A Fisher in a barrel

The time has come to start revising Madame la Dissertation. (Not that that's how you say it in French. That's just what she's called.) I have two pitchers in the fridge: one of cold-brewed iced coffee, and one of matcha iced tea. Both homemade and delicious. And I'm digging around looking for diet Coke, because a task of this nature requires the hard stuff.

So let us turn away from my own undercaffeinated/underaspartamed state, and towards the wider world.

This Jezebel post calling out the white privilege of Abigail Fisher is making the rounds. (Not the first "open letter" to Fisher making that point, let it be known.) And... there are fish, you see, and sometimes they're collected in barrels. (Pickled herring? Why are they in a barrel?) If one wishes to shoot one of these fish, one does not need to be a particularly skilled marksperson. I mean, if you're going to make a federal case of something literally...

Normally, when there's an internet-wide pile-on against someone whose crime is being mediocre given whichever advantages, I have some sympathy, because man, that has to sting. There's often a sense - barring, even, any expression of entitlement, let alone federal-case-level entitlement - that those who have whichever advantages and don't excel are somehow terrible people who should be ashamed of themselves. When the reality might be that the face obstacles, all right, but they're things like not being that gifted academically, or not actually caring whether they get into an elite college. And the comments about Fisher's looks (not so much at Jezebel as on the entire rest of the internet), please. Would she have been more entitled to a slot at UT had she been more Olivia Wilde-esque? (Are her PR people keeping her less glam and be-eyeliner'd than she might be because it conveys an image of a serious scholar?)

But is Fisher really oblivious to her whiteness? (Also, is she instigating all of this, or merely consenting to have it instigated on her behalf? She was mighty young when all of this started.) This is one of these things where, whatever you think of the broader issue she represents, her story seems tailor-made to bring about this exact kind of outrage. If she'd been in the top 10% of her high school class, problem solved. It just seems like, if there's any white person around who's gotten an earful already about how whiteness puts her at an advantage, it's Fisher. And it's not a message she cares to receive. Of all people, she just doesn't strike me as someone who cares if her privilege is showing.