Sen. Bernie Sanders has been seen through many lenses. He’s been seen as a U.S. senator, a presidential candidate, a liberal, a socialist and—after President Joe Biden’s inauguration—someone who can turn a winter coat and repurposed mittens into a never-ending internet meme.

For the last two weeks, the image of Sanders sitting at the inauguration with the aforementioned attire has been Photoshopped and re-Photoshopped into thousands of images, causing chuckles at how easily the image can be merged with any scene and anticipation at where Bernie will end up next. I, for one, will be glad when the internet moves on to something else, but I don’t find anything particularly threatening about it.

Ingrid Seyer-Ochi does, though. The San Francisco Unified School District teacher penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle recently that described Sanders and his inauguration attire as the epitome of white privilege. She noted that Sanders was not as obvious a figure of white privilege as President Donald Trump and the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol last month, but he’s still apparently guilty of the sin.

“Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel,” Seyer-Ochi wrote in the op-ed. She went on to say that “I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie.”

The first question that springs to my mind is, has this woman ever been poor? Has she ever lived in a climate where the thermometer dips below freezing, and was she raised in a home where families have to scrimp and save just to be able to get their daughters one—count, one—pretty dress. Seyer-Ochi is so busy trying to paint people as ignorant and borderline racist that she exposes her own prejudices in the process.

I grew up in a household where we couldn’t always afford the niceties, where I didn’t automatically get a car when I was 16 and couldn’t afford to get a tuxedo for the high school prom. One time, my mother made me a bolo tie—that’s a country-style tie that some folks in Arizona wear, if Seyer-Ochi was unsure—that had the image of a cougar’s face, my high school mascot, so that I had something fancy to go with a button-down shirt.

Sanders can usually be seen in a dark suit, similar to what his fellow members of Congress wear. They indicate a certain level of wealth, as many suits for men cost hundreds of dollars brand new. Seyer-Ochi can’t imagine someone who is poor or working class coming to an inauguration like that, claiming it’s something that can’t be taken seriously. I wonder how many of those folks saw Sanders’ attire and thought, “Hey, he’s just like us.”

Has this woman ever lived in a rural community, or has she even seen the ghettos of her own city? Poor people don’t always have easy options to access formal clothes. Instead of realizing this and providing a more positive lesson to her students that we’re all different, Seyer-Ochi flips the script and turns it into a negative.

In her opinion piece, the former college professor points out the formal attire of the women involved with the inauguration—Vice President Kamala Harris, first lady Jill Biden, former first lady Michelle Obama, poet laureate Amanda Gorman, to name a few—and grouses that Sanders opted to wear a “puffy jacket and huge mittens.” She would prefer a leader in a suit and a nice-looking trench coat, apparently, rather than wearing a warm winter coat that I’d likely wear in January.

Let’s look at the aftermath of Sanders’ attire. Once folks caught sight of the mittens, knitted by hand by a former educator, people swarmed to buy a pair of their own, causing them to sell out.

Sanders himself used the viral image to sell T-shirts and other attire, raising more than $1.8 million, and then he turned around and donated that money to organizations like senior centers, Meals on Wheels, Feeding Chittenden, the Vermont Parent Child Center Network, the Chill Foundation and the Bi-State Primary Care Association.

To Seyer-Ochi, this is white privilege. Using a country’s combined sense of humor to raise money for charities and organizations that help people in need is apparently white privilege. I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time my local school is selling cookies or cupcakes.

Seyer-Ochi reportedly makes a six-figure salary teaching in San Francisco, and yet she claims Sanders, who makes $174,000 as a senator according to Business Insider, should look less like a frigid old man and more like an everyman. She even goes so far as to force her view on her high school students.

“What did I see? What did I think my students should see? A wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens,” she wrote.

You know what I see? I see a teacher pushing her ignorance onto her students and trying to make mountains out of molehills. If Seyer-Ochi really believes Sanders is the poster boy for white privilege, maybe she should make a less-flimsy argument and not judge a person by his coverings.