“This resurgent interest in privilege is just noblesse oblige for millennials.”

I sat at a table in the imitation café in the basement of the campus library. My sandwich was untouched, and I spun a coffee stirrer between my fingers as I spoke.

“The basic argument is the same: some men are fortunate at birth and so they have a moral duty to those who weren’t born lucky. Aristocrats—and white boys from Long Island—have an obligation to everyone else, and by acknowledging that obligation they’re superficially doing good, right? But they’re also reaffirming their social status. It seems so progressive on its face, so generous, so benign, but in reality it buttresses the system.  You’re saying, ‘Yes, I was born white or male or rich, but don’t worry, I am going to advocate for you.’” (I lisped the word “advocate.”) “I’m your ally, and I’m not going to behave in a way that’s below my station or makes you feel embarrassed about yours. It’s all about codes of behavior. It’s medieval.”

I could feel my tone becoming passionate. I hoped no one was looking. “Is that all we aspire to? Aristocratic condescension? What happened to dismantling the system? Killing the masters? Have we raised a generation too weak and jaundiced for revolution?”

The man seated across the table from me was a professor of literature, specializing in modern American poetry, and one of the last templars of New Criticism. Recently tenured and more recently divorced, he had on more than one occasion been spotted advancing on drunken graduate students at faculty parties. It was widely believed that it would only be a matter of time before he showed up to a backyard barbecue in the company of a freshman on a sports scholarship. Track and field was the popular consensus until a fellow from the math department, an expert in applied statistics, pointed out that the school had been aggressively recruiting for the women’s basketball team.

“You know,” he said, returning his half-eaten danish to its paper plate. “I think we all imagine our own oppressor.”

He had rings on each of his fingers, a hard rock affectation that complemented his black logoless t-shirt and dark jeans, and he used them as wheels to roll his fist across the tabletop as he spoke.

“We’re all lying in the street with our mouths on the curb. We can feel the sole of a jackboot at the back of our heads—every minute of every day it applies a little more pressure—but we can’t see the man (if it is a man) behind the boot. We can’t lift our heads up high enough to look, and frankly, we’re afraid of what he’ll do if we try. So our mind fills in the face. We see our father or our ex, or the kids who were bigger and louder than us in middle school. Or, if we’re sufficiently educated, we turn to abstractions: racism, the patriarchy, the petite bourgeoisie, God.”

He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. “It’s all just desperate fantasy. ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ for sociology majors. The movement of shadows on the sidewalk before the foot comes down.”

I raised my coffee stirrer in protest. I was about to mention institutionalized discrimination, redlining, Tuskegee, golden parachutes, Citizens United, and—I shrugged.

“I can see why you would say that,” I said.