Privilege

[Vivisectus]

I got a small taste of how you do not notice how important all these little advantages are every time I emigrated. When I went looking for work after just moving here, I got better jobs quicker than the Nigerian dude and the Polish dude that I met while jobhunting, despite the fact that the both of them where better educated than me, simply because my odd mongrel-american-and-Dutch-sounding accent is much more acceptable to people in this country than a Nigerian or a Polish one. As far as I could make out from the afternoon coffee sessions we had for a while, these were intelligent, well-spoken guys.

And even though I had a pretty easy time integrating here, I noticed how difficult it can be to not know all the little rules and rituals of a non-native society. You fail to pick up on signals a lot, and you find yourself at a loss and unable to express yourself properly in many situations. Native people just do not notice the cultural disconnect, and unless you work extra hard to make up for it by being extra likeable, they will simply find your foreign-ness slightly unpleasant. You have to work harder to overcome the disadvantage but no-one realizes it except other people in the same situation.

And that is even when you hail from what seems to be a universally acceptable foreign country (In the west, everyone seems to like the Dutch, for some reason. Yesh yesh koffeeshjop windmill good taimsh Amshterdam!) from a universally acceptable gender etc., with the same colour skin.

[Doctor X]

Originally Posted by Vivisectus

(In the west, everyone seems to like the Dutch, for some reason. Yesh yesh koffeeshjop windmill good taimsh Amshterdam!) from a universally acceptable gender etc., with the same colour skin.

Pulp Fiction - Car scene - YouTube

--J. "YES, You DID, Bret!" D.

[Ensign Steve]

Originally Posted by Goliath

Bullshit Privilege

What are you complaining about? Some people are bigots! But some people are not. Did you ever think about that? You can't do anything about it, so you might as well shut up. Wait, you're not shutting up! Why not? I just said you can't do anything about it and yet you're still talking about it. Don't you realize how bad that makes you look? You're just making the bigots right by talking about them. They get to talk, you get to shut up. That's how it works. It's not "privilege" it's just that life's not fair, which is somehow different. Don't you realize what an entitled crybaby asshole you sound like every time you write? Please, allow me to continue writing at length about how you need to sit down, shut up, quit being angry, and just enjoy your life! See how happy and well-loved I am by doing so? Also, we obviously can't police actions. That would require some sort of police force whose job it was to police actions. How ridiculous is that?!

[Ensign Steve]

And what most privilege lists look like to me is I’m angry and I need someone to blame lists.

Also, btw, the only privilege list I've ever encountered was written by a white woman exploring her own white privilege in order to better understand the lives of those who don't have it. So angry!

[Goliath]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

<snip, snip...logical equivalent of "STFU, YOU PRIVILEGED FUCK!!!1!eleventyones!!!">

Next!

[Kael]

Goliath, you're a whiny little shit when someone has the temerity to disagree with you. Anyone ever told you that before?

[Ensign Steve]

LIST!

[Kael]

Someone needs to bring back the signore. Goliath, you've got a lot of butthurt that you avoid by putting people on ignore, right? Is there any way you could put that all in a comprehensive list in your signature? Perhaps with a description of their offense and a link to the thread/post?

[Ensign Steve]

Indeed. Also then maybe he can keep better track of who he's already (pretend) plonked and quit wasting his (pretend) plonks on repeats. You've made a full loop, Goliath! You're back where you started!

[lisarea]

That blog actually appears to be objecting to people they think are overapplying the term privilege. You'll notice a lot of the posts are tagged with 'mistaking intersectionality for a new sort of privilege.' Which implies that the point is that people are misusing the term privilege to describe a different type of social dynamic.

If you actually read the rest of the posts (there are only two pages of them--it's not hard), you'll notice that all of the privilege lists are really specific. There are lists about gamer privilege, adult privilege, romantic privilege, extrovert privilege, etc. There's nothing about white privilege or male privilege or any of the big ones.

That blog is just designed to address some apparent trend on Tumblr where people are making up privilege lists for things that are better described using a different term, but then it probably just started getting hits from angry privilege denying people who searched Google for 'bullshit privilege' or somesuch, casting about for someone else to cite to support their emotional reaction to hearing someone articulate the concept of privilege; and apparently, they're so fuzzy and inarticulate on the concept that they can't see that that blog is actually apparently trying to defend the concept of privilege from being watered down.

Pro tip: You are not going to find any sort of even remotely reasoned argument against the concept of privilege itself, because it is very much real and very much obvious. All you're going to find are angry emotional outbursts from entitled people demanding that everyone stop doing things that hurt their feelings.

[beyelzu]

But most privilege lists I have found do nothing but poke at and strip other people down to shriveled up pieces of ugly. A black man can make a list showing all the white privileges he can think of, which makes it kind of a jealousy list if anything. Instead, he could make a list of things he can do and love and celebrate openly.

I like this part, maybe because I am from the south and am pretty sensitive to racism. I don't know that the guy who wrote this is an ignorant, racist fuck.

I do know though that I could picture Bull Connor saying, "hey I don't know why those coloreds gots to be so worked up over different water fountains. Its just jealousy, they should focuse on the things that they do have."

[Angakuk]

Originally Posted by lisarea

All you're going to find are angry emotional outbursts from entitled people demanding that everyone stop doing things that hurt their feelings.

That's our privilege.

[Doctor X]

They should know their place, bey.

--J.D.

[seebs]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Pro tip: You are not going to find any sort of even remotely reasoned argument against the concept of privilege itself, because it is very much real and very much obvious.

It's a lot less obvious when surrounded by bad examples or anti-examples.

All you're going to find are angry emotional outbursts from entitled people demanding that everyone stop doing things that hurt their feelings.

Yes.

And a lot of that will be framed as complaints about "privilege". Which makes it harder to figure out what people are referring to.

When I tried to figure it out from angry social justice activists on tumblr, I got nowhere. When I asked sane people here, I got much better answers, including the acknowledegement that this wasn't a trivial and obvious has/doesn't-have binary.

Problem is, if I don't already know what it is, and a bunch of people give flatly wrong definitions or explanations or examples, it's very hard to find out what the right answers would be. I can't just look at the bottom of the post for the "by the way I'm an angry teenager and don't actually read books" disclaimer, and even the people who have a lot of clue usually don't have a clear definition that doesn't rely on implicit assumptions that I tend not to share.

Here's the thing. If I'd gone out for coffee with you and Demimonde and someone had mentioned privilege, and I'd asked "I've heard that word used, but I don't quite get it, what's it mean?", you could have given me answers that I could use to build a good working model. Then I could encounter tumblr social justice warriors and say "oh, I see what you guys are getting at, but you're totally missing the point."

But if I encounter them first, I end up with a completely fucked up mental model and no real way to disambiguate, and it's compounded by the fact that people who don't have that fucked up mental model are going to assume I'm disputing their coherent model, which I've actually never seen.

Basically, shitty advocates make it hard for people to get a good picture, and I don't have any clue how to solve this. It's not remotely unique to the concept of privilege; I can show you dozens of people who have totally fucked up notions of what "Christians" or "atheists" are like, because they got bogus data and everything since then has been framed by the initial bad data.

Correcting bad initial definitions is hard, and it's especially hard because people rarely realize that the word they're using is not the word the other person is using, even though they're spelled the same and refer to things in roughly the same category of human experience.

[Ensign Steve]

[Ymir's blood]

Oh yay. Deep tissue massage... FOR MEN. Sorry wimmenz. Not yours.

[But]

[Ensign Steve]

Yikes.





Best part, they were black in the book. Way to totally gloss over the parts of the book that don't jibe with your mental picture.

And most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that's she's very like Prim in size and demeanor.

...

The boy tribute from District 11, Thresh, has the same dark skin as Rue, but the resemblance stops there. He's one of the giants, probably six and half feet tall and built like an ox.

Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Very Disappointed

[Crumb]

[lisarea]

#WeAreTrayvonMartin: Breaking the silence around racial abuse

I don't trust the police, and when I encounter them, I don't always expect to be treated fairly or respectfully; but I've never had that real, pressing, almost constant fear that they were likely to beat, kill, or jail me for no reason.

[Miss Shelby]

Originally Posted by seebs

Amusingly, my spouse finds the use of the word "privilege" in that context upsetting because that usage conflicts with other usages, and does not seem to precisely match. Since my spouse is autistic, I infer the existence of "people who can stand to see words used in a broad sense even though it's not really literally accurate privilege", and wish people would open their eyes...

... well, mostly joking, but it sort of bugs me too. I tend to suspect that one of the emotional barriers to recognizing a lot of "privilege" is that in many cases, the word has connotations which don't really match the situation. Not that I have a better word in mind.

wow, seebs I never knew you were a pothead. What say you and me get together and smoke a blunt?

[seebs]

Originally Posted by Miss Shelby

wow, seebs I never knew you were a pothead. What say you and me get together and smoke a blunt?

I never knew you thought everything you didn't understand implied drug use.

[Miss Shelby]

Well you learn something new about me everyday.

[seebs]

So, saw some more random social justice warriors on tumblr going around yelling at people, and it occurred to me:

Is there a proposed course of action about all this privelege stuff? Has anyone got useful vocabulary or procedures for the question of "okay, so what do we do about it?" Because all the social justice warriors have on offer is "feel really guilty about things you never had a choice in".

[Demimonde]

Again, understanding the social theory of privilege has nothing to do with guilt, blame, or shame. That isn't what it is advocating. It only seeks to describe the dynamics involved with social inequality. By exposing the inequalities of the system, the system will change.

Privilege differs from conditions of overt prejudice, in which a dominant group actively seeks to oppress or suppress another group for its own advantage. Instead, theories of privilege suggest that the privileged group views its social, cultural, and economic experiences as a norm that everyone should experience, rather than as an advantaged position that must be maintained at the expense of others. This normative assumption implicitly constrains discussions of social inequality within the dominant discourse: such explanations are limited to factors specific to disadvantaged groups — who are viewed as having failed to achieve the norm — and solutions focus on what can be done to help those groups achieve the 'normal' standards experienced by the dominant group.

In essence, theories of privilege assert that discourses on social inequality do not truly discuss differences between privileged and marginalized groups, but only discuss the failure of marginalized groups to achieve normal social status, effectively turning inequality into an issue that does not involve the dominant group. In this sense it is similar to confirmation biases and the fundamental attribution error in social psychology.

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