In college, I made a lot of money working side jobs, especially in the spring and summer. From April through September, I would mow tiny lawns in Annapolis and get $20 (more than $37 in today’s dollars) for a lawn that took me about 30 minutes from start to finish.

What made this more valuable per hour was when my customers’ next-door neighbors would hire me — thus creating efficiencies, as I could do just one 20-minute round-trip bike ride, use fewer rakes, have a backup mower right next door in an emergency, etc.

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Though timesavings wasn’t that much of a concern for me, and it couldn’t be: An unspoken part of the deal is that when I finished mowing and putting away the equipment, I would collect payment at the kitchen table, over a cold glass of root beer — and sometimes lunch. Then I would talk about college — the academics, the croquet, the Friday night lecture — or my hometown in New York. Sometimes I was invited to join these clients for lunch or a soda as their friends or siblings were over.

That is, part of what these older couples were paying for was conversation.

This, I believe, is related to why I garnered a lot more pay per hour than the average lawn care contractor in Anne Arundel County in the late 1990s: I was a white college boy with flawless English. You could attribute my high pay to “white privilege” if you wished, and I wouldn’t object.

Here’s where I agree with a lot of progressive writers: As I have written and stated in public repeatedly, I believe white privilege is a real thing that reflects an unfairness in our society.

So if I benefited from white privilege but think it’s bad, does that make me ungrateful or a hypocrite?

Let’s ask the liberal commentariat:

One very popular attack on Clarence Thomas today is that he benefited from affirmative action and yet attacks affirmative action as unjust and illegal discrimination.

We can debate whether Thomas benefited from affirmative action. Yes, he was accepted to Yale Law School in 1971 when the school had racial quotas, but we don’t know if he would have gotten in absent those quotas. Yes, he was nominated to replace a black former justice, Thurgood Marshall, but note that when Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson into a slot he had set aside only for a black woman, the major left-leaning media treated it as contentious to call this “affirmative action.”

In fact, Thomas has long hated affirmative action precisely because it creates the assumption that a black person in a prestigious position is there undeservedly. In the 1980s, he argued that for this reason, successful black people suffer from rather than benefit from affirmative action.

But to point out the illogic of Thomas's opponents, let’s grant, arguendo, the Corn and Dyson assertion that Thomas benefited from affirmative action. So what?

If I could benefit from white privilege in college and call it bad as a columnist, a black man can benefit from affirmative action and explain that it’s unjust. That’s not hypocrisy, that’s acknowledging unfairness in this world, even unfairness that may have helped you.

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Joe Biden’s ancestors owned slaves. Arguably, Joe Biden is a beneficiary of slavery. You would be insane to argue that Biden is now forbidden from opposing slavery.

Accusing Thomas of hypocrisy is illogical, but it serves the narrative of stoking resentment against the court, and so you should expect to see it constantly these days.