Laura Ingraham’s whine about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has rumbled our secret: once you ignore the facts, minorities are having a grand old time in America

Minorities of the world, gather around, I’ve got bad news. The jig is up; we’ve been rumbled. While I know we’ve all been trying to keep our “minority privilege” a secret, the whitest minds in America have put their heads together and found us out.

Who is afraid of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? | Nathan Robinson Read more

On Thursday, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham went on a rant about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and how she benefits from a widespread but little-discussed phenomenon called “minority privilege”.

Fox News rants about Ocasio-Cortez every five minutes, but this particular outburst was prompted by the fact that she had posted a tweet noting that many people have recognized the network “has crossed a line beyond conservatism and into outright bigotry with their financing of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham”.

She added: “Tucker finances the [Daily Caller] which posted fake nudes of me.”

Sign up for the Week in Patriarchy, a newsletter on feminism and sexism sent every Saturday

Ingraham took offence at being called a bigot and, in an episode of The Laura Ingraham Show Podcast, railed against the fact that you can’t say anything racist these days without people calling you a racist. Ocasio-Cortez, she argued, was guilty of “minority privilege” in her criticism of Fox News.

“How about the privilege of being a protected member of a class that you can never criticize, lest you be called racist?” she asked. The fact that conservatives are obsessed with criticizing Ocasio-Cortez appears to have passed her by; self-awareness not really being her strong suit.

Now, I don’t want to boast or anything, but as a half-Palestinian lesbian I score pretty high on the Official Oppression Scale™. Nevertheless, I’m not going to use my minority privilege to call Ingraham a racist.

I don’t want to be divisive by bringing up uncomfortable facts, after all. No, I want to keep things civil and remind you that nobody in America is actually racist any more.

As you may have noticed, racism died out a long time ago – now people just say racially tinged or racially charged things or stumble into “race controversies”. Sometimes they make “inflammatory statements” or, if they’re Roseanne, they take Ambien and suffer unfortunate racist-like side-effects – but they’re not really racist.

No, as Ingraham and her ilk have started to realize, what’s really racist is all the privileges minorities get. Like Black History Month! And Black Entertainment Television! Black people are even allowed to say the N-word when nobody else is. Why do we never talk about that?

Yes, I hate to say it, but Ingraham sort of has a point with this whole minority privilege thing. Once you ignore all the facts, it’s very clear that minorities are having a grand old time in America. In fact my minority card gets me 15% off at several leading retailers – meanwhile my woman card only gets me 10% off. This is why intersectionality is so important, people.

This story was updated on 19 January to include Ocasio-Cortez’s full tweet. In an email to the Guardian on Friday, a Fox News spokesperson said: “Tucker Carlson does not finance The Daily Caller in any way, nor does he have any role whatsoever in its editorial operations. She would have known that if she’d bothered to check.”