Privilege

Raynaga

OK, so. I just read something that bothered me. And I've been sick all week and as a result have been stuck perusing the web. There seems to be an ongoing back and forth about "privilege" and what that means. Some folks decry it, some say it doesn't exist.

So I wanted to contribute to clarification, if possible, as a beneficiary of it.

My father is a good man. He worked hard his whole life. He superceded my managerial career in every way possible. He had a positive impact on a lot of folks.

He also had parents who owned a gas well. Who took him and his brother on European vacations every year. Who were able to give loans any time (which he paid back, more than I can say for me so far) it was needed.

Now, my grandfather built their family home with his bare hands. Literally. Planed all the lumber, planned the construction. He fought in WW2.

That also gave him the GI Bill. And the know a fellow connections surviving an all encompassing war delivers. He did a lot of things, no question.

I am a lesser son of greater fathers in terms of skill and achievement.

But.

I can also acknowledge if my dad had been born with skin a different color from a different family, his opportunities would also be different. There wouldn't have been the gas well or the custom built home. No vacations for perspective.

We hear about Bezos a lot. Started in his garage! Boot straps!

With a million plus dollar investment from his parents, after a hedge fund career that bought the house that garage was attached to.

There could be a Bezos born in a disadvantaged part of the country tomorrow. He won't have those opportunities or advantages. That's the privilege.

Someone way smarter and better than me could graduate tomorrow and not have the in at schools I had or the network in business my family provided that helped me get where I am. That's the privilege.

And the thing is, that doesn't make the beneficiaries bad! They didn't make the system we're in, they just live in it. It's possible to both try and be a good person and also recognize that our status is a result of our circumstance, to whatever percentile degree you are willing to acknowledge.

I don't know, this is probably an ill-conceived ramble. But the online discourse right now is poison. Our political system seems stuck in mediocrity.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with accepting that where we are isn't entirely because of what we did? And that where other people are isn't because of what they didn't do.

Feel free to mock me now or lock the thread. It's been a long, RSV week, and I'm very tired.

Thanks.

Caedwyr

Another way to look at it that I have found useful is that when we are born we all are assigned to a difficulty setting that we can't change and we are all playing on Ironman. For the white straight male in America who has a hedge fund, loving and supportive parents who have a healthy relationship, the child is on the VERY EASY difficulty. For the black lesbian woman born to the foster system, they are playing on one of the HARD difficulties. Theoretically, both can get to the same place in life (unless there is some sort of difficulty hard cap), but one is going to have a lot harder time and their chance of failing is way higher.

Privilege is just acknowledging that the difficulty settings exist and are out of our control when hitting the random new character button.

Sadly, many people behave like the protagonist of the classic meme


Which comes across as Bad Manners

Scooter

The superficial first reaction a lot of people have to the concept of 'privilege' is that it's like stats from an RPG. If you pick this background, you get the Educated trait, if you pick this background, you get 500 extra starting gold, etc, and then they dismiss it because in RPGs that applies to every character while in real life obviously there are no universally applied advantages. It's not stats, it's statistics. If a white driver and a black driver both get pulled over for speeding, it doesn't mean the white guy always gets a warning and the black guy always gets arrested. It just means there's a greater statistical likelihood that those will be the outcomes than if the demographics were swapped. Of course, a lot of people are really bad at statistics, but I think it could be made clearer more often that this is what people are talking about.

A lot of the instinctive anti-reaction people have from the concept is the impression that, by accepting that they have in some way benefited from sins that occurred before they were born, they are themselves being labelled as bad people. But humanity's been around for hundreds of thousands of years, there isn't a person alive who isn't in some way the product of thousands of crimes along the way. People don't need to feel bad about things that other people did. They only need to feel good or bad based on how they react to realizing it.

RT800

I've often felt that using a term like "privilege" to reference the phenomena it describes seems almost deliberately inflammatory.

To my mind - and I think to a great many other people as well - a word like "privilege" is almost synonymous with the words "special treatment".

Which is not really at all what it's meant to describe. This makes it easy to misunderstand - and even easier to misrepresent, either by accident or on purpose.

Just seems like real clumsy messaging, is what I'm sayin'

Organichu

where i've had great luck in placating those who are defensive about the idea of their privilege is pointing out those privileges which they lack. often i've talked to a white person who grew up in very poor bayou country louisiana, or bleak appalachia, and they're super resentful of what they see as the idea that they haven't dealt with challenges. so i think it can be helpful to remind them- you know, a queer person of color who grew up rich also possesses some privileges you lack. i find that this can help to assuage their hostility. privilege and intersectionality are really complicated. i grew up in israel and have lost family members to terrorism. have fun telling some israelis (especially conservatives) that they're in a privileged position in society- economically advantaged, only at danger from low tech qassam rockets instead of smart bombs from the IAF. when people have endured great hardship, been destitute, lost family to violence- they're resistant to argument about power dynamics and relative advantage. so i find this sort of thing to be a useful way to sooth them; they inherit some privileges but lack others, and so aren't entirely outside of this system.

dporowski

Scooter wrote: »

The superficial first reaction a lot of people have to the concept of 'privilege' is that it's like stats from an RPG. If you pick this background, you get the Educated trait, if you pick this background, you get 500 extra starting gold, etc, and then they dismiss it because in RPGs that applies to every character while in real life obviously there are no universally applied advantages. It's not stats, it's statistics. If a white driver and a black driver both get pulled over for speeding, it doesn't mean the white guy always gets a warning and the black guy always gets arrested. It just means there's a greater statistical likelihood that those will be the outcomes than if the demographics were swapped. Of course, a lot of people are really bad at statistics, but I think it could be made clearer more often that this is what people are talking about.

A lot of the instinctive anti-reaction people have from the concept is the impression that, by accepting that they have in some way benefited from sins that occurred before they were born, they are themselves being labelled as bad people. But humanity's been around for hundreds of thousands of years, there isn't a person alive who isn't in some way the product of thousands of crimes along the way. People don't need to feel bad about things that other people did. They only need to feel good or bad based on how they react to realizing it.

Well, there's very loud, visible, persistent asshats who have worked out that they can weaponise these concepts, and they do use them like that, and do label people as bad, because the thing they want is "their way", and this is just useful ammunition. So to a degree, it's understandable. Also, some more academic-style phrasing and verbiage just doesn't translate into "normal human", which is a constant for all disciplines. So "privilege" gets heard like images of some society snob looking down on the rabble. (See also: "Theory".)

However, "I'm not saying you aren't screwed; I'm just saying they're screwed worse." or similar tends to kind of soften it, as said above. Just need to speak the right language for your audience IMO.

Edit: Re "inflammatory", I'd wager it's not; just academic-ese. Academic communication diverges from normal lay communication, because a discipline needs its jargon to adequately communicate. Similarly, "the male gaze" is not literally "a dude is looking at a thing", and "the theory of evolution" is not "a guess".

However, JFC are most dedicated academics bad at communicating outside their sphere. They do the "if I just speak louder that will fix it" thing normally ascribed to Americans/Brits in Spain on holiday.