And most of the people running things tend to have a lot of privilege. It’s why the government keeps screwing over poor and disabled people. It’s why Facebook has its RealName policy. It’s why lG(b)… rights groups tend to focus on marriage equality instead of homelessness. It’s why mras tend to focus on total bullshit instead of homelessness.
P.S. One more thing: Many privileges are things that everyone should be able to take for granted, such as freedom from poverty, from police harassment, etc. but some people can and other people can’t.
Yes. That’s why I have misgivings about the term “underprivileged.” And, privilege only works as privilege when others don’t have it. So, the “underprivileged” should get more privilege, so they too can have something that others don’t have? :-/
I have brought this up several times before, but I feel gratitude is a better way to approach this.
If you aren’t grateful for everything you have, you cannot appreciate that others don’t have it. Because you have taken it for granted. You have forgotten to be thankful for all the stuff we have, that many don’t. Running water. Not living in a war zone. To be born in a first world country. A place to live. A family that gives a damn about you. I mean the list goes on forever.
Hell, to be born at all.
So instead of “check your privilege”, I think it’s more constructively expressed as “don’t forget to be thankful for everything you have, that others may not”.
It is another way of putting it, but the word privilege is used by activists to point out unearned advantages that others have as a result of social inequities. Getting people to feel grateful for what they have seems far less useful as a way of pointing out that others don’t have something BECAUSE you have it, and of asking you to give any of it up.
It can be, yeah, especially when you’re using a term that conveys exactly none of that. Is it so hard to see, after countless irate forum discussions on the topic, that “white privilege” is an incendiary term that typically does not promote constructive discourse, but rather makes a large portion of the target audience feel like they are being shamed for their genetic makeup and some set of presumed advantages?
It doesn’t really matter what the term is intended to mean. If your message is getting lost because of the wording, change the damn wording.
“the structural inequities inherent in the system that mean that non-white individuals start off at a huge disadvantage relative to white individuals.”
i use the term white privilege because it takes 4 syllables instead of 34.
Just realize, while you’re doing that, that doing what is easy or convenient instead of what is necessary is precisely why we have a privilege imbalance in the first place. You aren’t helping.
No, the reason we have an imbalance is because of institutionalized, structural imbalances that weren’t even illegal until fifty years ago. And while reforms have been made the economics of Rich vs. Wealth (as Chris Rock puts it) is a multi hundred year, generational issue.
My view on privilege has always been an economic and generational one. And it take more than five decades to repair the nepotism, coercism, and repression the US institutionalized.
And furthermore, let’s look at non skin color based privilege: the movement for women’s rights is over a hundred years old. Progress has been made, but can you argue with a straight face that white men don’t have an advantage over… Err… Everyone?
The tech transparency reports back up this hypothesis to the nth degree. Because of historical inequality black women have +1 short sword, white women have a +2 gladius, and white men have a +5 vorpal long sword.
It is slowly changing. But I will bet my bottom dollar it takes at least 300 more years.
you’re giving me too much credit, i cannot accept the honor. besides which you know nothing more about my rhetorical approach to the problem of privilege than that i avoid unnecessary circumlocution and euphemism.
Way to abjectly miss the point, there. By clinging to an incendiary term just because it makes you feel like you’re better then other people, you are actively harming the cause.
Understanding how your attitude and terminology are actively damaging those you seek to help, should not be “fucking hard” in any way. It’s advertising 101 - you want to win people over, not cause them to entrench against you. I honestly don’t know how to explain this to you any more simply.
Why cater only to jerks who want to feel better than others, and ignore the majority? Why do you resist the suggestion to find a term (like"spoon theory") that is non-judgemental and will win more support for the concept than a toxic, divisive one? What do you hope to gain by clinging to this term, than one which does not drive people away?
To put this another way: I am white, and happy, and healthy, and abled. I have traveled widely. I have insane levels of privilege, more than I will ever be able to consciously understand, no matter how much I think of it.
But on the other hand, my family have been starving, so poor we’ve had nothing to eat. We’ve been jobless, homeless, penniless, friendless and paperless in a foreign nation. I’ve lived in places where I had to scrape up five different species of shit before I could get to my room. I’ve been mugged, and lived in areas where every one of my friends has been mugged.
This term “privilege”. what does it mean in this context of grey areas? What’s wrong with “Lucky”? What’s wrong with “count your blessings”? What’s wrong with “There’s always someone worse off”? As a kid, “just think, you could be one of the starving kids in Africa” worked well. All these are easy to relate to and have stood the test of time, without inspiring argument. So why defend the pointlessly-incendiary “privilege” term?
I honestly have a hard time applying the term “privilege” to myself, because I know where I and my family have come from. Even though I fully understand the ideal intellectually, and at that level I am convinced that much of my ‘luck’ has been privilege, I find the term very hard to relate to on an emotional level, because it’s so far removed from my experience. These other terms I listed don’t have quite the same meaning, but I can at least relate to them.
So the challenge is to find something we can all relate to, like the “spoon theory” term, which is non-inflammatory, and gets us all pulling in the same direction, instead of entrenching against it.
I don’t think I’m being a jerk, but please let me know if I am (and in what way!). I’m not arguing against the concept of privilege, since it very clearly exists. I’m saying that, as a term, it’s damaging and divisive. “Toxic” is a perfect description for it.
Hrm. Perhaps it would help to investigate why “privilege” is an inflammatory concept? Feels to me like the concepts of “there are people less fortunate than you” and “you have some blessings” are less inflammatory than the concept of “you are more fortunate than others”. Interesting and strange.
Could it be that the term “privilege” implies that “you have not earned and do not deserve your current position in the world, have no right to celebrate your triumphs, and in an equitable universe, you would be worse off”? I think that’s to the core of it. Since all that is so obviously wrong (in an equitable world, almost all of us would be significantly better off), the term feels wrong - and even insulting. Does that make sense?
This has been covered so many times in so many places that insisting we have put forth the effort to educate you is proof that you don’t want to be educated.
You’re probably right, chgoliz. But I guess I’m not ready to give up on this kind of white guy just yet!
Well yes, I think it would help you if you investigated that. Along with what seems like an assumption of yours that all or most other white people feel the same as you when they hear the term white privilege. As I wrote somewhere above, many don’t; many realize, or eventually realize, it does accurately describe a general phenomenon in a society where racism is still so entrenched.
I think that when white people’s hackle go up in response to that term, it’s often because they don’t think of their whiteness as something that has helped them and continues to help them in life – as something that often makes live and achievements and happiness just that much easier than they are for people who aren’t white. And so, the response is something like, “What in the world do you mean? I don’t have advantages over others! I’ve lived in places where I had to scrape up five different species of shit before I could get to my room. I’ve had it bad, and I worked hard to get where I am! Advantages, just because I’m white? Naaaaah.”
In other words, the concept (whatever term is used to describe it) bothers many because not only does it address something they’ve hardly ever thought seriously or analytically about – their membership in the white race – it also points out something they’ve never realized before, which is that being in the white club has its privileges. Its advantages.
Maybe “white advantage” would be easier for you and others to hear? I suspect not; it’s interesting how many of the suggested alternatives don’t even include the word “white.”
Why are white people so often so unwilling to talk seriously about what it means for them to be white?
Yes thanks, that makes sense, but it’s also, again, a defensive reaction, one that inaccurately describes what “privilege” actually is. It’s simply an advantage that others don’t have. I think white people have every moral right to be happy and even proud of their current position in the world, IF they actually have worked hard to get there. But i think they should also realize that they probably would have had to work harder to get there, or even might not have gotten there at all, if they weren’t white.
I don’t think some other term would get them to understand that any quicker or easier than “white privilege” would.
speaking as a middle-aged white guy from texas, privilege represents all the things in my life which were easier and simpler because i was not black or hispanic and because i am a cis-gendered male. ii have seen over and over again the way my peers who were people of color got left behind or caught up in the discipinary system at school or caught up in the legal system after adulthood for things i had done and not been punished for. it means the continuing leg up i have because my ancestors were white and had so many more opportunities to accumulate wealth or property or status that made it simpler for my parents and grandparents to pass on elements of that to me and my sister and my cousins. it represents the continuing leg up the white students i teach have because the children of color in my school tend to be disciplined more often and more harshly than the white students in my school, a tendency i work against. it represents the continuing leg up i see the male students in my school system get when excellent female science students of mine are thrown under the bus and pushed out of advanced science classes at the junior high and hgih scool after they leave me. during the middle of the 20th century in the south white privilege was an explicitly described entity with politicians guaranteeing their constituents that no matter how poor they might be they would always be better off then the blacks and the hispanics. it’s better hidden behind code talk and dog whistles now but it was spoken of openly and approvingly by politicians in my lifetime. to understand privilege is to understand where we fit into the sweep of history and to recognize that the world wasn’t created yesterday.
i have been examining and questioning my privilege almost from the time i became capable of rational and analytical thought and i have acted on that analysis in ways intended to help remove the barriers for those people of color whose lives i can touch. i believe that it will be impossible to move away from a racist society without similar actions by individuals and groups and it will be completely impossible without recognizing and examing privilege.
Oh dear FSM, I am gonna go full nerd on this analogy.
Isn’t privilege basically like a Buff in WoW? It doesn’t mean you will win or even be satisfied, but a 25% increase on Damage per Second is substantial. A person can still use it in a way that is less effective though (and not any fault to them).
One of us is missing the point. But it’s not the person you think it is. And, if you think that this is all about making me feel like a better person, you’ve not only missed the point, you’re not even on the same plane of existence as the point.
I think all this understanding and thinking does not matter. Awareness is great, but awareness alone is not moving the needle. What matters is what people ultimately do about it. The general idea is that rich people use their power and wealth to help others, Gates style, right?
