Not bad except for the insanely weak idea that expectations on kids’ success are naturally less for poor people. It depends on the parents. Many poor, immigrant, etc. parents will not stand for less than A’s, and an A- will not do. Stereotypes you approve of are still stereotypes.
There’s a weird phenomenon in which everyone insists that they, and their children, got straight As, or at least mostly. Most students don’t get As. And as is often pointed out, school assessment systems don’t reliably measure anything but parental incomes.
Sure, some disadvantaged parents will not stand for less than As. But that’s less common than among elite parents. And the resources that help a disadvantaged kid get As are going to have to come from somewhere – other needs will be sacrificed.
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Thanks for saying that. It pushed me to look into the issue a bit and see that I may well harbor the stereotypes you’re pointing out, and that they may well be false.
OTOH, one source says:
Parents from a more advantaged environment exert more effort, and this influences positively the educational attainment of their children. The parents’ background also increases the school’s effort, which increases the school achievement.
But another study convincingly argues the opposite, that lower-class parents often place MORE emphasis on education. So, yeah, I’m still thinking…
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While I do really like this comic (it does a great job of explaining privilege). I was the underprivileged child. I did have to fight everyone telling me that I was no good or I would never be successful. But you can still lift yourself up. I have a wonderful wife (I definitely married up in the world) who believed in me from the beginning and have always worked very hard. Honest work matters too. I love that more people are paying attention to these things but we can even save the Paula’s of the world even as adults. We just need to reach them and give them a chance to show us who they really are. If you are a Paula gain as much experience as you can Education is wonderful but I can tell you that my work experience and ethic have opened more doors than my Education has. You can do just believe in yourself and keep moving forward!
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Of course this illustrates extremes on both sides. At least 90% of us are neither trust fund babies nor in stark poverty. I think we need to address the roots of why groups of students attending the same school and sitting in the same classroom can come to such different ends. One kid participates in class, does his homework, and studies in the library after school if home is not a good place. Another kid ignores the teacher, never does homework, and spends their free time shoplifting or getting into fights. I find it a little distressing that more and more, just having parents that teach you values and work ethic seems to be some form of privilege that should be “checked” or be ashamed of. Work ethic has nothing whatever to do with wealth, but is a hugely important tool for success. There gets to be a point where there is almost nothing you can do for the kid who refuses to participate in his education. By junior high, he is never going to catch up. If you make special accommodations to let him into secondary education, he will soon be lost and drop out. You cannot even give him a job, because he is illiterate and unlikely to show up every day.
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Are you aware of the fact that middle class and wealthy families have just as much abuse, neglect, addiction, and other issues as poor families do, which make growing up in them just as difficult?
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I never know what to think about the topic of privilege.
I think the best thing one can take away from is is a great appreciation of what you have and that other people may not have had those things. So when you start evaluating someone else, you might consider carefully your assumptions about where they’ve come from.
Take Mozart. Was he a prodigy? It’s been debated. Some say that he was born to a wealthy family and his father happened to be the greatest musical pedagogue of his generation, what else could you expect other than his child was really good at music?
Should we be less impressed by his music now? What do we do with this information?
A lot of people throw around “check your privilege” a lot, but by doing that aren’t they making the same kinds of assumptions about someone’s life; assuming that they know just how they got where they are?
What more wisdom is there in arguments about privilege other than “Don’t throw stones”? I’m asking.
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Of course. I was one of those kids in one of those urban public school classrooms. It was certainly not true that the kids who fell by the wayside were the poorest. I really do not think it is all about wealth. Of course parents who do not teach their kids work ethics are probably not going to be high achievers themselves, but that is an opinion, and I have seen many exceptions.
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The problem is more that people who have privilege, and thus likely got where they are with some help, tend to look at others who haven’t gotten as far, at least in part because they lack said privilege, and wonder “what’s wrong with those people? I did it, why can’t they?” It’s an obnoxious naivete about both one’s own life and those of others.
I don’t know if there’s wisdom to be found in every argument about it, but learning about it can provide a lot of wisdom. Members of various majority categories are basically trained to fail to realize they even have privilege. For example, as Peggy McIntosh wrote in a famous article about white privilege,
My schooling followed the pattern which Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work which will allow “them” to be more like “us.” I think many of us know how obnoxious this attitude can be in men…
For me, white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject. The pressure to avoid it is great, for in facing it I must give up the myth of meritocracy. If these things are true, this is not such a free country; one’s life is not what one makes it; many doors open for certain people through no virtues of their own. These perceptions mean also that my moral condition is not what I had been led to believe. The appearance of being a good citizen rather than a troublemaker comes in large part from having all sorts of doors open automatically because of my color.
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I think the odds are pretty good that a white man with a stereotypically “ghetto” name is less educated than a black man named Winston Stanhope Thornton-Smythe III, at least in the opinion of a corporate HR drone.
In your specific example the real problem may well be that someone associates a name with a community that suffers disproportionate levels of poverty, violence and poor education, but you’re talking about it only in terms of skin color. Equally likely explanations that don’t require repeating and confirming overt racism have been avoided or discounted, because a skin color explanation is available. I don’t think fixating on skin color as a metric is always necessary, useful or even valid. This is the taxi driver argument all over again, assigning racist motivations without alternative when other more useful framings and possibilities are clearly available. I see this as perpetuating racism; it’s internalizing, confirming and repeating the idea that certain skin colors are inferior, because they can’t get jobs and they can’t get taxis to stop. If we were talking about poverty and lack of education and false perceptions of those conditions, we’d be talking about things that we can fix - but skin color is part of who you are, something I don’t want to change.
Let me put this another way, since I am highly dissatisfied with the above paragraph.
The name “Maya” is from Sanskrit माया, it’s a technical term in philosophy. The same sounds occur as a word or a name in most languages; for example in Amharic it means “water”, and in Nepali it means “love”. If someone discriminates against someone named Maya, and you conceptually frame this as a “black” name (it isn’t) then you aren’t fighting that person’s racism, you’re sharing it - and possibly even spreading it if you go around telling people that “Maya is a black name and that’s why she didn’t get hired.” That’s definitely not helping, and may be actively hurting people.
Fixing these problems, which are economic side-effects of historic and structural racism, cannot be done by insisting that people who make economic decisions in their own best interest based on their own best knowledge and experience are themselves the problem and labeling them as racists. You can call a taxi driver who prefers fares that are more likely to be affluent a racist, and you can call an HR clerk who prefers names that are more likely to reflect a privileged upbringing that includes a higher level of education a racist, but I don’t see how that actually helps anyone - it seems to me that it’s just diluting your effectiveness by creating unnecessary, energy-wasting conflicts.
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[quote=“FoolishOwl, post:20, topic:58099, full:true”]There are different forms of privilege, right?
[/quote]
Oh, yes. Others here have pointed out, perhaps inadvertently, that the biggest privilege anyone can ever enjoy is the attention of a parent or other mentor who has the ability and desire to give a child the very best upbringing they possibly can. A person born into desperate poverty can still achieve happiness and stability (and perhaps wealth and power) if they are lucky enough to have at least one loving adult totally dedicated to giving them the best possible outcomes, in nearly all environments and conditions. And a person born into obscene wealth may never achieve happiness or even maintain sanity if they are treated cruelly or (worse yet) with total neglect by the adults in their lives, despite having all the nutrition and education money can buy.
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Um, yes, likely so, and nothing I or anyone else here has said otherwise. The former is likely to lack the “class privilege” of the latter, and the latter lacks the “white privilege” of the former. But of course, rare exceptions only help prove the general rule, right?
You seem entirely resistant to admitting that white privilege even exists. Have you read McIntosh’s incredibly widely cited article on the topic? If so, where do you think she goes wrong?
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Why would neglect be better than cruelty?
So everyone should be equally deprived? One bozak professor actually called it racist for parents to read to their children since it gave them unfair advantage. Harrison Bergeron redux. How disheartening.
No, I disagree. I could provide tens of thousands of such examples and someone would call every one of them an exception. It’s what always happens.
Here in reality, these “exceptions” aren’t rare. More privileged black people and less privileged white people are commonplace. I am among them every single day! I suspect that ignoring them, or falsely believing they are exceptions to a glittering generality framed as a universal rule, may be a subtle manifestation of structural racism. It’s like an insistence that dark-skinned people are inferior. They haven’t got “white privilege”, which makes them lesser beings identifiable by skin color. I’m rejecting that whole paradigm.
I understand why it seems that way; it’s the only interpretation available within the procrustean bedframe of the white privilege meme. Everyone must be assigned to a value derived from the first sentence of McIntosh’s essay; either they admit or they don’t. What I’m actually trying to tell you is that I believe that “white privilege” is a phrase to be assiduously avoided in nearly all circumstances, like “global warming” or “death tax” or any other memetically keyed toxic phrase.
But I’m not saying that McIntosh’s work should be disregarded and I’m not trying to refute it. I’m not saying that George Woodwell’s work on global warming should be discarded, either - it’s perfectly valid, within the framework of reference (although he regrets popularizing the phrase.) More people should read both of them!
Nonetheless language matters. I think the meme which has sprung from McIntosh’s insightful essay makes many people think wrongly because most of us think in words. Language shapes thought, thought shapes perception - how you talk can determine what you see, and what you can see limits what you can learn and do.
You know, I realize I may well be an obstreperous iconoclast, just another loud-mouthed knucklehead. But I refuse to use the phrase “global warming” to refer to the problems of pollution and climate change, although I do respect the work of the man who popularized it. I won’t use the phrase “death tax” to refer to inheritance taxes, either, and I refuse to equate anti-Israeli sentiment with either anti-semitism or anti-judaism. Basically, I am not going to change the way I frame concepts unless somebody shows me a better way, one that helps me do more or understand the world more clearly - and that’s not what’s happening in any of these cases, quite the opposite in fact. The same goes for the “white privilege” meme - I believe it’s metastasized into harmful way of thinking and talking, despite the validity of what McIntosh was using it to explain.
@chgoliz, neglect can be worse than cruelty. Consider attachment disorder, for example. An abused child can often retain or recover the ability to form normal, healthy emotional attachments, but a neglected child may never enjoy that capacity. Early neglect can inflict terrible, permanent damage; a child needs to matter to someone else in order to be healthy. Sadly, even an abusive parent can provide a needed psychological anchor in a child’s life.
OK, gotta go help a guy shift a ton or more of antique electric tractor parts, won’t be back until Tuesday at the earliest. Everybody have a nice weekend!
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In lieu of a more lengthy comment for now, I’d like to say that I sincerely hope we can have a fruitful discussion. I’m troubled that, over several discussions I’ve had on this subject, I still find that there are a significant number of people whose political judgment I respect who consistently argue the contrary position to the one I’ve argued for, as well as a significant number who agree with me. This leads me to suspect that there’s something non-obvious at the root of the disagreement.
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Self-angst trumps the suffering of others. That’s how solipsism is the governing principle of the privileged and why empathy gets the back seat of human understanding.
This, more than anything else, THIS!
Like “mansplaining” and other such terms, this “white privilege” term only serves to divide and entrench the people who are part of the problem it seeks to address.
It’s a relative term, so can be leveled at anybody - Paula is immensely privileged, with that roof over her head, enough health to get a job, a whole support network of caring parents, family and community, and even a job! So, she’s better off than well over three quarters of my friends. But she absolutely deserves to feel good about herself and her achievements, as does Richard. As do we all!
If we can’t feel good about our achievements, then why strive?
Such toxic phrases make no effort at positivity or suggestion at a resolution. Nothing about the term “white privilege” says anything about what the reader should or could do to improve the situation: it’s just “you’re white and middle class, you are bad and should FEEL BAD!”
That’s not (I hope!) what people mean when they say it - but it’s how it comes across, and that causes their audience to entrench rather than be converted. That’s immensely unproductive. Dump this term. Find a better one. I don’t have one, but I know there must be one.
We need someone to write the “spoon theory” of privilege-explanations. Some phrase that makes it something that can be talked about without instantly degenerating into acrimonious argument!
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Except no.
You are white and middle class you should feel empathy for people who have not had the same opportunities as you, respect them when they talk about their experience, don’t diminish their experience, and don’t make it about you.
Is that so fucking hard?
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For some people, apparently so. Sadly enough.
It does that with some people, but not with others. Some welcome self-awareness, some reject it. Why cater completely to the latter? Especially when they’re not likely to listen no matter how one puts it, given that they usually think racism doesn’t exist anymore (except when, supposedly, white people are now the victims).
Sounds to me like you still don’t understand the “paradigm.” Nobody who sincerely uses the phrase “white privilege” believes that those with different skin colors are inferior.
I actually prefer to talk about de facto white supremacy, but I gather that wouldn’t work for you either.
It’s obvious to me that white, male, heterosexual, class, and other forms of dominant-group privileges exist, and that those in dominant categories tend not to be aware of it, and that they tend to bristle and resist when their unearned advantages, gifted to them by an unjust social order, are pointed out. I just don’t think their resistance means we should all start ignoring the phenomenon. What sort of activist shoots herself in the foot from the get-go like that, by catering to the dominant?
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