kind of thing makes the left about as appealing to potential converts as an endless Twitter war about race science with toxic right-wing logicbros. We can do better.

But aside from how it turns people away, is there anything substantively off with the practice of privilege-checking? Though I didn’t address this head-on the book, I want to bring up a fallacy I included in an appendix, which can form the beginning of a fuller answer to this question.

There is a fallacy known as Affirming the Consequent. Here’s how it works.

Premise (1): If p, then q

Premise (2): q

Conclusion (3): p

Logicians call an if-then statement a “conditional.” The “if” part of a conditional is called the “antecedent” and the “then” part is called the “consequent.” Affirming the Consequent is the reasoning mistake that involves asserting the q-statement (the consequent) in a hypothetical and using that to conclude the p-statement (the antecedent).

To see why it’s a fallacy, consider this example:

(1): If Mitt Romney became president in 2016, a Republican became president in 2016.

(2): A Republican became president in 2016.

(3): Mitt Romney became president in 2016.

Affirming the antecedent is perfectly fine, because if Romney became president then it’s guaranteed a Republican became president. But affirming the consequent is not fine, and is in fact a logical mistake, because if a Republican became president it does not necessarily mean Romney became president.

What does this have to do with privilege-checking? Here is what I wrote in the appendix:

An all-too-common form of this on the left has to do with “checking one’s privilege.” If Suzy is being blinkered by her privilege, that might lead her to advocate a certain position, but inferring from this conditional and the fact that Suzy does advocate that position that she came to that conclusion by failing to take things into account that a less privileged person would have confronted, is to fallaciously assert the consequent. Suzy might have perfectly good reasons — perhaps also ones that have persuaded many less privileged people!

So this is part of what’s wrong with a lot of the discourse surrounding “privilege” on the left. Just because some form of epistemic privilege coincides with a person holding to a particular belief doesn’t ipso facto suggest anything about that belief’s reasonableness.

But I tend to think there’s something much more basically wrong with the way we talk about “privilege”—not the glaringly obvious “privilege” of the wealthy, but the various forms of demographic “privilege” that anyone who’s logged any time in left-wing or more broadly progressive circles is likely to hear a lot about. To see what it is, let’s scan one of the foundational texts of “privilege” talk, Peggy McIntosh’s essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

McIntosh didn’t invent the notion of white privilege. Its roots go back at least to W. E. B. DuBois, who talked about the “public and psychological” wage of whiteness. His idea was basically that white workers in racist societies accept the lower wages that result from the lack of unity between workers of different races in exchange for the psychological benefit of feeling powerful and superior to non-whites. DuBois was a Marxist who regarded this as a form of false consciousness. He thought the “psychological” wage was a kind of fool’s gold that blinded white workers to their objective self-interest. Later “privilege” theorists, however, made no such judgments. By the time we get to McIntosh, she’s saying things like this:

I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to [boost] women’s statuses, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women’s disadvantages.

When McIntosh turns from “male privilege” to “white privilege,” she construes the latter as “an invisible package of unearned assets” that she can “count on cashing in each day.” But, she also says, if not for the process of self-discovery that she hopes others will also come to have, she would have remained “oblivious” to her white privilege.

What’s interesting about McIntosh’s framing is that she couldn’t be more explicit about something that many casual users of the categories she did so much to popularize (“male privilege,” “white privilege,” etc.) tend to leave implicit — that the use of the word “privilege” frames the various goods in question as things that the people who have them should not have. It’s not just that women and black people should have more. It’s that men and white people should have less.

The centerpiece of the essay is a long list of specific white privileges. For example, #20: “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.”

Or #25: “If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.”

Some of the items on the list are odd in various ways, most notably #12: “I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.”

The second and third parts of this are real frustrations for many people but the idea that the bit about music shops is an exclusively “white” privilege is a head-scratcher. Is Peggy McIntosh a visitor from an alternate dimension where the history of American popular music is entirely different?

These oddities aside, the items on her list tend to fall into one of two categories: (a) actual examples of unjust disparities between the treatment of white people and members of racial minorities (e.g., the traffic cop example) or (b) examples of frustrations that result simply from being a member of a cultural minority in any society (e.g., not every store, including major ones, will offer an exhaustive supply of your staple foods).

Most of her disciples have focused on common examples of type (a). For example, I’ve frequently seen people on social media post about some armed encounter between the police and a militia group whose members are all white with a comment about how, since none of the militia members were killed in the conflict, this is explicable by their having “white privilege.”

I agree that the contrast between such cases and the numerous instances of police officers shooting black people under otherwise similar circumstances reveals a troubling and very real disparity between the treatment of white people and the treatment of black people. So do a great many of McIntosh’s type-(a) examples. But calling these instances of “unearned privileges” enjoyed by whites gets things exactly wrong.

First, it only makes sense if we assume that the police should be as trigger-happy in interactions with white people as they all too often are with black people (rather than erring on the side of not spilling blood in both cases), that white people should be subject to grating condescension of the type embodied by “credit to your race” comments, that traffic cops should pull over white drivers for arbitrary and unfair reasons outside of their control, and so on. Why should “not being treated in these disgusting ways” be something that anyone has to earn? Shouldn’t it be the default for all human beings?

Second, as McIntosh’s essay makes abundantly clear, framing these disparities in terms of privilege rather than oppression lends itself to a way of thinking about them that emphasizes the psychodrama of the “privileged” realizing how good they have it (and then feeling bad about that) rather than anything actually useful like organizing the oppressed for better treatment.

Finally, speaking of organizing people, McIntosh seems to revel in precisely the feature of “privilege” discourse that makes it so obviously politically counterproductive. Let’s roll back the tape to that first paragraph I quoted above:

I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to [boost] women’s statuses, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s.

In other words, men in these ritualized “realizing how good you have it and then feeling bad about that” sessions are telling McIntosh, “We support feminist demands. We have no reason to oppose them!” And McIntosh is insisting, “No, you absolutely do have a reason to oppose them. What we’re asking for is not in your interests.”

Why on earth would you frame things this way if you actually wanted to win?