Disneyland Posts Wheel of Power/Privilege for Employees
Disney is fighting privilege in America, one food court worker at a time. The Daily Wire published an exclusive the other day (which I found through Bleeding Fool) in which an anonymous Disneyland employee sent them an image of a poster Disney called the “Wheel of Power/Privilege.” This poster lists a hierarchy of what Disney bigwigs (or the HR department, or whichever nutcase was behind this) deem to be privileged individuals, with different levels of privilege defined by certain physical, social, sexual, or economic attributes. For example, the most privileged are – not that you haven’t guessed – white, heterosexual, cis-gendered men who speak English and own property. (There are others like “rich,” but I imagine that doesn’t apply to people manning the cash register at the Bibbity Bobbity Boutique.) Those who fall under the “marginalized” category are “dark-skinned, transgender, homeless,” and don’t speak English. But the best part is the middle section, which is somewhere between privileged and marginalized; this includes women and gay men, who have apparently slipped a few notches down the oppression ladder.
Why put up a sign like this? The obvious answer is because these people are totalitarian lunatics who can’t leave working stiffs alone for a moment, even when they’re on a coffee break after dealing with sugar-infused children for hours on end. But the stated reason for telling the guy in the Donald Duck costume to check his privilege is this:
“By accepting that we have privileges, we can see that not everyone sees the world from our perspective and that we have privileges in our life that have hindered our awareness of the world.”
Call me crazy (which, coming from the people who made that poster, I would consider a badge of honor), but I thought that was true of everyone, and we all get that. Nobody has the same perspective on the world; that’s why we talk to each other, form friendships, and get to know one another. It’s also why we consume art, which introduces us to a world of different perspectives – or it used to before the DEI regulations made sure we could only hear from certain people who think Hollywood-approved thoughts. The idea of considering other people’s experiences and perspectives was one of the lessons of To Kill a Mockingbird, a beloved American story that beat these self-righteous prigs to the punch by over sixty years. I wondered how long it would take Disney to use AI to recreate Gregory Peck’s voice so he could recite the Wheel of Power/Privilege for them, but then I remembered he was a white heterosexual man, and that would be self-defeating.
The best part of this gaze into the abyss of modern-day social insanity is that, as soon as The Daily Wire reached out to Disney for a comment on the story, the Wheel of Power/Privilege was removed, as evinced by another picture from their source. This is great for two reasons. First, it’s funny, and unlike the Privilege Police, normal people enjoy a good laugh on occasion. Second, it means they’re embarrassed by this, as they should be. For all their moral grandstanding, they know regular people hate this kind of thing – just as The Daily Wire’s source confirms the Disneyland workers do – and it will only hurt Disney if everyone knows about it. And Disney really can’t take any more hits after the year it’s had, losing money on its movies left and right. This is a company that was once an American institution and has now become a source of contempt and a national laughing stock, and the parks are pulling stunts like raising prices to make up for losing customers. How likely do you think the “privileged” classes will be to pay money to people who insult them like this? And now, they’ve included women and gay men; I’ll have to check again, but I’m pretty sure most mothers are women, and they’re necessary to bring in Disney’s target audience: kids. (Dads can always be dragged along.) And finally, it reinforces that the best way to fight ideas like this is to drag them into the light so normal people who may otherwise be skeptical get a good look at the sickos we’re all dealing with.
Universal’s Epic Universe is looking like a smarter move by the second.
