Posted from a coffee shop

Found via the usual via - as in, I'm no longer sure - an interesting post (part of a series) about "hipsters on food stamps." The Last Psychiatrist, whoever this is, effectively argues something like what I have as well: it's not right to refer to the unemployable or service-sector workers who happen to be white and college-educated as 'privileged,' if this privilege is purely theoretical and in no practical sense transferrable. Put another way: 'cultural capital' is an interesting idea to toss around in seminar, but it doesn't pay the rent. We're so accustomed to talking about whichever traits as conferring privilege that we have no real way to express the many situations these days where someone will have whichever outward signs of not-remotely-underclass, but will be deep in educational debt, with nothing much on the horizon. Within a broad caste of people who look and dress about the same, there's a huge diversity, cushion-wise. Debt or not? Trust-fund or not? Rich-and-generous parents? Well-connected parents? And so on. So you end up with a bunch of liberal-arts grads apologizing for Lena Dunham-level privilege that they don't even have. Anyway, I hadn't seen anyone else making that argument.

But the post itself goes in some directions I can't quite get behind:

1) Are we talking about hipsters or women? (Did I fail at life and major in French, leading to permanent unemployability, as a woman, or as a hipster?)

2) Everyone likes to laugh at English majors, but I'd thought that trad liberal arts majors often correlate with having gone to a well-regarded college, and that if you do this, you get hired.

3) The tendency of elite-college grads who seem to be drifting at 22, 23 to have their lives sorted out by 27, 28 suggests that... something is going on. Either the name of the college helps, or whichever factors got you in in the first place (work ethic, family connections) kicked in once it mattered. Or maybe whiteness and/or cultural capital do pay off, after all.