A small story from a small town grew legs and got around last week. A local essay contest prompting high school students in and around Westport, Connecticut to consider the role “white privilege” has played in their lives didn’t sit right with a handful of parents and a mob of Internet hecklers, according to the Associated Press and the New York Times. The Christian Science Monitor, Independent, New York Post, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and The Onion joined the pile.
The setting for the entirely optional prompt (wealthy suburb of New York City, overwhelmingly white) and the uppity spin on what mild pushback it incurred (the Times, ever hip, contrasts backward parents with enlightened high schoolers: “students were largely fine with the question… adults had much more to say”) together make the best-imaginable justification for a “discourse on intersectional diversity,” what progressive educators often aim for.
The prompt, for a 1,000-word essay, asks about white privilege, “To what extent do you think this privilege exists? What impact do you think it has had in your life—whatever your racial or ethnic identity—and in our society more broadly?” As one local woman, offended by the idea, pointed out to the AP, and therefore also to readers of the Times, Post, Blaze, and so on: We welcome anyone who can afford to live here, regardless of race. Aye, there’s the rub.
The essay needn’t be about the town, but the news coverage aptly is. Westport’s done well as a self-pleased liberal paradise for suburb-bound New Yorkers turned off by the stodginess of neighboring Darien and New Canaan. It earned that reputation, sort of, in two ways: Wealthy patrons and party-throwers probably made well-situated Westport a popular summer escape for artists and writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald may or may not have looked up from the first few pages of what would be The Great Gatsby and seen the neighbors’ outer beacon glowing green at the end of their jutting breakwater. In the The Stepford Wives, Joanna—a photographer before she (spoiler) becomes a robot wearing a Laura Ashley dress and pushing a grocery cart—is advised by her analyst to move to wonderful free-spirited Westport instead. Her awful husband will have none of it, and they stay on in Stepford.
The artsy vibe commonly gets credit for Westport’s progressivism, but, historically anyway, leaders in the local Jewish community deserve it. According to local writer and educator Dan Woog, it’s all thanks to lawyer Leo Nevas that Westport realtors ceased signing “gentleman’s agreements” decades before surrounding towns would suspend the practice. These notorious restrictions prevented the showing of homes and commercial properties to Jewish families. (Nevas’s intervention brought, among other blessings, Main Street mainstays Oscar’s Deli and Klein’s Department Store—both more recently replaced by ritzy retail chains.)
Becoming home to the world’s largest hedge fund added an element of technocratic meritocracy to the inclusivity claim. It’s less white privilege than privilege in the more conventional sense that divides teens born into stratospheric wealth from those more moderately well-off—and it’s precisely this privilege matrix that makes a town like Westport seem news-worthily clueless to the rest of the world. It also makes We welcome anyone who can afford to live here an excellent starting point for an award-winning essay, in the opinion of this former English teacher.
I’ll wager the three award-winning essays, worth $1,000, $750, and $500 to a volunteer committee on multiculturalism, will note implicit bias and give a nod to the racial breakdown of public and private schools but then reach for an even bigger question. Because, particularly now that the essay is inseparable from its context, there’s something more underlying Westport’s variably oblivious progressivism, something in which racial diversity and a lack thereof play but a part. With personal testimony baked in, a few age-appropriate literary allusions sprinkled on top, and a humble hand with the moral prescriptions—it’s a formula for laughs, tears, and, thanks to attendant hype in the headlines, probably wider recognition for whatever clever young writer pulls it off.
