privilege as a meme

™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

xp suzy, sure, it is v. unhelpful to get into a bank balance measuring contest, but obviously there are plenty of other aspects of class privilege beyond the purely financial and one person's "scraping along" is almost always another person's "rich beyond their wildest dreams"

i mean, if class was just a question of "how much money do you have/earn?" then there would be many fewer enjoyable bunfights about what it is and how it signifies

True, but there's more to privilege than a white face and a university education.

LOL trust Green to come up with the goods, every time. I cannot imagine Green ever getting something wrong about intersectionality and the left. Have a great mental picture of him from the interview he gave me, where I taught him the Tony Blair hand jive and we sat in the pub doing this, intoning 'I say to you today..." and damn near pissing ourselves with laughter.

Sorry to rewind for a bit, but the descent of "Privilege" as both a word and an idea is almost a classic example of the decay of Prestige speech.

This is a noted Thing, in linguistics, of what happens to a word which formerly was associated with Prestige speech (i.e. used in Academia) when it becomes attached to non-Prestige people (i.e. LOL teenage girls on LOL tumblr)

It reminds me of a recent(ish) scrape, where one high profile feminist journalist (oh, let's say Laurie Penny) wrote a piece about how "Intersectionality" was a long word, but really not that complicated a concept because, look, lo, teenage girls on Tumblr are able to use it correctly, with ease. To which another high profile Woman of Colour got really, really offended, saying "OMG, did you just call WoC 'teenage girls'? You are insulting Women of Colour and our words!" Because it is that impossible to view "teenage girls on Tumblr" as anything other than a smear, rather than describing the actual behaviour of young women (some of whom are actually "Of Colour") on the internet, with regards to positively recognising their *abilities*.

A word has prestige, or not, depending on whom it is associated with, rather than an inherent quality of the word. "Privilege" has made the jump straight from Academic Prestige Speech to a group of people (women/girls, People of Colour, trans* people) who are viewed as very, very *not* Prestige, and the word, and with it the concept, has been demoted because of this.

Screw that. Privilege talk without marxism (academic or inherent) behind it is just another way to say "you smell".

i think it's already been noted but privilege discourse needed assume a Marxian world view, its roots are more closely tied to Foucault and other analysts of power relationships

needed = needn't, should type and eat breakfast at the same time

flaunting my sausage sandwich privilege

anyway i already noted possibilities why some people may resent privilege discourse this morning

Starting to respond to the rest of the thread since that turn, so apologies in advance if this x-posts.

I do think it's confusing that the concept-meme of "Privilege" grew out of a word that was already so strongly associated with wealth. Because that has obscured many of its other meanings and contexts. But, still, the most common usage, that when someone says "X came from a privileged background" what is both implied and inferred is "X has wealth and X's family has wealth."

But when talking about Privilege in the sense of "Class Privilege", that word actually refers to "all the other stuff as well as/apart from the money." The entitlement, the ease, the access, the way people treat you, the expectations that you *will* be treated a certain way. To use an example exaggerated for effect: Wealth just means having £100 to pay for lunch. Class Privilege means the *expectation* that you can turn up for lunch at the Ritz without being refused, that this is a thing that is available to you, that you will be admitted, you will be seated, you will not be challenged or refused when you order the most expensive items.

Once Privilege becomes detached from actual money, it becomes both possible to have money without having Privilege (e.g. the experience of Black professionals in America such as the college professor who was arrested for "breaking into" his own suburban home) and also it becomes possible to have Privilege without having money. (I grew up in a family intimately acquainted with exactly how many red-topped letters you get sent before the phone or heating oil gets cut off, and yet still somehow protected by having a certain accent, a certain education, a certain way of speaking, a certain appearance including but not limited to skin, hair and eye colour, having certain kinds of people as grandparents or godparents or family friends. Which was the point of the story I told a few weeks ago, of my brother and the cops. We (meaning my brother and I, before anyone accuses me of a "royal we") were still protected by Class Privilege, even in circumstances where we were not protected by money.)

When "Privilege" gets redefined as "the protective atmosphere" it can be legitimately applied to all sorts of things that are not money - to Whiteness, to Maleness, to Straightness, to Cis-ness, to Being Youthful and Able-Bodied, and many other things. But the problem is, the word itself still has this connotation of "Wealth" hanging around it, rather than "system of advantages for people closely conforming to an image of this ideal." This is not the only problem that people have with accepting this word/concept, but it is certainly a cluster of associations hanging around the word, even used in other contexts. I wish we had a different, fresh word, and also one that indicates that the nature of these things are often sliding scales of "more privileged" and "less privileged" rather than black and white scales of "on/off" - Privilege is not binary, it always happens in relation to an other. "Wealth" to some people is "£100 for lunch" but "Wealth" to other people is "There are never any red-topped bills", as discussed upthread.

I don't think that taking the word out of an academic/"Marxist" or whatever background has weakened the soundness of that *concept*, though it has de-prestiged the word. If anything, it strengthens it, by having the word picked up and used by people who did not learn about the concepts in a purely academic setting and then had to stretch their brains to see its uses, but by people who learned the experiences first, then finally picked up a word to describe those experiences. It's like the experimental real-world data that proves an arcane theory of physics. This is a good thing.

the alternative is, of course, an unchecked Academicist privilege

Haha, yes, indeed.

Am not defending the academicist position (but non-academic Foucault is the oxymoron of all oxymorons). I am saying that if you are not combining talk of privilege with revolutionary thought or action, you're just taking the piss out of people and accepting the permanence of social injustice.

And I am saying that you do not get to define what counts as "revolutionary thought or action" for groups you are not part of.

i.e. "nanny nanny boo boo stick your head in doo doo". Yawn.

I don't think this conversation is going to be productive for either of us. Good day to you, sir.