Yeah, we need to ease people that would claim they have no privilege into things because…they might be upset if they were forced to realize that their success and that of generations of their family was at the detriment of whole classes of human beings. Oh, I’m sorry, are their feelings hurt by reality?
This is like saying we have to ease misogynists into acknowledging that women have it worse because we don’t want the misogynists upset…
Bias needn’t have anything to do with belief. For example. a skewed science experiment can easy be biased towards certain kinds of results, despite the researchers not believing this or making it their personal intention. It simply represents circumstances made to cause events to favor a certain outcome.
It just depends whether your goal is to antagonize and fight with people, or get them to introspect, empathize, and change their behavior.
I personally find that antagonizing people and picking fights does not result in much, if anything, changing. Particularly dudes just double down on their current position if you begin fighting with them. And unfortunately privilege starts people off on the “let’s fight about this” mindset, versus being thankful or grateful for what you have, and drilling down on that to being born at all, born in a modern era, first world country, white, male, middle class, etc.
But if you enjoy fighting, and you are a dude like me, so you probably do (I definitely do) the fight is its own reward. People Are Wrong On The Internet and all that.
If you figure the audience you are trying to reach loves to fight and is aggressive, maybe an aggressive approach isn’t the best way to achieve the goal. Dudes do not need more excuses to fight, we are quite good at that already and enjoy it to the point that the fight all too often becomes the goal.
I thin soft peddling things to avoid hurting the feelings of people who willfully don’t want to understand doesn’t really help anyone. Not them and not anyone else. It is just catering to them.
That’s not what I said. What you want to avoid is falling into the fight trap that dudes set for themselves. Particularly when the very audience you are trying to reach is dudes that love fighting about stuff and will happily get so engrossed in the fight that they forget what the goal even was.
Sometimes the best way to win is not to fight at all. And think not, how are we different, but what do we have in common and realize where those commonalities end, and why.
Lack of empathy is the bedrock of our political and financial systems, and evidenced in a significant number of our religious leaders as well. Please-pretty-please hasn’t worked well for any other disadvantaged group…why would appearing to be compliant work in this case?
After all, compliance by the victims is why we’re still in this mess.
I’ve just finally got around to starting to read Antonio Gramsci, and I’m wondering if the way I’ve been characterizing privilege could be understood as an instance of Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony.
The effects of cultural hegemony are perceptible at the personal level; although each person in a society lives a meaningful life in his and her social class, to him and to her, the discrete social classes might appear to have little in common with the private life of the individual man and woman. Yet, when perceived as a whole society, the life of each person does contribute to the greater societal hegemony. Although social diversity, economic variety, and political freedom appear to exist — because most people see different life-circumstances — they are incapable of perceiving the greater hegemonic pattern created when the lives they witness coalesce as a society. The cultural hegemony is manifested in and maintained by an existence of minor, different circumstances that are not always fully perceived by the men and the women living the culture.
That is not what I am proposing – the language itself gets in the way. Witness this 350 response topic. Privilege, the word, turns things into an us vs. them contest.
Privilege is a language war word if there ever was one. Look forward to lots of pointless, ineffectual (and arguably countereffective) arguing with dudes if that’s how it starts. Just further entrenchment of existing opinions.
Read and weep.
But accusations based on stuff people can’t control – where, how, and when they were born – is going to push people away, versus focusing on what they can control: their mindfulness and gratitude.
Well put.
And can I add a:
ThisEscalatedQuickly.gif?
So talking about Privilege doesn’t worl for some people. What would work?
Also, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work for everyone. Did for me.
Except that the people we are talking about have no interest in these commonalities from what I can tell. That’s why they’re so reactionary against any suggestion that they may owe something to anyone other than themselves for how they got into their current positions.
I really do not think playing nice really will cause any change with these folks. Convincing folks who aren’t the ones sitting around arguing about whether we’re allowed to use the word “privilege” is a much better outcome. How did overt racism become socially unacceptable? Well, there were a lot of causes but people realizing others would look at them with disgust and horror when they used the N word, for example, caused them to at least learn to quit spreading that filth around and maybe caused some occasional reflection. I want to see back slapping Libertarian “I’m a self made man!” dude bros in the same place if they’re unable to admit to all the advantages that just inherently accrued to them by an accident of birth.
Except you’ll notice that the privilege deniers are outnumbered more than 10 to 1 (probably more like 20 to 1 but I didn’t count) in this thread. You’re talking about a handful of folks here who angrily argue that they’ve never benefited from racism and how dare we use such language. Frankly, screw them and their denials. If they want to be willfully blind, I’m ok because a lot more other folks get it.
Loaded terms are the Internet’s equiv of trash talking football teams.
Now if you don’t mind I’m gonna use my white privilege (platinum) card and mansplain my way to some free, delicious Jazz Flute coffee.
(I may have just slapped myself for saying that)
Maybe, but
I feel like “privilege” leads to a recursive negative, who-suffers-most discussion, in a timeline of human history absolutely filled with the unimaginable, systemic suffering of billions worldwide. Suffering is, statistically speaking, the norm.
What I suggest might work better, is a more positive discussion recognizing our many, many first world advantages (Were you born without special physical or mental needs? Are you healthy? Do you have adequate food, water, education, and medicine? Do you have parents that care about you? Do you live in a warzone?) and thinking about how we can extend that to as many other people as possible. These advantages are so common to us we stop seeing them. They are everywhere and invisible. And that is kind of an amazing, incredible thing, except insofar as we forget not everyone is as lucky as us. And reminders to be thankful and grateful for what we have, things that are so very rare in the overall timeline of human history, help us see these invisible advantages and consider why others might not be so fortunate.
You simply can’t do anything about when, where, or how you were born. We have zero control over this. So why not focus on what we can do, and control, instead?
How about this;
Make them realize that ThanksGivings a lie, and have them realize that United States was never a free country to begin with.
Ah, but isn’t that the crux? I can’t go back in time, but I can acknowledge, well, basically the nepotism that is rampant. And through that acknowledgement figure out a way forward.
It is similar to stages of grief, or twelve step programs.
Here is Bob’s Grandma, living a life of leisure during her privileged childhood.
http://www.shorpy.com/node/1025?size=_original#caption
Bob’s Grandpa, similarly idle-
Here is the mansion Bob’s Dad grew up in-
http://www.shorpy.com/node/18727?size=_original#caption
All you have to be is white in this country, and they just hand everything to you.
…my ancestor was a slave. I bet that current southern billionaires planning to bring back slavery through prison labor.
Quite a lot of people in this first world country (the U.S.) are born into a war zone where they don’t have adequate food, water, education and medicine and can be mowed down by bullets at any moment of the day or night. People down the street from me.
If you saw the equivalent black housing from the same area at the same time you would realize that Bob’s family WAS doing better.
