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Likewise a lot of the early men and women who fled the Irish Famines — so white and pale from endless hunger they could pass as ghosts. Sure, they left a lot of their families either starving — literally — or past all emaciation and already into the grave. But they came to the East Coast as servants, went off to the holiday of a seal hunt, or chewed a living out of the thin soil and treacherous sea for generations. It was life as one big open-air picnic — diversified by endless corn beef and cabbage dinners, and the beautiful thought that they didn’t ever have to worry about money or goods, because they didn’t have any money and there weren’t any goods.

But they were white — so privileged crowned their every hour. Up at 4 a.m. to go to sea for the men, up earlier for the women to light the stoves, start the breakfast for their masters, and work their fingers to the bone serving their betters. A privileged life? You betcha.

War was always one of the crowning moments of white privilege. The poorest whites, the least educated, always went to war in the biggest numbers. And there their privilege was to crowd in rat- and rain-filled trenches, huddled next to dead comrades, and then to throw themselves “over the top” to face a frenzy of artillery and rifle fire, where loss of life and loss of limb was preordained.

The history of all peoples is an anthology of pain and sorrow, hardship and brutality, intermingled for the lucky ones with moments of delightful exchange

I think you could easily run through history, recent or distant, and find a hundred or a thousand more examples of such pernicious entitlement. But if I may drop the ironic mode, let’s not. Let us instead agree that the history of all peoples is an anthology of pain and sorrow, hardship and brutality, intermingled for the lucky ones with moments — mainly domestic or social — of delightful exchange: of weddings, summer gatherings, a little kindness here, a little success there.