A San Francisco high school teacher wrote an Op-ed stating that Senator Bernie Sanders “manifests a privilege” to wear his meme-evocative investiture suit.
Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, a former UC Berkeley professor, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that the Vermont senator’s election over recycled woolen gloves was integrated into her class discussion of U.S. diversity and discrimination .
Initially, on the day of the inauguration, Seyer-Ochi said his class spoke of the deepest meanings of the historic day, including “the vulnerability of democracy” and “the power of ritual” and gender.
Sanders, the professor said, wasn’t even on his radar until it became an instant Internet sensation about his gloves and brown parka.
“I was baffled and wrapped up as an individual as I struggled to be my best teacher possible. What have I seen? What did I think my students should see? Seyer-Ochi wrote.
“A rich man, incredibly well-mannered and privileged, who appears perhaps for the most important ritual of the decade, with an inflated jacket and huge gloves.”
The senator, she said, “manifests privileges, white privileges, male privileges, and class privileges, so that my students could see and feel.”
Seyer-Ochi told the public that many people without privileges could not dress like Sanders did on this occasion.
“I don’t know many poor people, or working class, or women, or struggling to be taken seriously, who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed as Bernie,” he said.
Opinion left a lot of people on social media scratching their heads.
“So Bernie represents the terrible privilege of whites and rich because * he reads the article * he didn’t wear expensive clothes,” one commenter wrote on Twitter.
“Apparently, it’s a privilege to dress comfortably and NOT have the privilege of wearing expensive designer clothes while the media talks about sets as if it were a red carpet event,” another Twitter user commented.
A third person on Twitter wrote, “The only ‘privilege’ I see right now is being able to publish a bad faith opinion article in a paid-walled newspaper,” one commenter wrote on Twitter.