I strongly urge Tal Fortgang to check his privilege. The Princeton freshman’s proud and unapologetic defense of white privilege has been in constant circulation on Facebook since TIME Magazine republished it, immediately launching Fortang into Internet infamy. Since then, he has become a mouthpiece for white privilege as well as a new conservative prodigy (or wunderkind, given his penchant for dictional choices such as “Weltanschauung”).

Before dismissing Fortgang as a petulant specimen of white privilege with an admirable family backstory and a limited understanding of how racism (a truly existing force in this country) still operates, it is worth discussing the attempted merits of his argument. It is especially true that labels of race and ethnicity often undermine academic and personal achievements: for example, if I were to be accepted to Fortgang’s alma mater, I know that my detractors would cite affirmative action as the basis of my college acceptance. Such a claim would ignore my artistic and academic achievements (being Latino doesn’t assure a 4.0 GPA in high school, after all), and much like Fortgang’s fears, I would be negated by a label (to quote Kierkegaard).

Fortgang’s points, however, are muddled by his ignorance (or avoidance) of the racial topics that make affirmative action a necessity in this country. Although he is particularly idealistic when it comes to describing a Napoleonic meritocracy in the U.S., such talk disregards the rampant inequality and socioeconomic adversity that minorities still face in this country: the statistics have been reposted in several rebuttals across the Internet, but fellow Princetonian Daniel Gastfriend’s reply best illustrates these disparate realities.

“U.S. Children growing up in poor areas often attend public schools with significantly less funding than those born in affluent areas (a disparity that does not exist in most developed countries); almost one in five American women are survivors of completed or attempted rape; individuals with non-conforming sexual and gender identities face high rates of workplace discrimination and violent crime; blacks are given harsher prison sentences for the same offenses than whites; resumes with black-sounding names are 50 percent less likely to get called back than equivalent ones with white-sounding names, and emails to University professors with minority or female names are 25 percent less likely to get responses than those with white male names; the list goes on,” writes Gastfriend in his open letter.

The manicured lawns of Princeton, a school whose academic prestige still carries outdated WASP-y and elitist stereotypes, are far from the ghettos (or euphemized “lower-income neighborhoods”) in which de facto segregation and other forms of oppression thrive. These unpleasant realities are also evident in U.S. policies recognizable to anyone who claims to be as politically active as Fortgang: the immigration and same-sex marriage legislations in Arizona, for example, are blatantly discriminatory examples that prove that white privilege still reigns.

The indigestible reality that white males are very privileged and very much in control have made Fortgang’s undermining of such truths popular among the political right. Another component of the piece’s popularity is its powerful story of his grandparents who, in their transformation from Holocaust survivors to successful Americans, embody the American Dream. Through this, Fortgang clings to a social application of Lamarckian inheritance, citing his grandparents’ struggle as a pretext for whining about his own histrionics that pale in comparison to what his grandparents faced.

Therefore, Fortgang’s cries are largely unfounded: I doubt he left behind a home country. I doubt English was his second language. I doubt he had to acclimatize to American culture. And I seriously doubt that he faced taunts based on ethnicity, which is something I had to overcome, despite my privileged upbringing in the suburban comforts of Boca Raton. If my experiences should serve as any indication, there are a lot more narratives “told by sex or [by] skin color” than Fortgang would like to admit.

It would not be enough to forgive Fortgang as a naïve college freshman with a less-than-cosmopolitan “Weltanschauung.” Admittedly, Fortgang, as a young adult, has not experienced firsthand the forces of inequality that are conveniently absent from his piece. A glance at his Twitter feed, however, does reveal his participation as a discriminatory presence, with vehement and threatening tweets espousing the Israeli bombing of Palestine. Such views from Fortgang render his idealism empty—in calling for the destruction of the Palestinian people, the unapologetic Fortgang is waving his banner as a member of the “racist patriarchy” whose existence he denies in his editorial. And in doing so, Fortgang, already a hero for many, is exercising his white male privilege—namely, one in need of checking.