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Originally Posted by LadyShea
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It may not have started as being about shaming, but it's absolutely used that way now. It's also a tool for shutting people up; I've repeatedly been told that I am not allowed to have an opinion on an issue due to "privilege".
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I am sure it is used as a weapon by some people, as most subjective descriptors and relative circumstances can be. That's not a fault of the concept or the word itself though. |
Hmm. I am not sure I am convinced. If you pick a word that has strong connotations of unfairness and/or abuse, I think the use of that word to attack people is pretty much a given. Imagine that the word picked had been something without those connotations; "defaultness", maybe. There would be no connotation of misbehavior or wrong action in saying that someone had defaultness, but there is a connotation of that to the word "privilege".
I think the choice of word has contributed to the misunderstanding. Certainly, I've seen a lot of people get angry about being accused of "privilege", but if I avoid that word and talk to them about taking things for granted, they agree that they do that, and they can, and they hadn't thought about how other people can't.
So it seems to me that in multiple real cases, I have seen people fail to accept the claim because of the word that was used for it, when they were ready to accept it when avoiding that word's connotations.