I'm a classy privileged lady

[alias_sqbr]

As a very belated follow-on to my vague meanderings after doing the privilege meme...

I came across this post:A Little More Discussion on Privilege. The discussion is about the relationship between class and race (and is quite interesting), but the final section is more just about privilege in general, and captured what I was groping towards.

Namely, that there is a difference between your/your parents material circumstances and your/their culture/attitude/expectations, and both create privilege in different ways. I was fairly poor growing up, but my parents are very intellectual people who not only value education etc but know how to get it and see it as attainable, as a result of their own intellectual middle class upbringing. I sometimes wonder how much I would have overcome the sense of despair that pervaded my working class primary school if I hadn't gotten the scholarship to a snooty private school (admittedly, I'm not sure how much of that was internal. I was not a very well balanced kid)

Hmm. I had more to say but my brain has sputtered out :/

EDIT after reading comments: success is about walking through open doors, and privilege helps with this by giving you:
- more doors to start with
- the self confidence to go through them
-the ability to recognise them as doors
-the knowledge of how to access them
- being allowed to pass through them (ie being "the right sort of person")

Comments

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

The three questions at the end of the article remind me of everything I have ever found wrong with the issue of privilege.

[alias_sqbr]

I can see why someone would object to the first one (I'm not 100% I agree with her emphasis on attitude, I don't think it's as simple as that) though I guess you could always answer "It doesn't", but what's wrong with the last two? People do get very narky when you suggest that maybe being white/straight etc gives them an advantage over people who aren't.

I'm genuinely curious: while I disagree with a lot of your opinions, they're always intelligently argued and interesting :)

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

I view privilege as a purely rhetorical device that's used to shut debate down. At this, I admit, it's incredibly good, and I get a fair bit of use out of it. But I don't think it does any actual theoretical job, and I think those questions are great examples of that.

Q1: If you view privilege as just the possession of normalised advantages that enable particular kinds of human development relative to some element of a society (without any extra connotations), then it is completely unsurprising that entitlement plays into things. Because that is a fairly basic description of something like Sen and Nussbaum's "capabilities approach" to human development. And they're all about basic entitlements. But this has nothing to do with "privilege" as it's normally used. Something else is doing all the conceptual work.

Q2 & Q3: When you come across an idea that people object to so strongly, persistently and predictably, then the automatic assumption should not be "my idea is right and is the reason these people are objecting," because that begs the question. The standard assumption should be "there is something wrong with the concept or its phrasing." I think that the thing that is wrong is that: the term “privilege” doesn’t actually mean what it may intuitively seem to mean; the meaning that the term “privilege” is stipulated to carry is actually held by a set of other concepts (like the capabilities approach) that form part of the backbone of Western ethical thought; and the stipulative meaning of the term doesn’t match up with the way it’s used. I think that way “privilege” as a term is actually used is just as a covert way of saying “x-ist.” The inference that goes along with the whole “systematic advantaging of a group” is a silent “at the expense of” at the end. Which is fair enough, but dishonest if you’re trying to pretend that you’re being completely neutral and non-condemnatory when you use it.

I also think privilege is unhelpful as a concept because it doesn’t actually have enough apodictic force to act as anything other than a rhetorical tool. It doesn’t give you any guidance to behaviour, or policy.


Also, there are always those old debates that go on about what "luck" and "deserve" and "free-will" actually mean. Many of which become stupid when the person putting them forward makes a claim that ends up translating into something like "you only deserve something if you, by the power of your mind alone, compelled the universe to fall into such a co-ordination of atoms as to give to you something that you had absolutely no desire for (because desire is both socially codified and naturalised)"

[alias_sqbr]

Well, I've found privilige a useful concept for my own understanding, so nerr :P

That said, I think I get where you're coming from. I think there is a conflation of "in an advantaged position for societal reasons beyond your control, which gives you certain responsibilities and cognitive blind spots" and "morally bad oppressor". The ambiguity of the term "racist" annoys me: either it means society wide predjudices everyone engages in, or it means particular examples of damnable individual behaviour, but I don't think it can mean both at the same time. And perhaps these concepts could be better explained and dealt with with different terminology.

That said, people *do* get defensive for no reason about this stuff, and I get that feeling that if you're a victim of racism then once you've seen it enough times it's hard to give the next defensive person the benefit of the doubt. See for example this post: http://zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com/429092.html

I'm sure there's some psychological theory about people getting into denial about any fact which reflects badly on them or whatever.

Interesting discussion

[willbarratt.livejournal.com]

I like this discussion very much. And yes, there are some theories that explain the defensiveness - see Milton Bennett on Intercultural Sensitivity for example.

My sense is that privilege is a conversation stopper because most people don't want to confront unearned privilege. The idea of unearned privilege does not imply the propriety or impropriety of earned privilege. I am often criticized for exploring class because I am not ready to confront ethnicity and gender, and my response is to turn that back on people and suggest that class is what they are afraid of discussing.

Will Barratt - one of the authors of the "Privilege meme"

Re: Interesting discussion

[alias_sqbr]

Oh, hey! Nice meme :)

I think people tend to be afraid of discussing anything which makes then look bad. White women don't want to discuss race, poor men don't want to discuss gender, rich people with disabilities don't want to discuss class etc. We tend to see our own oppressions as paramount and everyone else's as a distraction (even when their particular issue is the topic under discussion) it annoys the heck out of me.

(Sorry I took a while to reply, I was waiting until I had something really insightful to say but then decided that might take a while :D)