Single moms are crying in eviction court. The federal moratorium ended last week. Billions of dollars remain available, but miles of bureaucracy stand between them and the money they need. It should piss everyone off. We’re donating and signing petitions.

Meanwhile, childless white dudes and girl bosses thought this would be a good moment to show off their new dream homes.

The timing is perfect.

You can try to exonerate them. You can go full Jesus and say, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

That leads to an interesting question:

Why don’t they know…?

We’ve made it pretty clear. I’m not just talking about my little blog. All across America, teachers and activists have tried to illuminate the destructive consequences of unexamined privilege. When you create enormous rifts between wealth and poverty, everyone suffers. Eventually, inequality hurts everyone. Instead of responding with grace and dignity, fragile white minds have used bans on critical race theory as a guise to exclude justice from curricula. They’ve passed new waves of voting laws.

If they can’t ignore us, they pitch man fits.

Like this one:

This guy got taped to a chair for being an asshole. After downing two drinks and fondling flight attendants, he proclaimed he was worth more than everyone on board because his parents were rich. And yet, it was the flight attendants who got suspended.

That’s privilege.

They’re leaving out the magic ingredient.

So the privilege club is spamming the internet with stories of their so-called success. You might ask, “What’s the big deal?”

I’ll tell you.

These stories are the sober versions of getting on a plane and loudly declaring to everyone how much you’re worth, then explaining how it should allow you to do and say whatever you want.

Plus, they leave out the magic ingredient.

Privilege.

Go ahead, roll your eyes if you want. It’s simply the truth. These stories leave out the little details about race, gender, and social class. They never ponder that maybe unconscious bias favored them, and that’s why they got promoted three times in a row.

Sanitized success stories do damage to our culture, and our economy. The authors might think they’re inspiring us.

They’re not.

It’s actually a form of gaslighting.

They presume the reason everyone else is struggling is because they have a bad attitude, or they don’t work hard enough. Hear this assumption a dozen times, and you start to believe it. You internalize the notion that you’re lazy, or that something’s wrong with you. So you stop advocating for yourself. You simply accept everything’s your fault. Worse, you try to implement someone else’s success plan. It doesn’t work.

You blame yourself again.

That’s exactly what the architects of privilege want everyone to do. It ensures they focus completely on their own personal wealth instead of looking at the bigger picture. It creates a steady demand for struggle porn, which becomes another income stream.

“Success” stories reinforce unconscious bias.

Yes, unconscious bias exists.

It’s well-documented.

If you’re a woman, people automatically question your intelligence and authority. They question your ethic. You have to work twice as hard to prove yourself. It’s even worse for black women. The same thing happens to men if they don’t have the “right” personality or mental framework. If you have a “disorder,” then you’re treated as a liability. You’re not given the same opportunities, even if you kick ass.

Of course, it’s bigger than that.

Regardless of your race or gender, you have to buy into the hierarchy if you want to move up it. If you reject capitalism, or do anything to signal different values, that costs you too. That’s how we wound up with the girl boss, a woman who gets ahead by being an asshole and throwing everyone under the bus, including other women.

There’s another problem with these stories, and it’s the promotion of entrepreneurship as the ultimate end of human endeavor.

You know, it’s not. It’s really, really not.

The world doesn’t need more entrepreneurs all falling over each other for startup cash, doing anything and everything they can to sell another shiny app for ten million bucks. We have enough.

What do we need? We need nurses. We need teachers and engineers. We need journalists. We need social workers.

We need activists.

They know what they’re doing.

The good people of the world are outnumbered and outgunned. We want to help. We use the resources we have.

It’s never enough.

Anyone who’s worked on the social justice side of reality knows the immense labor that goes into fighting. Sure, protests attract attention. The mainstream media loves to cover them. Behind all that, there’s teachers and nonprofit lawyers slowly dying over paperwork and meetings. It takes a huge amount of effort to get a group of human beings to do the right thing for another human being. It’s slow. It’s boring.

I’ve done this work.

You neglect your own health and well-being. You work all the time. You give up sleep. You give up money. You give up opportunities.

You give up your dream home.

You feel guilty anyway.

Then some asshole comes along and tells you he’s rich now because he worked hard in his 20s. They leave out the mommy and daddy who went to Harvard, then paid their tuition at NYU. They leave out the family connections and built-in social status that got them their first jobs. They leave out the support networks and everything else.

You want to punch them.

No, it’s not because you’re jealous. You don’t want them to suffer. You don’t want them to lose everything. It’s because of the arrogance. It’s because they don’t seem to have any problem marketing their success, oblivious to the obstacles that normal people face.

I’ve asked around.

You know who works hard in their 20s?

Everyone.

Just once, you’d like to hear one of these people admit they had lots of help, without piling on fine print and disclaimers, or trying to argue that everyone has some form of privilege. If they’re going to flaunt their success, it would be nice if they could be more specific than “I worked every day.” It would be nice if they acknowledge the head starts they got. It would be nice if they could name one thing they’re doing to make life easier for the single moms of the world, other than thinly veiled bragging. It would be nice if they could acknowledge the troubled world beyond their success, instead of exhorting everyone to ignore those problems.

That’s all.

Maybe it’s asking too much.

We’re not falling for it anymore.

America said they were declaring a war on poverty.

Instead, they declared war on the poor.

This is what makes me so angry about “success stories.” These people have no idea what’s really going on. They don’t want to know. Of course, the “success stories” and struggle porn are a symptom of a much deeper attitude ingrained in the American psyche. It’s the attitude that wealth equals intelligence and moral worth. This idea goes back centuries. It willfully ignores how the real foundation of their success wasn’t entrepreneurship or hard work. It was the progressive movement, which gave their parents safety nets and support networks to build wealth and stability. We need more progressive thinking, not more entrepreneurs and digital nomads.

Something has happened the last couple of years that gives me hope. These “rags to riches” stories have lost some of their traction. Honestly, I’m glad we’re seeing through these toxic narratives.

These stories aren’t just innocent musings.

They’re a kind of propaganda that tricks us into supporting inequality, trading our democracy for a bad lottery ticket. It’s just two drinks away from shouting about your rich parents on an airplane.

Jesus was wrong about assholes.

They know what they do.