privilege as a meme

I've never seen anyone even suggest that all aspects of privilege must be withdrawn rather than redistributed.

the closest I've seen to this is when dolts like Cenk Uygar were taking the FBI to task for not slaughtering the white Bundy militia dudes the way they presumably would have a Muslim or black group occupying a federal building

I get what mh is saying. The original knapsack essay is nuanced and explains ways privileged groups can develop blindspots, or benefit from discrimination without realizing it. This is obviously valuable. But people do sometimes talk about privilege in a way that's like, holistic rather than situational, like some people are just in general "privileged" and perhaps acceptable targets of resentment and i think it gets dodgier here. n.b. I've only seen white ivy league grad school dumbasses use the term this way, it's possible they just didn't understand the concept at all. Usually they'd admit to some sort of privilege and say they felt bad about it but then condemn people who didn't similarly admit they felt bad about being privileged. It was just a circular, unproductive kind of conversation and it seemed that way by design.

I also felt like when some of these people would go on about how "privileged" they were and isn't it so awful they were really just signalling they were rich and educated and it was basically bragging. This was probably unconscious on their part.

At a deeper level though it's a very good thing people are talking about inequality now even if the rhetoric they use has flaws and blindspots.

Weird that my 2nd link doesn't work.

Try this one:
-
"Admitting that white privilege helps you is really just congratulating yourself"

http://wpo.st/SX1W1

Which matches what Treeship was saying, sorta

Did we ever get this sorted

Guess

no, Guess jeans

Guesstures, the fun party game
from Milton Bradley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Q1jZ-LOT0

http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2016/08/19/when-our-dream-school-had-no-space-for-my-son-i-panicked-then-i-confronted-prejudice-i-didnt-know-i-had/#.V7xz6Wf6vhm

Wasn't sure exactly where to post this, but I thought it was a good example of the limitations of the "privilege confessional" genre of essay/thought. Basically, white mom can't get kid into affluent public school she was originally zoned for (PS8 in Brooklyn Heights), is given the option of mostly black PS307 (though it will change because of the zone change), "confronts her prejudice" and realizes hey it's nice that they have all those things over there, but in the end doesn't choose it anyway, but rather a diverse but far more white public school in Boerum Hill. This individualistic "honest self-reflection" by privileged white people seems more like a conscience cleanser than a political awakening. Also, contains this cringeworthy paragraph:

Instead, I chose to send my son to P.S. 261 in Boerum Hill, a school with a more even mix of white students and students of color. It felt like a school where my son would be exposed to classmates truly different from him, but without the worries I couldn’t shake about P.S. 307. There, he could choose between chess or double dutch, gardening or African drumming, ballet/tap or hip-hop dance. It felt right.

these people disgust me

also, I agree that this is a good illustration of the limitations that people face when discussing privilege. Doing nothing more than tipping your hat to all the wonderful choices that are available to you, and that other people do not have access to, really does not do anything for the community at large. It just provides you cover for morally dubious decisions. If your first priority is to use every advantage and networking opportunity available to you, if that is the main driving factor in your life, then you are alienating yourself from the group around you and perpetuating the very privilege that you show so much fake concern about.

Privilege can only be attacked systematically. Nothing will ever be accomplished by thoughtful reflection and voluntary abdication.

true. In this specific example, tying local school quality to property taxes is one of the most pernicious structural problems spanning the US today.

i read an interesting story about the rise of private emergency rooms and how they are opening up in more affluent/upper-middle-class neighborhoods and hiring doctors away from (city) hospitals where they are needed and now i can't find it. and i don't know if this thread would have been the place to put it anyway. did i read it in the NYT? anyway, it was interesting. and it reminded me of the malcolm x quote about how you can't have capitalism without racism.

Actually, while I generally agree, I'm fairly certain that is not the case for New York City -- p sure funding is roughly the same per student citywide.

xp

yeah, I don't know a lot about the specific system in NYC, although it sounds like various neighborhoods or known for better or worse schools, don't know what drives that

Historical housing segregation is part of it. 207 is interesting in particular because the bulk of its old "zone" was a cluster of housing projects taking up a pretty small geographic area. It's pretty striking to look at the map when you see the differences in geographic size between the two old zones. PS8 is a little more complicated, it's in a rich neighborhood, but part of that neighborhood was poorer a few decades ago and so was the school.

But, you know, when you look at the map it's pretty clear they drew the 207 zone to take all of the projects and not a lot else.

I mean PS8 isn't really more complicated -- it's still the same issue, i.e. racial and income segregation of housing. One of the results is that the parents in the rich neighborhood are able to do a lot of extra fundraising and pull a lot of strings for their schools. Also more likely to be a non-working parent at home who has time to volunteer and organize, etc.

Yeah the parents at a selective middle school near my public middle school raised something like half a million dollars last year. We raised about $10k, and organizing the fundraiser almost broke our PTA.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/06/liu-brooklyn-campus-contract-dispute-faculty-union-tells-400-professors-they-will-be

faculty lockout at LIU brooklyn

Individual faculty members are taking to social media to talk about what it's like to lose a middle-class salary and health insurance overnight.

"This is terrifying," wrote Emily Drabinski, associate professor and coordinator of library instruction at the university. "We talk a lot about privilege in my circles, and the way that privilege insulates people like me from encounters with raw, brutal power, how terrifying and total it is, how people in power can make the difference between living and dying in instants. This is one of those encounters with brute power and its capacity to overwhelm and kill you on a whim. I live a pretty privileged life; I walk about the world as someone who really belongs in it. The police really do want to protect my well-being and my property, and with each passing year of accumulated middle class wealth, the entire economic system seems invested in ensuring my leisure-class pursuits of marathoning and working toward medallion status on my preferred commercial airline. Until it doesn’t. It’s a different thing to know in your body what that means. I am learning a lot this weekend."

yeahp a lot to learn here

The LIU situation is v shameful, and I think "privilege" is just about the last narrative that needs to be explored here, although I can see how that person might feel sort of bewildered and guilty enough to go that route. It almost makes privilege-checking sound like a tool to keep people in line -- "Shut up, you don't have it as bad as those other folks."

This is a really good example of a time when class analysis would be a lot more useful than "privilege" analysis.

who are the scabs - desperate grad students?

As yet I think they're hypothetical. I mean I don't know if they have any yet, let alone enough to fill most of the spots. But yeah, I guess they would be desperate grad students/underemployed PhD's. I can't imagine they really expect to replace all their faculty this way so it's probably more of a power move, but who knows.

xxp adjuncts i think, mordy - and so probably also grad students, given the locale

taken seriously her reflection also seems to point to a pretty unhappy implication of the 'x bodies' discourse when it criss-crosses with privilege-checking discourse, that 'knowing in your body' is treated simultaneously as the guarantor (when the body is one targeted by privilege-sustaining systems) of all kinds of potential political power, if converted appropriately into self-assertion, self-identification, claims to solidarity, etc etc, yet so tied to having actual social/economic experiences that cause it that it can still fundamentally elude people who are swimming in privilege discourse

btw just for context it's the downtown brooklyn campus and not actually out on long island proper, so there are a lot of academic types in the immediate vicinity who I guess could hypothetically scab here, although otoh those types tend to be pretty lefty so I sort of doubt it.

given what i'm making i'd have to have a think about scabbing for an adjuncting gig or not, in principle it would be bad but the unionized academics in my region have not exactly been trying to stem the tide of adjunctification in the first place, so it'd probably be the same old job anyway except with more precarity than normal

fwiw adjuncts can now unionize, a new development

yes i mean they are already included in union contracts at some institutions, but that doesn't change their relative status

Hundreds of Long Island University students walked out of their classes at noon on Thursday to protest the administration’s continued lockout of their professors, a move they say has compromised their education and the rights of students and teachers alike. Many said that classes—taught by an interim staff—were as disorganized this morning as they had been on Wednesday, the first day of the semester.

“We aren’t planning to go back to class at all until our professors are back,” said Sharda Mohammed, 18, a sophomore studying philosophy. “Today I walked into my English class and the guy gave us a syllabus and told us we could leave. He couldn’t even pronounce the names of the books.”

“They are charging us full tuition for this, and they’re not teaching us,” she added. “I was in class for five minutes today.”

Gina Pacifico, a 19-year-old sophomore from Queens, said she had a two-hour organic chemistry lecture in which the instructor left after an unproductive 40 minutes. “He didn’t teach,” Pacifico said. The business school seemed to be less affected by the lockout. Business major Gabriel Torres, 27, said his business classes were “fine, so far.” While Shelleyanne Esquilin, 17, said her professor was running between rooms, essentially trying to teach two classes at once.

lol business school is such bullshit it's the only thing that didn't change

or it did but business students can't tell the difference

man organic chemistry is really something you don't want someone halfassing

Lol business students get jobs lads

thanks for reminding us that capitalism is bullshit

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v87/Inuxx/Franco_zps47m6lhhv.jpg

xp no charge, ironically

HOT DAMN SOMEONE FINALLY NUTSHELLED IT pic.twitter.com/ogYTnXaWMM

— EastCoast (@Gw1Valentine) April 16, 2018

Can't tell if the purpose of this post is to laugh at some element of the discussion or agree with it. Personally I think they're pretty spot on.

in a sense they are. but really any adult who identifies strongly with almost any fictional character is off

you're off

I mean, I don't exactly agree that "Fight Club is my favourite movie" = "I idolize Tyler Durden" but eh, it's not really any worse than most litmus tests that people use when it comes to dating (which I assume is the context for this?).

Have you seen Fight Club recently? I remember loving it in college and finally rewatched it last year after reading all about the russian/alt-right infatuation with it. It's pretty hilarious to rewatch.

Not recently tbf

I remember on 9/11/01 a friend emailed me, "No one's going to watch Fight Club ever again."

They need to add On the Road to that list above.