privilege as a meme

i'm not sure if this is what you're saying, and if it is i can totally (totally!) appreciate the stress of this stuff, but i don't think that's a fair reading of what mykytyn was advocating for.

there's an interesting (awful!) local situation close to where she lived by the way, which is pasadena school district. pasadena is a rich and *incredibly* overeducated city (caltech! jpl!). it was desgregated (by supreme court ruling IIUC?) in the 70s.

it was one of the few places this happened in socal. school districts here are generally carved up to make it impossible to desegregate them without inter-district transfer, i.e. they are almost entirely kids of a single race/economic group. pasadena was a rare exception and it was super segregated. so they desegregated it with busing.

the result was (and still is) that public school attendance is incredibly low in pasadena, with the implications for their state funding, and white kids just don't go to public schools there. their parents moved over the border to south pasadena or la cañada (JPL employees can send their kids to the public schools there), or went private. all of which has the expected effect on test scores, which is what the likes of redfin show housebuyers as a proxy for "are the schools good". and it becomes a feedback loop. it's not clear how they're going to get out of it.

and of course the schools are fine, or they would be if they were properly funded.

man alive re: my privilege, i live in one of the poorest boroughs in London that, because of massive public investment in early years education over time, has largely excellent primary schools. i have my pick of three great primary schools within walking distance. four if i were willing to join the church of england lol. anyway I'd call that fairly lucky for me, and the consequence of many years of hard work on the part of central and local government, but i wouldn't call it an example of privilege exactly, certainly not white privilege, because everyone at the school (majority BAME and east european) gets access to it. and i don't even have to agitate for anything! win win

i'm not sure if this is what you're saying, and if it is i can totally (totally!) appreciate the stress of this stuff, but i don't think that's a fair reading of what mykytyn was advocating for.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 7 January 2020 17:30 (fifty-six minutes ago) link

Did you listen to the segment of the podcast on "too bad" schools? That is literally what she advocates.

no i didn't listen to the podcast. i'm going by interviews i've read. it's not what she was (or her org is) about IME, but i defer to people who listen to podcasts about the content of podcasts.

tbf, I wasn't sure whose voice was whose so I wasn't sure which of them was saying no school is too bad and which was telling the story about her daughter crying every day (but keeping her there anyway). The latter seemed a little more reluctant about the idea that "no school is 'too bad'"

haha fair enough

I mean, to be clear, I don't think the problem is that any one point they are making (other than "no school is too bad for your kid") is inherently "unsound" so much as that when you put them all together, the total picture feels like a kind of social justice martyrdom (btw, they have an episode where they try to debunk the narrative of 'sacrificing your child on the altar of social justice,' but I have a hard time accepting that the woman whose daughter cried every day after school wasn't doing exactly that).

i can see that. they are certainly zealous and it seems like they don't make a ton of space for people dealing with this for the first time, which may be a tactical mistake as well as unfair. the org's most concrete outreach thing is this https://integratedschools.org/two-tour-pledge/ which is a lot more "we'll meet you halfway".

it's only SJ martyrdom if the "bad" schools are actually bad for your kids though, and i think one of the points we (and they?) would make is that most of *our* kids are going to be fine at most schools because of how the world works. in the limit of "no school is too bad" though that breaks down because, yeah, some are too bad.

I think "our kids will be fine" is rather vague and not sufficiently backed by evidence. The only evidence usually cited is that wealth and parental educational attainment are the biggest predictors of success. That is a far cry from saying "affluent kids turn out fine no matter what." They don't.

Another flaw I find in their discussions is they seem overly focused on elementary school, which IME is the age at which the differences will be least stark.

DCPS has plenty of schools that are too bad. Thankfully there’s the lottery, so you can still send your kids to a good or great school that’s also integrated. I’m still pissed about the pass we give to charter schools though (pats self on back)

I think "our kids will be fine" is rather vague and not sufficiently backed by evidence.

correct. i'm glossing. but if i add a "probably" in there then it is backed by evidence.

fwiw i found this comment useful on that evidence, which is basically what you say: https://ask.metafilter.com/329141/Do-we-move-to-a-better-school-district-If-so-when#4738658.

Another flaw I find in their discussions is they seem overly focused on elementary school, which IME is the age at which the differences will be least stark.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, January 7, 2020 2:54 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

your complaints seem to be to do with them being too zealous, but the choice to focus on elementary seems tactical and pragmatic:

it's easiest to persuade nervous parents of the principle that academic stakes are lowest at that level. and elementary schools perform much better on paper than middle/HS in her home town, so it's a particularly easy sell in practice. and if your goal is to get people to go to public schools, it's best to start at the top of the pipeline, not near the end. so it makes sense to me to focus the effort and rhetoric there given their goals.

For more Hannah-Jones and a wonderful 8-episode podcast about the history of schooling and integration/segregation in a Brooklyn district and recent events in parent organizing, may I suggest

https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/

The hosts are leaders of a local org that I have worked with and adore. The podcast and the history that it describes has been intensely present in my life because I've been employed by the teacher's union for almost 5 years and smack in the middle of this wreckage. Several of my colleagues work in affected schools in District 16.

I think this is a much more nuanced take from the perspective of actual Black parents of public school students, one which doesn't claim to have all the facile answers like "always do this" or "never do this." Fucking great imo.

I do generally like her, so I'll give that a listen.

I find the "how to be a sufficiently good white person" stuff hard to stomach as it just seems so navel-gazing. Which is why I posted all this to the "privilege as a meme" thread.

I think "our kids will be fine" is rather vague and not sufficiently backed by evidence.
correct. i'm glossing. but if i add a "probably" in there then it is backed by evidence.

fwiw i found this comment useful on that evidence, which is basically what you say: https://ask.metafilter.com/329141/Do-we-move-to-a-better-school-district-If-so-when#4738658.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, January 7, 2020 3:21 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think this really resolves my issue though. Again, this just goes back to saying that family income etc. are bigger predictors than other factors. That doesn't mean the other factors are insignificant. It's a little like saying "Don't bother to exercise, the biggest factor in weight loss is diet."

I want to change the course of this conversation with this: https://www.thecut.com/2020/01/lingua-franca-and-the-rise-of-the-resistance-socialite.html

xpost oof. i'm was agreeing with you, not trying to resolve your comment like a jira ticket.

i'm was

I, on the other hand, am absolutely trying to move your comment to Code Review

my revive of the wikipedia thread was supposed to be about code review if that helps.

I am abiding by the pledge I saw on twitter to avoid commenting on that article (the one DJP linked) or giving it attention. If we ignore it, it'll go away. It does not need thinkpieces or discussion.

Headline + picture + first paragraph = I'm done. Can't go any further.

I didn't get all the way through that article because once I saw that she started Guest of a Guest with a Winklevoss, I started checking on what the new ex-gawker editor who got fired? like a month after being hired is doing (bustle).

I don't have kids, won't have kids. I don't make the decisions about schooling that parents have to make, so the idea of telling anybody what they should do, making everything a test of individual morality ... it's abhorrent to me, honestly.

Having said that, the argument I've read - I don't have a cite, but I feel like it was a good argument - was that busing was the turning point for the civil rights movement. All that progress of the 1960s but rich or middle-class white parents didn't feel safe having their kids go to inner-city schools, so poof, no busing, no kids growing up experiencing being around people different from them, and without that, the whole thing just crumbled. Probably an overstatement, but a good argument.

And is there ressentiment in there? Sure, some. Maybe it's, if I don't get to send my kids to safe schools nobody does. Because the only people whose experiences matter are the rich white suburban parents, and the belief, maybe, is that if rich white parents had to go through this and couldn't get out of it, well, they'd have no choice but to make the schools safe. Or else find out that there's no way to do it. You can't make my life better, well, at least I can make your life worse, and if that's the only kind of justice possible, fuck it, let's go with it.

But this is all in the abstract, like I say.

for me private school feels like opting out of society.

that and the fact that, at least in England, when i think about the kind of kids there are at private school, and what sort of people they are.... i shudder. even if i could afford it 20x over i would not really want my kids running with that crowd!

ftr i haven't commented on the article that Dan posted because it was making me hyperventilate

For more Hannah-Jones and a wonderful 8-episode podcast about the history of schooling and integration/segregation in a Brooklyn district and recent events in parent organizing, may I suggest

https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/

The hosts are leaders of a local org that I have worked with and adore. The podcast and the history that it describes has been intensely present in my life because I've been employed by the teacher's union for almost 5 years and smack in the middle of this wreckage. Several of my colleagues work in affected schools in District 16.

I think this is a much more nuanced take from the perspective of actual Black parents of public school students, one which doesn't claim to have all the facile answers like "always do this" or "never do this." Fucking great imo.

― There's more Italy than necessary. (in orbit), Tuesday, January 7, 2020 3:51 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks for the rec! I'm up to episode 4 now and it's really good, and also especially fascinating since it feels close to home -- my dad was living in brooklyn at the time and became an NYC teacher in a mostly minority school only a few years later. And it even explains exactly how my weird-ass gerrymandered school district that spans all the way from Rego Park to Jamaica got formed (in reaction against decentralization and local control, but also as a partial compromise between that and total centralization).

Those large districts are now the vehicles of the current diversity push, which is based on recommendations from a mayoral committee (the School Diversity Advisory Group) that the city should strive to make the demographics of each school in a district as close to the district as possible. This is a hard thing to do in my district because it's so large and parts of it are underserved by transit.

A similar process was just done with mixed success in D15, which is mostly Park Slope and Sunset Park -- several schools became much more integrated, but the "lowest performing" and most geographically remote from the affluent part of the district didn't change much.

I also happened to look up PS 307 in DUMBO, which was the subject of a TAL piece and reporting by Nikole Hannah-Jones a few years ago when it was being rezoned with a brooklyn heights school. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the makeup of the school changed as much as hoped -- it's only like 11% white, although I imagine that's still a big change from before.

Right now especially I am really disliking the fact that we are using "privilege" to refer to what should be ordinary rights and activities - going for a jog, not being followed around a store, not being shot by police, etc. I understand the intention but I find the emphasis to be so deeply wrong - first, it places the white speaker at the center of attention, second it seems to come from a spirit of self-flagellation rather than generosity. How about, instead of feeling guilty for having these basic rights, we say "everyone should have these things, they are not privileges."

Right now especially I am really disliking the fact that we are using "privilege" to refer to what should be ordinary rights and activities - going for a jog, not being followed around a store, not being shot by police, etc. I understand the intention but I find the emphasis to be so deeply wrong - first, it places the white speaker at the center of attention, second it seems to come from a spirit of self-flagellation rather than generosity. How about, instead of feeling guilty for having these basic rights, we say "everyone should have these things, they are not privileges."

we are using "privilege" to refer to what should be ordinary rights and activities - going for a jog, not being followed around a store, not being shot by police, etc.

I was saying to my wife a couple of days ago that the primary solution to the problems posed by black oppression and police brutality is to place far more power in the hands of black people. It's black disempowerment that is the heart of the matter.

imo, because power in the USA always comes down to money, a very good place to look to jump start this process would be paying some kind of reparations for slavery, along with some provisions to ensure that the economic resources so provided remain largely in black communities and largely under black control for a generation or two.

For those who say such a thing would be unthinkably expensive, just point to the CARES Act, which iirc, committed to spending about $2 trillion dollars over the course of three or four months and was scarcely debated a day or two before passing.

That does seem about right.

I also can't help but feel like there is this subtle, possibly unintended intra-class conflict negative to the whole "privilege" thing, where it's like "Yeah you're a white person making $30,000 a year and drowning in student debt, but you should feel thankful you have that and even guilty about it, because the black people on the other side of your city have less."

isn't the point that these things are, effectively, a privilege, if everybody doesn't have them?

these things are, effectively, a privilege, if everybody doesn't have them?

As I learned the word, a privilege is some benefit which accrues to some person or group automatically upon entry into the status which grants it. If the granting status is 'whiteness', then the privilege is automatically granted at birth. Each genuine privilege or benefit remains realizable for as long as one's status remains eligible, even if it is never utilized. It's like the theory of inalienable rights, but for special rights not human rights.

Some privileges which are identified as accruing to all whites may be class privileges that have been misidentified as white privileges, but that is understandable, since greater ease of upward class mobility is among the many white privileges and these things can blur at the boundaries.

isn't the point that these things are, effectively, a privilege, if everybody doesn't have them?

― I am a free. I am not man. A number. (Neanderthal), Sunday, June 7, 2020 10:37 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

There's no question that that's the point that is supposed to be getting across, and I'm saying I don't like that framing, because the subtext is "feel guilty that YOU have these things and other people don't" instead of "everyone cleary should have these fairly minimal things."

there was some of that on my wall this weekend, where my ex's ex-husband got accosted and told he was abusing his privilege for posting frequent non-protest stuff on his wall.

he's known for exaggerating so idk what *really* happened but

yesterday i saw like two instagram stories within 5 minutes where people were like "dear white friends: if you are not using your instagram stories to post about the protests, please be aware that it is a privilege to refrain from doing that! if your instagram story doesn't currently have something relevant, i see you!"

but like idk maybe it's just that i think instagram stories aren't a very good way to spread information or make meaningful statements? but i felt guilty anyway and found something useful to post so i guess it worked.

(i should clarify that both of the ppl who posted those stories were white.)

if people of color are required to post nothing but content related to the protests, then the ability to post other content is indeed a privilege granted only to whites.

otoh, if posting any kind of instagram content that is unrelated to the protests is a prima facie case that the person posting has spent no thought upon the reasons for the protests, or dismisses their importance, has no interest in them, or simply ignores them because they feel uncomfortable thinking about them, then - yup - those are definitely manifestations of a white privilege. so, it all depends on several factors not clearly established by the choice of instagram content alone.

There's no question that that's the point that is supposed to be getting across, and I'm saying I don't like that framing, because the subtext is "feel guilty that YOU have these things and other people don't" instead of "everyone clearly should have these fairly minimal things."

i don't think that's true, although i have often felt that way. guilt is one way of processing all of this, and a very natural one, for a white person. but i don't think it's a productive way, or the intended consequence of thinking about white privilege. and when i feel that way, it is almost always a framework that i am putting on myself, not one that other people are putting on me. by itself, before i add my own bullshit on top of it, "white privilege" is an acknowledgement of the gap between our real living conditions and lived experience. what we do with that information and how we process it is up to us

otm

"white privilege" is an acknowledgement of the gap between our real living conditions and lived experience.

this was poor writing, sorry. i am tired. i meant the gap between the living conditions of white people and the lived experience of non-white people

xp yeah my feeling on the whole "you are privileged if you are not sharing x on instagram" is (1) well no not really but (2) that's a pretty effective way of getting people to share stuff on instagram, and ultimately who cares, you don't actually have to do it.

There is also something about privilege-acknowledgement that feels, to me, uncomfortably like saying grace to society rather than being outraged at injustice I guess.

Good news everyone moved on from the privilege thing like 5 years ago mostly. The new meme is abolishing the police.

not in my facebook feed!

Maybe quit Facebook, dunno what to tell you dude