privilege as a meme

I'll get me privilege

I made that pun already

how would you even coat check your privilege

by taking off your privilege and leaving it in a closet near the door.

LOL at Dan. "Here's a shiny quarter, young rapscallion, now run along!"

http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/ele3600/mcintosh.html

founding document iirc

lex i think the thread creators are not questioning that (straight, white, w/e) privilege is a thing, rather that the angle should be pointed inward rather than outward. beam, mote, etc.

go lex

i mean, self-examination is great and all, but sometimes people just have to be told a thing. this can be true even when they don't particularly want to hear it.

sometimes you tell people a thing and it doesnt do anything idk

i mean, self-examination is great and all, but sometimes people just have to be told a thing. this can be true even when they don't particularly want to hear it.

sounds in the spirit of the concept.

xp - well sure. no guarantee that pointing out privilege is going to accomplish any actual good. it probably makes some people more defiant and aggrieved.

but i'm not gonna suggest that the world should just shut up about privilege and allow all us good, nice, liberal, well-intentioned straight white men (speaking for myself) come to enlightenment in our own time, through unmolested introspection.

^ to

makes me think of some study i read about recently where they found that challenging peoples views actually made them harden their position, but im kind suspicious of that result cause i think its just measuring the initial reaction, and im sure we all have personal experiences of being confronted about being wrong by someone and getting embarrassed and mad and doubling down, and then later we lowkey change our opinion lol

but i'm not gonna suggest that the world should just shut up about privilege and allow all us good, nice, liberal, well-intentioned straight white men (speaking for myself) come to enlightenment in our own time, through unmolested introspection.

nobody is arguing this...

http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/ele3600/mcintosh.html

founding document iirc

― rather ugged man (zvookster), Wednesday, April 10, 2013 10:55 AM (36 minutes ago) Bookmark

i had seen this piece referenced in other stuff i've been reading but never tracked down the original. ty for this!

nobody is arguing this...

troo, i was strawmanning p hard there. nevertheless, i think that the discussion of privilege provides us with a nice opportunity to, you know, keep our privilege in check.

"the music of my race"

new album in the works

thanks for linking the mcintoch essay, zvooks

i'll throw up some choice quotes from the essay

Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that, since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there is most likely a phenomenon of white privilege that was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege.

...

My schooling gave me no training in seeing myself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged person, or as a participant in a damaged culture. I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will. My schooling followed the pattern my colleague 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 that will allow them to be more like us.

i'm glad to see that essay here

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant groups one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

Disapproving of the system won't be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a "white" skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.

To redesign social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these subject taboo. Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist.

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

and im sure we all have personal experiences of being confronted about being wrong by someone and getting embarrassed and mad and doubling down, and then later we lowkey change our opinion lol

― lag∞n, Wednesday, April 10, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have this kind of confrontation semi-regularly with my wife (over something political or whatever), and she's super-stubborn and will double down hard and I'll have to just drop the conversation because it gets to an utterly useless deadlock. But sometimes, weeks or months later, I've overheard her talking to other people about the same topic, but then using my position from the argument we had. It's heartwarming as fuck.

lol that would just make me furious

I think it's awesome. I mean, whatever. I can reconcile to having a difference of opinion with her too. It's hard to fully digest information and change your mind about something when you're in an argument. But how many times have you been mid-conversation with someone and then just stopped and said "wait, you're right and I've been wrong about everything this whole time."

ha I do that occasionally

I try to be better about it as I've gotten older, but it's still hella awkward.

It's hard to fully digest information and change your mind about something when you're in an argument.

IRL arguments are so ineffective because of this.

"I was taught to see myself as an individual whose moral state depended on her individual moral will."

this is crucial, i think. the challenge issued to this way of thinking can be a very tough pill to swallow. no matter how sound my thinking and good my intentions, my position in the culture can make my views less useful in certain contexts than those of others, can even make them intrinsically suspect. that lesson ran counter to some of my most basic assumptions (and, not coincidentally, to the nature of privileged entitlement itself). it took me quite a while to come to terms with it. hell, i still struggle.

I don't think this is something anyone can ever "come to terms with"

yeah, probably not

RE logic. I don't think logic works the way some people think it works. If by logic you mean reasonable or thoughtful, then there is no line between logic and discussions of privilege. If you are talking about the discipline of logic, then you need to understand that logic is only good at analyzing the structural validity arguments, not ascertaining truths.

The applicability of logic is even more constrained when we don't start with objective truths. The illusion that one is an objective or neutral observer is often reinforced by privilege.

Arguments based on privilege aren't illogical, they're historical, empirical, and rational, and they are about exposing the fallacy of an objective position--an illusion that is often at the heart of what it means to be privileged.

The thing that sometimes makes me uneasy about "privilege" as a concept (I still don't understand what a meme is!) is that it seems imprecise as a way to fully describe how power and inequality operate in the world. something goole and dayo were talking about up thread seems relevant here, about how the language of privilege helps American individual rights discourse to accommodate a more structural understanding of inequality. I don't really have a better account to offer, and I've seen the concept of privilege work for people irl.

the conceit is that you can "teach someone a lesson" which basically never works.

basically lagoon otm

basically, fuck i need new words

I think I realized in high school that to counter my relative poverty and deviance with the appearance of white, male, bourgeois probity would save me from a lot of hassles, tickets, distrust, etc... from the powers that be. It can be incredibly demoralizing and alienating, especially when you're young, to hear other white guys try to 'bond' with you by talking down whatever race or gender they like to disparage or even just guys bonding over sexism or homophobia, and since I was a suspect, book-reading francophile, I was 'tested' a lot. It made me utterly unsympathetic to 'real American' masculinity (though I was sad for the individual guys who were caught in the social mechanics of the phenomenon) and later, made me realize it wasn't limited to America. I guess my privilege was that I could mutter my way out of most situations and that I found them as tedious as I found them infuriating.

Being able to dismiss that kind of unpleasantness as "beneath" you is a reflection of privilege yeah; you're not at its sharp end.

Austerity ponies otm

There's a poster itt who changed his mind after getting in countless lengthy arguments about whether or not he was arguing from a position of privilege, who doubled down and dug in his heels, and eventually came to agree with some of his critics, so idk, sometimes it works. xposts

you're not at its sharp end.

Tbf, that's why I said upthread that I'm all about expanding privilege (not unexaminedly so, however) 'cause who the fuck wants to be on the sharp end? I'm not a big fan of the expiatory or cathartic value of suffering shtick that Xtians and stoics are so enamored of.

MW, with respect, i don't think you're quite comprehending the usage of the word privilege in this specific academic context -- that is, privilege as an unearned advantage that implicates you in institutional forms of inequality

that's the definition i'm working from, so i don't know why you're proposing to "expand privilege" unless you're using a very different definition

Drawing from the McIntosh paper:

I want, then, to distinguish between earned strength and unearned power conferred systematically. Privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies. For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them. This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally say as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

Maybe it makes sense to talk about positive advantages (which are benign and which we want to spread) as well as negative advantages (which require dominance and which we want to negate).

in my understanding, tho 'privilege' may have arisen in an academic context originally, it is not really used at all in gender or race studies in the academy today and is def more of a social justice/political term. << my 2cents.

this looks awesome: http://books.google.com/books?id=zZ1wcz366pkC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://images.tandf.co.uk/common/jackets/amazon/978041566/9780415669641.jpg

that is, privilege as an unearned advantage that implicates you in institutional forms of inequality

Basically what Austerity Ponies says at the end. I differ from Jefferson in thinking that we don't have inalienable rights. We have rights that we believe in and defend but they can all be lost. That said, we have rights now, considered sacred and immutable, which we didn't possess 5 or 6 generations ago. Even white males, ironically, the ones most attached in America to 'traditional American values'™ wouldn't, most of them, be able to vote in Revolutionary era America; they're too poor to hold the franchise. Sorry if this is kind of a derail, but limiting the idea of privilege to just institutional forms of inequality seems arbitrary and I'd like to consider privilege from aspirational as well as negative povs. Plus, Americans talking privilege can seem globally a little myopic

Oh yeah, communist privilege.

http://www.salpetrieredesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/druzhba-holiday-center-hall-1.jpg

Dachas, holidays on the Black Sea, food...

privileges and rights are different things, tho! such that pointing out the difference is itself something of an idiom: "it's not a right, it's a privilege"

Tanned, toned, and distributed.

xp or vice versa. i think the usefulness of the term privilege is the implication of inequality. not rights, but special rights, yes, inherited and seemingly natural, but explicitly NOT universal