privilege as a meme

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

What do you call it when one has better access to what ought to be universal rights because one is white, male, or heterosexual?

just dude stuff

Privilege, indeed. The privileges of the aristocrats and Church (largely wrt taxation) were a leading reason for the French Revolution

i'm not sure i know what the privilege meme is now either. i thought it was people on blogs talking about privilege and how it should be checked, not the invisible knapsack. i don't have a problem with that except like what horseshoe said, "it seems imprecise as a way to fully describe how power and inequality operate in the world," but i get that it's more of a rhetorical thing than an all-encompassing theory. but now i'm a committed anti-feminist because i have questions about its usefulness. even though my questions about it are feminist imo. i don't like discussions and i should not read these threads.

see, I could see social justicey type people saying to one another about a third party "he/she needs to check his priv." But it shouldnt be the thing a person tells another person. That needs to be way more explicatory to have any benefit.

I've definitely heard third-person accounts of other people's callousness that have caused me to change my ways/mindset so I wouldn't say there's no benefit

i...think people generally use it (the exact phrase) with people who should 'know better' anyway? it's really not that confrontational (or it shouldn't be) - it's just saying "think about why you think that way"

i can see benefits and i don't think people should have to teach every troll that comments on their blog about why their behavior is bad

There's a definite overlap btwn ppl who use 'privilege' and ppl who want to call others racist or sexist but can't quite bring themselves to ... come out and say it? So you get declarative sentences ... weakened by the pause and the high rising terminal? They don't want to be held to justifying a direct allegation, so they settle for implication instead.

See also: "It is interesting that ..." signifying "It is racist / sexist that ..."; "some people itt," passim

That was me, since yr comment seems pointed. I was trying to be calm and not attacky but show that even in a thread where
ppl are ostensibly trying to learn about privilege, there was resistance to even acknowledging the problem, or being willing to work with the solution even if they werent comfortable with the fit. And I was posting mostly from a phone where it's hard to scroll back, cut and paste, etc.

Also just fuck you. It's hard to be the only person trying to explain this shit, when dayo and others went quiet for a while.

so itt it's been decided that ppl have to be less confrontational and accusatory when they say "check your privilege" but also "check your privilege" isn't confrontational or accusatory enough

sometimes it's fun to watch strangers getting pointlessly butthurt about things

check your butthurtness privilege

sorry io ;_; i had to go work!

There's a definite overlap btwn ppl who use 'privilege' and ppl who want to call others racist or sexist but can't quite bring themselves to ... come out and say it? So you get declarative sentences ... weakened by the pause and the high rising terminal? They don't want to be held to justifying a direct allegation, so they settle for implication instead.

See also: "It is interesting that ..." signifying "It is racist / sexist that ..."; "some people itt," passim

― boxall, Wednesday, April 10, 2013 7:36 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

oh come on - people deploy the word 'privilege' because it does land a softer blow than calling someone racist or sexist, it doesn't shut the conversation down i nthe way that calling someone those terms does. lol @ holding these conversation-extending strategies as a reason that we should be suspicious of people who frame the conversation in these terms. but if you only prefer hardman trolling, if you only get off when people actually do call you a sexist or a racist, i'm more than happy to oblige

also lol @ trying to draw a direct link between 'privilege' and the very general linguistic concept of hedging; hedging is something literally everybody does, every day, in every interaction they have with other people. it's called not coming off as an imperious asshole to those around you

xxp Aw don't sweat it, boo. Sometimes I need an irl witness for this shit tho. Lagoon straight social experimenting by even creating this thread which no doubt went exactly the way he predicted.

it's been remarkably civil and sensible, all things considered

I think most contributors did a reasonable job of avoiding the more obvious trolling posts. My mental killfile is kinda working.

haha regardless of lag**n's intentions i think it's generally a good thing that this stuff gets discussed out in the open and that there's a forum for it. i feel like a lot of air has been cleared already!

Anyway, people getting defensive about privilege is pretty dumb because if they bothered to stop saying LALALALALLA for long enough to learn about it, it is basically impossible by definition for anyone in a privileged group NOT to benefit. It's academic justification for it not being any individual's fault! We should all be going gladly to that well, because it absolves us of being responsible for benefiting from the qualities we did nothing to earn, up to the point where we start to recognize them and then it IS on each person to think it over from there.

i don't know how i feel. lagøøn said but particularly itt im more interested in how something gets chewed up by the internet and people and everyone talked about what they think about privilege instead.

it's like he totally lost control of the thread, what happened

The internet is people, so are the posters posting here. We just demonstrated the chewing up part for you; you're welcome.

yessssss i just added another layer of troll his troll and it took only one minute 18 seconds

happy to help

in orbit, I really appreciate your contributions to this thread and to ILX in general, just sayin'