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Students Diagnosed with Disadvantage Envy
ABU DHABI (The Lyle White Report) — In a school-wide email last night, NYU Abu Dhabi doctor Evanna Le announced that a syndrome called Disadvantage ...
May 20, 2015
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ABU DHABI (The Lyle White Report) — In a school-wide email last night, NYU Abu Dhabi doctor Evanna Le announced that a syndrome called Disadvantage Envy has spread throughout campus.
Disadvantage Envy is a condition in which the individual suffers from deep insecurity due to the perception that he or she is not sufficiently disadvantaged. The condition is common among young adults from high socioeconomic backgrounds.
Symptoms include wearing expensive hipster clothing that look cheap, referencing Edward Said daily and compulsive use of words from languages that the individual does not speak.
According to Dr. Le at the Health & Wellness Center, at least eleven NYUAD students have been diagnosed thus far. Le said that the spike in diagnosis is not a result of stress from the final exam period, but prolonged exposure to extreme cosmopolitanism.
Consequences at the lowest level of the syndrome are relatively harmless, such as insisting on only dating people of a different racial background or always pretending to be broke, and the highest being going to an active conflict zone to take high-resolution pictures of people’s faces.
“The majority of diagnosed students are at the post-snowflake stage of the syndrome,” said Dr. Le.
The post-snowflake stage, Le explained, is the phase at which adolescents are so used to being called unique, individual snowflakes that they need to be marginalized to feel validated as individuals again.
“Treatment includes yelling "ching chong cha" at diagnosed students as they pass and making them watch movies and TV shows in which only one race, not their own, is featured for 18 years,” said Le.
Le wrote that Health & Wellness will launch a treatment program called the Marginalization Simulation next fall, encouraging students to book a consultation if they detect any symptoms. The Simulation is modelled after a similar program at the New York campus called Started from the Top Now We at NYU, inspired by the struggles of alumnus James Franco.
Sophomore Atticus Gandhi is the first student to sign up for the Marginalization Simulation, after concerned friends staged an intervention. Gandhi’s friends said that they first noticed something was amiss when he officially changed his name to Atticus Gandhi and self-identified as Nigerian.
“Yo, like, it’s just so easy to lose track of yourself, you know? It’s like the old Nigerian folk saying, tsamina mina eh eh, waka waka eh eh, tsamina mina zangalewa, this time for Africa,” said Gandhi.
At that point, Le intervened in the interview and started to tell Gandhi in soft, soothing tones that, as a white male, he probably only got into college to fill NYU’s minority quota.
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