privilege as a meme

it's not all sort of happy-slappy

xp yeah academic privilege is often a...blind spot here. i don't mean the basic stuff like grasping the concept of intersectionality and i certainly don't give anyone smart enough to have a career in mainstream journalism a pass on constantly whinging it's too hard to understand, but just repeating how you came from nothing but made it to university can def come across like bootstraps rhetoric at times. especially when many people on whose behalf you purport to speak don't have the access to or even interest in that kind of education.

Man, it's such a drag to have people speaking for "feminism" who say things like that, because then I have to look at every social media feed being full of scathing (and deserved) denouncements of what "white feminists" do for like a week afterward. More seriously because this shit is part of what makes smart, political, motivated women of color decide they can't be "feminists" because the official face of the movement excludes them and LASHES OUT AT THEM?? so duh, they are taking their toys and playing in the other sandbox, which at this point is kind of the only sandbox for me.

For most of my life I haven't had the vocabulary to talk about justice issues and didn't know that there even was such a thing, but I do remember my mom asking me why I cared so much about gay rights (in college, natch) and trying to explain to her that their oppression was not separable from women's struggle for equal rights and opportunities. It would be 15 years before I learned the word "patriarchy."

Well, this is the thing - lacking the *words* for a concept is a very different thing from lacking the concept itself.

Having the experience of the kinds of things the word/concept discusses makes it much, much easier to encounter the word for the first time and go "Yes! That!" and not see it as an overly academic concern, but finally having the right word for an experience one has encountered one's entire life.

The problem is, as that Flavia Dzodan piece makes clear, the people most often saying "the concept is fine, but the word is ~terrible~" are the people coming at it from an academic rather than an experience point of view, so what they're objecting to, really, is not the word. It's the concept.

Haha. Yes.

"It's not me. It's you."

all of this stuff reads kind of like extreme mental subterfuge/mind games to me

also this is otm
i have had to remind a lot of feminist friends that making fun of people because their academic practices (handing in a rough draft to a professor) are different from theirs is nagl

xp yeah academic privilege is often a...blind spot here. i don't mean the basic stuff like grasping the concept of intersectionality and i certainly don't give anyone smart enough to have a career in mainstream journalism a pass on constantly whinging it's too hard to understand, but just repeating how you came from nothing but made it to university can def come across like bootstraps rhetoric at times. especially when many people on whose behalf you purport to speak don't have the access to or even interest in that kind of education.

― lex pretend, Friday, January 3, 2014 7:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

just realized i used to get most of my priv news from twitter but now theres a lot of it on facebook

wonder if that has to do with fb tweaking their flow to surface more substantial #content or the topic is becoming more mainstream or im just imagining it or what

it does seem to me like its become more mainstream? i didn't see it nearly so often 3+ years ago.

yeah id have to agree w that, not sure i even knew about it as like a thing three years ago, well three years ago prob, but five years ago idk

i've had some familiarity with it from gender studies courses i took in college, and it had currency among activists i knew in occupy days, but that was where i started to realize for the first time that like 'tumblr discourse' or what have you was a thing

and that seems to have been its base of operations for spreading

tumblr by teens

™

™blr

"privilege as a meme"

i am playing a beta for a thing and can't log in, the exact lingo used in silly video-game-speak starts with "Error xx.xx...: You are not entitled to..." so i googled it and landed on a gamefaqs thread where no less than five thousand people (maybe just 2) joked "have you tried checking your privilege"

have to wonder how soon it is before the word and the discourse around it starts to really infiltrate everywhere and every standup comic in the world does a bit about it like what happened with the term "political correctness" in the 90s. and it becomes a big thing that people far away from the internet have strong half-informed opinions about, and then the word is completely lost forever because it develops such a connotation with badness, nothing but a joke, etc. has fox news spent a day on it yet? it sucks that a few years ago so many people would be so excited to see how far it's all come but lol come on this was bound to happen it will always happen

yup

it's like when "A spectre is haunting Europe" became a lol meme and then communism caved in

memes ruin everything

Next jargon pls

did people actually identify as politically correct in the 90's? i thought that was the reactionary designation hoisted on them. makes it sound like something it's cool and dangerous to be against. ppl tend to self-identify as "anti-oppressive" now ime

conservatives got it from the left iirc

no one identified as politically correct iirc, it was something liberals said to make fun of themselves or their more strident brethren but then it really picked up steam when conservatives/normies got ahold of it

yeah i knew that wasn't a good parallel, also i was born in 88 so i have no idea how it all started, but i think the trajectory of that term once it really took off is possibly very similar to what will happen with "privilege"

obvs meanings/cultures are always mutating which is what inspired me to bravely start this thread, but i wouldnt be surprised if privilege has some legs, it really kinda speaks to our times

I was thinking recently that a lot of the things that I now would describe in terms of white privilege, ten years ago I would have described I'm terms of "Eurocentricity", but that particular mode of discourse has fallen out of favor.

I dunno about "fallen out of favor" exactly, but intersectionality addresses one of the key weaknesses in post-post-colonial identity politics, which is precisely that identity is not singular and power flows in multiple directions.

Which is only to say, I guess, that it seems less that one discourse has been replaced by another than that the discourse has been field-tested and refined.

The old Marxist in me wonders what that does to old coalitions, what new ones it supports, and who benefits, but that's probably a different thread.

what is the story with the use of "folks"?

probably got it from obama

to me the mainstream discovering the privilege discourse, which it will anytime now, is just a necessary step in the process. there will be embarrassing david brooks columns or whatever but introducing the ideas to more people will only shift the overton window. short term pain for long term gain

who doesn't say "folks"?

snoots

i probably lean towards pessimism w/r/t the future of "privilege" in the public discourse. the mainstream RW press have barely touched it yet but i'm seeing a lot of disdain from mainstream liberal journalists sneering at phrases like "check your privilege" and "intersectionality".

more disturbingly it's being conflated with social media trolling - like, literally in the same debate about misogynists sending rape or death threats on twitter, some idiot liberal will chime in with "and those mean intersectional feminists having the temerity to disagree with me in a rude tone".

i genuinely have no conception of the time when the word "privilege" began to be A Thing because it always seemed like duh, the most natural word to use for a social phenomenon that was entirely obvious to me. it's not like it's a relatively new word like intersectionality. people have surely been referring to "privileged backgrounds", "privileged kids" for decades?

also, when i say white liberal journalists sneering, i don't just mean the occasional clueless-but-measured articles they write about it - i mean the behind-the-scenes stuff on facebook, twitter. just pure contempt and disdain for the very idea that those words could mean anything. a loooooot of people have plummeted in my estimation over the past few months.

Lex, you've grown up somewhere that's outrageously frank about class compared to the US. But you're right about the behind-the-scenes stuff - it's as if some people in the commentariat resent not being out ahead of what are (to me) simple, important terms.

People on the left used to go batshit insane when GWB referred to 'folks'.

Late '80s 'political correctness' was used by lefties/students in a non-ironic way but by the time I graduated from college it was just 'PC'. Ironic use by right-wingers took about a decade to get going.

The phrase "check yr privilege" was used as a punchline in the IT crowd recently

ARGH think about who wrote that, and how annoying he finds the inconvenience of people who are more left-wing than him calling him out on Twitter.

i had an 18 year old student use it in class during a debate about ethics of genetic testing he started laughing as he realised what he was saying, and all the other students laughed too

ARGH think about who wrote that, and how annoying he finds the inconvenience of people who are more left-wing than him calling him out on Twitter.

oh my fucking god is it seriously glinner???? that fucking guy.

Tbf it was a funny joke & the mockery wasn't aimed at the phrase itself, the gag was that it was being said by the oblivious millionaire dude

yeah...this is how the phrase itself comes to be seen as a joke though.

GL wrote the IT Crowd, yes. So he'd have privilege-checked in a script at least a year ago, when the series wrapped.

Had a very dispiriting FB discussion about that lamely reductive C4 Queer As Pop doco where white lefty men I otherwise respect wound up sort-of mansplaining Riot Grrrl demographics to me, featuring such classic responses as 'you were too close to the centre of that scene to appreciate how it looked from the outside'.

there is obv going to be a certain section - in the media but not just - of left-leaning middle class liberals whose self-image is in large part built around their sense of righteousness and they are inevitably gonna be some of the last to accept that privilege is a thing and they also possess it because they've been fighting the good fight for years and why aren't we more grateful?

also class/wealth is perhaps one of the harder privileges to recognise because at a certain income level it's easy to be surrounded by people who appear to have much more than you and not to notice those that don't, plus all the evanescent little markers/assumptions of class which in a way don't look like privilege at all to the owners thereof

xp to lex Potentially yes which is why I thought it germane to mention, I just thought I'd mitigate that by saying how the joke worked in context, as a throwaway character detail. GL's dickishness is legendary of course

Nv otm, like with the suzanne Moore thing its never a good look to assume that you have attained top level right on status & can never be called out on anything ever

'you were too close to the centre of that scene to appreciate how it looked from the outside'

oh noooooo -_-

The person who said that to me was actually on the periphery of said scene and loved it, and he's otherwise awesome, but AAAARGH!

GL is making the classic error of forgetting that his house is probably paid for several times over and he won't worry about a red bill ever again. But he's a privately educated South Dublin dude, so the latter point was probably never an issue anyway. Suzanne Moore has at least been faced with financial neediness at some point in her life.

A lot of writers who 'read' as middle-class and privileged in terms of taste and networks, and have a readership of some degree, are not feeling that privilege in terms of their finances. This is a grass-is-always-greener thing happening a lot in the discourse, but not often explicitly stated.

it occurs to me that privilege intersects here with broader issues about hierarchies and those who (claim to) speak for others - gonna indulge myself and quote Green Gartside "when representatives turn to leaders" - the tendency of political parties to hierarchize, for those who start out speaking on behalf of their community to end up telling their community what to think, what to say, how to act.

a lot of people who have acquired a measure of political power seem to find it very difficult to engage in debate without considering it dissent