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Originally Posted by LadyShea
If you were on fire, would you expect yourself to be able to go grocery shopping, or cook dinner, or go to work? Use these kinds of questions to find the "obvious" exceptions
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Well, hang on.
If I were in a culture a little different from ours, and I were female, I wouldn't expect myself to be able to vote.
If I were in a culture without the tradition of wheelchairs and accessibility, and I had a broken leg, I wouldn't expect myself to be able to leave my house, possibly even my bed.
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No, it's not consistent between people and there is no specific rule, as is common when dealing with psychological and societal issues. I am not sure what you need to do to find your own lines and edges.
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Okay, lemme ramble a bit. I'm totally going somewhere with this.
A lot of the writing about privilege is pretty clear on stating that it is harmful for people not to recognize privilege. I think this is a reasonable evaluation.
But wait! If there's no specific rule and it's not consistent between people,
how the heck do you do that? If a state exists which some people view as "privilege" and other people don't, then I can't tell whether harm is actually being done or not.
I can deal with fuzzy boundaries, and I can deal with things which create a moral obligation, but a fuzzy boundary that creates a moral obligation is problematic.
And I think what gets me is that, outside of a couple of people here, every time I've seen people start talking about privilege, they've used absolutist language. No "it seems to me", no "I see it as", just the sort of matter-of-fact language we'd use to make claims like "I haven't had breakfast yet today". And they frequently make these strident proclamations in ways that start getting into the territories that look to me like "not on fire privilege", which is to say, they violate my intuition of what a meaningful privilege looks like.
Thinking it through a bit... It's hard to dispute a specific case without getting into the whole argument over whether you're disputing the underlying concept. And in our culture, in general, if people can't offer a rigorous formal definition, we often assume the thing they're talking about isn't "real" or whatever. So... If I try to get them to commit to a definition, even though I am mostly looking to understand their concept, the net result is that it comes across as trying to invalidate their entire position, when in fact I'm mostly just curious, or trying to dispute one particular special case.
This has a lot of overlap with debates about morals and ethics, which tend to run into a similar problem -- no one I've ever met actually has a logically consistent set of moral and ethical rules, rather, they have a pretty good set of rules which nearly always agree with their unconscious moral intuition. I suppose that's probably because this
is really a morals/ethics question; it comes down to the perception of "fairness" or "inclusiveness" or something similar.
I suspect that's why my default intuition has a relatively narrow sense of what looks like "privilege"; I'm inclined to treat things like allergies, broken legs, disease, and so on as the same category as "on fire" in that the problems they create are largely inherent to them and unrelated to social behaviors, while I tend to view things that are clearly a function of societal norms as more significant. So for me, those are coming in under the extra category of "reasonable accommodations" -- it's reasonable to expect society to accommodate some kinds of limitations. Within reason.