Except it’s not accurate. As McIntosh told Christian Parenti, a journalist and associate professor of economics at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Justice, “I did not invent the exercises you refer to, and in fact I urge people not to undertake such exercises. They are too simple for complex experiences relating to power and privilege. I don’t know where they originated.”
The truth, as Parenti explains in an essay for nonsite, is more bizarre. Parenti traces the privilege walk — or the “privilege shuffle,” as it was first known — to workshops developed by the scholar and activist Erica Sherover-Marcuse in the early 1980s for a nonprofit called New Bridges, which “taught high-school students to ‘unlearn oppression.’” Sherover-Marcuse, who died relatively young, of cancer, in 1988 (a year before McIntosh’s essay was published), was a former student and then second wife of Herbert Marcuse. Herbert’s psychoanalytically inflected theory of revolution is an unsurprising source of Erica’s thinking. What is surprising: the role of Scientology.
Parenti, following a tip from Erica’s sister, looked into something called Re-evaluaton Counseling. “Doing so was like finding an evolutionary missing link,” Parenti writes. “RC is to the origins of left psychobabble as the Lucy fossil was to the paleontology of human evolution.” Founded in 1952 by L. Ron Hubbard’s friend Harvey Jackins, who had been kicked out of the Communist Party, RC was committed “to engage in, conduct, and teach the art and science of Dianetics” — but specifically in service of left-wing goals. It was Scientology for leftists.
As Parenti tells it, Sherover-Marcus borrowed the rituals of introspection, repentance, and conversion from Re-evaluation Counseling and introduced them to educational spaces, where, de-Scientologized and stripped of their more esoteric trappings, they remain to this day. This is, in other words, a secularization narrative. Read the whole strange story here.
Write to me, at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.
Yours,
Len Gutkin