“PRIVILEGE” IS JUST AN EXCUSE TO TREAT THOSE SEEN AS CLASS ENEMIES WORSE: Colleges Got Comfortable Talking About Privilege. Now It’s Being Scrutinized.

The newsletter seemed innocuous. In January, the chief diversity officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine kicked off her “Monthly Diversity Digest” with a list of nearby events for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Then Sherita Hill Golden outlined a “diversity word of the month”: privilege.

“Privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group,” Golden wrote. “Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups.” Privileged groups, she continued, included white people, people without physical disabilities, men, Christians, and English-speaking people.

Administrators and faculty members have been parroting similar definitions for years. This time, however, it struck a nerve online.

“John Hopkins just sent out this hit list of people automatically guilty of ‘privilege’ whether they know it or not,” wrote an account on X called End Wokeness, which has over two million followers. The post included screenshots of Golden’s newsletter. Powerful voices soon chimed in, such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.
A Republican congressman even called on the university to fire her, saying her behavior was “not expected from an institution that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the federal government — including dollars to fund that office of Chief Diversity Officer.”

Last week, Golden resigned as chief diversity officer. She remains at Johns Hopkins as a professor of endocrinology and metabolism.

Treating people differently on the basis of race, sex, religion, disability status, etc. is in violation of federal law, even though universities pretend it’s not.