Honestly? Read this piece on American poverty published by the Heritage Foundation. It seems pretty tame; all they’re doing is listing the number of amenities that modern American poor have, and conclude that they’re things to keep in mind when tackling poverty.
Now let’s look at what FOX News did with that report.
Or, another way to look at it: “But you still have privilege!” They say, as a way to table the issue of income equality; it doesn’t matter, because you’re not truly poor.
Ah ha, this is where I suspect we disagree.
“Do those protocols seem to facilitate anything necessary or desirable?”
Yes, in the context of this conversation, they do.
(BTW I sincerely appreciate the civil discourse).
Right, but no more than a hundred or two hundred years ago the very idea that all human beings are “equal” was not generally accepted, was it?
Now it is, even if the implementation leaves something to be desired and there’s still work to be done.
Let me put it this way, would you rather be a woman or person of color born in the 1850s, 1920s, or 1950s, or 1990s? It’s no contest.
It is no contest.
For our viewing pleasure, Louis CK.
(NSFW, obviously)
Not really, no.
I have just read the comments posted since my last, and I submit that many here have fundamentally misunderstood Steven Brust’s entire point and they are not talking about anything he has said or meant. If this misunderstanding is willful, I can’t help. But if you want to understand where those of us who stand with Martin Luther King and Malcom X and Steven Brust and Emma Bull are coming from, it’s not going to ever happen if you insist on keeping these misunderstandings.
No, no, no, no, no. I have to break this down, sorry.
some people with privilege don’t like to have that fact pointed out
Perhaps, but that’s not what’s happening in this argument. Brust says everyone everywhere should refuse to accept the idea that it’s a privilege not to be harmed. We must consider freedom from injustice as a right and not a privilege. Our communication, like our perception, is shaped by our cognitive models and your statement uses a model Brust considers unacceptable. You can’t accurately parse what he’s saying in terms of that model, because what he is saying is not expressible inside that framework.
because they think that it somehow means they must have had a perfect and painless life.
If anybody thought that, surely they have been corrected by now. Brust is not thinking that. But the language of privilege is easily misinterpreted in that fashion and that’s another strong and valid criticism of the privilege paradigm.
Those people aren’t listening.
I have listened and listened and replied and listened and asked for clarifications and listened and I believe I may even understand. I can speak effortlessly in the divisive languages of privilege and identity politics, though I choose not to. I submit that Brust could also, if he so chose. I could easily make you believe that I accept the premise that freedom from oppression is a privilege granted to certain identity groups. If anyone thinks “those people” aren’t listening, it’s because you are misunderstanding their response.
Telling others to stop talking about it is just trying to silence the issue.
Brust doesn’t want others to stop talking. He’s saying we should not talk about racism or sexism (I would add classism) in terms that he believes actively help prevent overthrow of the system that creates and perpetuates those and other harmful things. He’s promoting the extremely dangerous and disruptive viewpoint that got Malcom X and Martin Luther King killed, the idea that internalizing the broken and harmful paradigm of identity politics retards progress towards a better and more equitable society. We can love each other without resentment or division. What he wants is the opposite of silence, what he wants is a language that speaks louder than the language of privilege and identity can possibly speak. Never silence!
The people who are getting their feelings hurt need to stop trying to tell others how they can talk,
I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I think we have the opposite idea of who needs to stop getting their feelings hurt.
Brust has been called a name and he doesn’t like it. Privilege politics says he’s got no right to object to being called that name, and therefore he is a bad person and he’s trying to silence people when he says they shouldn’t call him or anyone like him that name. His considered, heartfelt belief that is supported by evidence and history has been mapped to a derogatory cartoon character’s role in a currently popular but deeply flawed metaphor. Brust is not in any way the aggressor here. Not even slightly. But in the metaphorical framework of privilege, he’s got to be a villain, because he won’t accept his cartoonish place and stay in it. This argues that the framework is fundamentally inadequate for understanding reality and effecting change, and therefore should be superseded by something more functional.
and need to start listening to what is being said.
Again, we’re listening. And we’re doing more than that - we’re trying to understand. I think most of us do understand. We’ve acknowledged the basic truths that you are starting from and we’re telling you exactly why we think you’re going down the wrong path if you want real change. But the responses we get to our replies indicate that we are almost never being understood in return.
It’s frustrating to see what someone’s saying get derided as “word salad” or “Dr. Bronner labels” or whatever today’s angry phrase of uncomprehending dismissal might be. People need to step outside the mental prison of the privilege paradigm in order to understand Brust’s point, because that is his point. You can’t engage with him or with his thoughts this way, and you’re frustrating his efforts to join you in creating a positive change by rejecting his entire person - his thoughts, his race, his gender, his whole identity is anathema to the identitarian privilege political model. Like me, he’s been assigned a role as a creature of privilege and thus inherently and irredeemably flawed. His ideas are just “another white man telling women how to think”. Cogent disagreement is the same as “not listening”. Asking you not to call out giant categories of people for public shaming, because it’s a terrible strategy for making changes, is the same as “trying to silence people”. This is all a manifestation of the privilege cognitive model (a model that literally has no place for many real live people that I actually know and love) and Brust believes that model of thought and discourse is harmful to the immediate future of the human race.
This is a big part of my own motivation. My children do not need special treatment and this insistence that they do is harmful to them. I don’t want my daughter to grow up to be someone who is primarily defined to the State by her skin color and gender, and I don’t like people constantly pushing a message of resentment, jealously and envy at her as though that was a good thing.
So while I’m not against affirmative action (I strongly support it, in fact) nobody in my family needs it. It’s wrong to teach my kids that they have a right to special treatment on a basis of their skin color or gender. It’s also wrong to give old people in the 1% a senior citizen discount, while young people living in inner-city poverty have to pay extra for their groceries. This segregation of people in privileged/unprivileged by race, age, gender and class is not functional or accurate - it literally breaks my family in half - how am I supposed to support that? We’re not privileged. The truth is far more powerful, the truth that there are many people in the world who are subject to more injustice than we are. That’s not my privilege, it’s their pain. Brust is right, despite being a commie pinko.
DISCLAIMERS: I quoted @Daedalus because s/he so perfectly distilled the content of dozens of posts, and I mean no disrespect to those I did not reply to directly (@anon15383236, @anon50609448 , @anon61221983, and others) and I greatly appreciate the opportunity that Daedalus gave me thereby. Also, I completely understand the Dr. Bronner label and it holds no mysteries for me. And I thoroughly love the Vlad Taltos novels but wouldn’t lift a finger to save Paarfi from the executioner’s star. And some of my best friends are commies and pinkos and blue-eyed devils, but I’ve never actually met Steven Brust or Emma Bull.
Of COURSE that’s a right. However, many don’t have that “right.” And those who do are – wait for it – privileged. People who haven’t done anything wrong have the right not to be followed around in stores as if they’re about to steal something, and they should also not be subject to being stopped while driving for no reason other than their skin color. POC don’t have those “rights,” and so, white people who daily expect them as American rights because they get them daily are “privileged.” Is there something difficult to understand about the utility in describing those differences of the concept of privilege?
No it’s not. It’s a strong and valid criticism of people who don’t yet (or refuse to) understand “the privilege paradigm.”
I have a quibble with this. Given that economic impact of generational wealth is so extreme, the time we have spent since legalized and institutionalized bias isn’t large enough for the United States to equalize said bias. And I think teaching that thought to people who are not affected by those economic issues is still valuable.
But that is my opinion, I have no facts on hand to back it up.
It’s not that there is anything difficult to understand about it, the problem is that what you are outlining here is, in civil rights terms, a self-defeating concept. Rights are “rights” because they are innate to people, as opposed to being granted at the whim of somebody else. For a higher power to “grant” anyone “equality” is a fallacy of reason and a contradiction in terms. The power of human rights is that they are recognized as being universally human, rather than some lofty concession handed down by some schmuck for ideological reasons. The problem is not that some people are more equal than others, it’s that some people’s rights are not recognized. It might seem like semantic nitpicking to some, but it’s basically the focal point of the entire concept of there being such a thing as “human rights” at all.
Oh come ON, man! This donning-of-the-mantle-of-REAL-victimhood is really too much, and it needs to be called out, because so many white men are doing it these days.
It seems that no matter how many times it’s said to you, you just don’t get it, but I’ll step up and try once again:
No one here is rejecting a white man’s “entire person” as “irredeemably flawed” just because he’s white and male,
Many, many white men have been effective allies in anti-oppression struggles. The point is, they do so more efffectively when they acknowledge that they’re not the same as women and POC, that they have privileges, and that makes life different for them, and thus their perspectives on things as well.
Sure, let’s all join together against the overarching Capitalist paradigm, but let’s not pretend we’re all the same as we do so, nor that other struggles aren’t worth fighting as well. Even concurrently! We’re all capable of doing more than one thing, and focusing on more than one thing, after all.
No. Different societies/countries have different conceptions of “rights.” They’re usually established “by law.” Not “at the whim of someone else,” true, but there’s nothing innate about them.
And in a sexist, de facto white supremacist society like the U.S. still is, white and/or male privilege is an entirely viable concept for describing differential an inequitable daily treatment of differently categorized groups of people.
There is nothing difficult to understand about the claim that there is utility in describing those differences as privilege. I totally get what you’re saying. But I’m asking you to understand the opposing claim, please. You’re not going to be able to grasp Brust’s point until you free your mind, at least for a few thoughtful minutes, from the cognitive straitjacket of the privilege metaphor.
Utility means usefulness, and it is not useful to describe freedom from injustice as a privilege. It is not useful to describe one groups’ higher statistical probability of receiving basic human rights as a privilege enjoyed by that entire group. Rather, it’s harmful. It hurts us. Me and you both. It holds us back. It reinforces and confirms class, race and gender divisions. That’s not utility. That’s working for the enemy.
Your posts responding to me exemplify the problem with this mode of labeling. You need to stop thinking that you know me, because you know of an imaginary privileged category, which for you is determined by skin color and gender.
I’m not trying to claim victimhood. I’m trying to convince you that you are using a divisive mode which drives people away from unity.
There is a problem that many involved with #BlackLivesMatter protests complain of, of white activists pushing themselves to the front of marches, standing alongside and calling out directions and political principles through bullhorns, and otherwise interposing themselves as leaders. And they believe they’re principled anti-racist activists, even as they’re ignoring and interfering with the organic black leadership of the movement. (Who, by the way, have also been doing a stellar job of maintaining independence from the “old guard leadership” of the black middle class.)
What’s been remarkable to me about this, is not that it happens, but that a) many black participants in #BlackLivesMatter have been calmly but clearly calling this out, and b) many white participants have backed them up on this.
The terminology of privilege may not be optimal, but I believe it’s been good enough to facilitate this shift in organization.
What is innate about them is the lack of fundamental differences between different groups of people. There is no evidence that people of any color or gender are of more or less worth than another.
The US is not a unified society, it is a multiplicity of societies. Which is precisely why there is so much tension and conflict in the US currently. Unlike most areas which have had a degree of ethnic stability for most of history, the US has been multicultural from the very beginning - although it appears to have an identity crisis about this. Most so-called white Americans are white, and red, and black.
The “traditional” categories of “us versus them” many people have clung to for generations are disappearing into phantasmal vapor, while people try grasping at them even more fervently. Now we are seeing nation states becoming porous, people shopping amongst values and lifestyles of the entirety of human geography and history, and millennia of commerce being replaced by ideas and the very plasticity of matter itself. Life has become more about what do you actually do rather than fitting in with older groups who don’t even understand their own professed traditions.
I don’t see that the terminology of privilege has any valid advantage in that context, and maybe it shows the harm - I don’t think you’re a racist, but you’ve specifically called out the activists acting inappropriately in a racist manner, which is using the tools and mindset of the enemy. We can do better. How about this?
“It’s not appropriate to choose leaders based on skin color, but it’s even less appropriate for anyone to try to take over someone else’s march. Presumably the protests were organized or at least called by someone, and (white or black or purple) it’s not right for anyone else to try to push into the leading role after the fact. That behavior is disruptive and divisive and the activists who are trying to commandeer these marches will need to be reined in, if they can’t rein themselves in.”
I think we could probably agree on the above, although I’m not pretending it’s perfect, and isn’t it a better way to organize against institutionalized racism than to say something that sounds like “only black people can lead black protests - no whites need apply?”
I would say that any conversation about privilege that is aimed at determining which group is worse off is beside the point. Poverty, coming from a less well-off area and so on are real issues and should be taken seriously. It is one example of how you can’t just compare privilege or the lack of it. You can’t necessarily point out someone who has come from a low income family in a crowd, but they may well have a number of invisible disadvantages - lack of role models, the ‘wrong’ accent, living in the ‘wrong’ areas, poor education, lack of funds, poor credit history, difficulty with dealing with money, lack of mobility, job/home insecurity, internalised judgement of their character and so on. They may not face the same discrimination if they get to the interview stage (so a white male is probably privileged over a black male or a woman in the same situation), but a big problem is that they’ll probably never get to that interview because of all of the previous problems. It’s worse if you compound poverty with other factors, but that’s the same for any factor.There needs to be the ability to recognise any one of these issues without dismissing the others, or allowing the other issues to cloud out this one.
I think rather than presuming to know each other’s level of privilege, we should be able to recognise the factors that are there and work to support those who are being marginalised. I don’t think the Empire and Rebel Alliance metaphor works well at all here - intentional or not, it seems like a meaningless stereotype that is pretty divisive. As humans, nerds are perfectly capable of reflecting all of the ugly sides of humanity. They haven’t gone over to the dark side, they were just never as good as they thought they were when they had less influence. People do need to confront the uncomfortable reality of how they reflect society and how their influence affects others though, and that has been pretty uncomfortable for geeks and nerds recently.
I think the privilege discussion can help point out where certain groups are at a disadvantage and where the things that we take for granted are not a given. If a white woman talks with a black man, she should not presume that she knows the systematic racism he experiences as a POC. Likewise, he should recognise that he doesn’t experience discrimination on the basis of sex, so both should spend more time listening when it comes to areas they aren’t familiar with. A middle-class SWM often experiences very little prejudice at all, so our perspectives on many of these issues are quite limited.
I don’t think this is what people like Laurie Penny are saying. There seem to be a couple of areas where she does lack perspective on what many white men around the world experience, but on the whole her point seems to be that white male nerds who see themselves as victims still have a number of areas where they are better off than others in the same group, and having a history of being the underdog doesn’t stop you from having and abusing power in other areas. We’re in a complicated world where our trauma can blind us to that of others, but we can use the language of privilege to open our eyes a little to what women, POC, people in poverty and other marginalised groups are experiencing. As someone who ticks most of the boxes for general privilege, I hope I can become more aware of it and support others who lack it.
And how, supposedly, does it do that?
That’s not what’s innate about “rights.” That’s what’s innate about people.
In some ways yes. But trying telling Michael Brown’s or Oscar Grant’s parents that race doesn’t matter anymore. When it comes to the ongoing realities of racist abuse, race matters less because black or brown people “grasp fervently” at the idea of being black and brown than because police and others see them as black or brown and act badly, often murderously in response.
I’d really love to hear the response of those parents if you could tell them that they shouldn’t grasp so fervently at the idea that they’re black people.
The thing is, I used to be in a socialist group that had a formal position very similar, if not the same, as Brust’s position. I believe it was an overreaction to identity politics. And I think it was a weakness, alienating us from other activists and cutting us off from a lot of important work around racism and sexism – even though we were genuinely committed to opposing these things.
The structural nature of sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression is usually understated, and we tended to emphasize it. This was good, as far as it goes. But, I think we also tended to underestimate the extent to which individuals feel personal stakes in various forms of oppression.
And for me, personally, 2014 was a wake-up call in this regard. People are willing to countenance murder and rape to protect their privilege. A minority of white people, a minority of men – but a much larger minority than I had been willing to acknowledge.
