A privilege, not a right

[jedusor]

I knew what privilege was when I was a kid. It was the set of things I was allowed to have and do that my mom could take away if she was feeling bitchy. I knew I had a lot of it, because Mom liked to remind me of this fact, usually when I was acting persecuted. I was annoyed when she did this, because by my understanding of the concept of privilege, all she was doing was throwing salt in my wounds about how much control she had over me. When she said I should be grateful for what I had, I thought she meant I should be grateful to her. Which maybe sometimes she did. But being grateful to circumstances is different, and when I think of privilege now, I think of circumstances.

I am not rich right now. I'm pretty sure that technically I'm below the poverty line. But socially, I'm definitely middle class, and I have a lot of resources and support. It's something I never thought about when I was told I should be thinking about it, but I'm thinking about it a lot now.

I know a fair number of affluent kids who clearly don't think about it either. It makes me wonder what can be done to raise people who understand the context of what they do and don't have. Sometimes I see their parents trying to get it across to them, and I wonder if there's a way to do it right. There was Anytown, of course, which I think every teen should attend, but I don't know what can be done for younger kids. I guess operational definitions are a good place to start.

Comments

[mh75.livejournal.com]

If you ever figure it out, let me know.

I think that education is really important, but not just education in a classroom. I think meeting people, getting involved, hearing stories, and being exposed is really important. It is not entirely clear to me how to give myself more of this, never mind give it to my children, but i think it is probably key.

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

My best friend at Penn Valley and I used to laugh about white people trying to "expose" themselves to non-white people, like they're a disease. I definitely agree that interaction is key to changing mindsets--there's a whole bunch of social psych data supporting that--but in practice, it's hard to orchestrate without seeming manipulative. And then you have the problem of the One Black Friend having to represent all diversity everywhere.

[gerald_duck]

"Privilege" comes etymologically from "private law" and, to me, still today carries the connotation of "I have a thing that I am seeking to deny others".

Wealth is a privilege: my spending power comes not from how much money I have, but how much money I have compared with other people. Being wealthy is a proxy for privileged access to scarce goods and services. Similarly, liberty is a privilege, when compared with totalitarian regimes or even slavery.

But I'm not sure that a functional support network, positive rôle models and so on are privileges in the strictest sense. Sure, they're things a middle-class person's more likely to have than a lower-class person, but they're not things someone would ever seek to deprive another of to their own advantage, nor an intrinsically limited resource.

Is this relevant? Possibly. It feels to me that there's a qualitative difference between "you're lucky I love you; plenty of kids have parents who don't" and "you're lucky that food is on your plate; plenty of kids would rather it was on theirs", which might be important when expressing the concepts to children.

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

In the context of wealth, I can see your point, but I don't think your other example of liberty holds up to the "intrinsically limited resource" qualification. And I do think my support network and other social resources are a function of my privilege, in that there are people close to me who are in high social positions (wealthy, educated, connected and so forth). My own education is an aspect of my privilege too, regardless of how much debt I'm in for it.

I agree that privilege must be denied to others in order to be privilege, but I don't think the people who have it need to actively seek to deny it to others, and defining it that way opens it up to the "I'm not privileged because I don't try to be" reaction Kit mentioned.

[gerald_duck]

Hmm. I see liberty as a relative rather than an absolute, possibly because I tend to view such matters in relation to the social contract. I'm not free to murder people, and I can't be without denying someone else the freedom to stay alive. Murder is so obviously wrong that we don't usually view preventing people from doing it as a curtailment of their liberty, but what about, say, smoking in public places? Then it's more obviously a case of winners and losers, whatever society decides.

When you said a lot of resources and support, I assumed you were talking about friends rather than contacts that afford you privilege by proxy. I'd agree that access to privilege is privilege.

To clarify, I said "things someone would ever seek to deprive another of", rather than "things you seek to deprive another of". One can be privileged without trying, but I'd assert that one can't be privileged without someone, somewhere, somewhen, somehow having exploited someone else.

[imagines.livejournal.com]

A+ comment, especially this: "people can't bear that they play a part in an oppressive system without even meaning to." The number of times I have heard "What do you mean I have privilege? I'm not racist!" or a similar comment is...nigh uncountable by now. And yeah, I had to face it myself: I am afforded privileges by society for reasons that I may think are useless and hurtful, but I am still afforded them! No, it never crosses my mind to be rude to someone because of their race, buuuut it's pretty unlikely that I'll be stopped and searched by police because I "look suspicious—"because I'm white. I'm not doing it on purpose, but that privilege is still operating.

...the what-to-do-about-it part is the bit I have trouble with. But I like what you say about framing my thinking so that I don't see non-white society as being disadvantaged. Which—hmm—reminds me of how the phrase "undeveloped nation" makes me cringe. But then I have so many more things to think about FOREVER. (colonialism! imperialism! ethnocentrism!)

In short, your comment is clear and lovely. Thanks.

[gerald_duck]

I firmly believe that it's the exploitation of privilege that is wrong. If I have access to a privilege but never exploit it, is that wrong of me? If I passively and unwillingly receive a privilege, is that wrong of me?

When yet another police officer fails to stop me in the street what, realistically, can I do about it? It's not my fault.

I get the impression terms like "privileged" and "having privilege" are used loosely — sometimes referring specifically to those who exploit privilege, sometimes to anyone who has access to it. Since one is a moral failing and the other isn't, that can lead to confusion when the speaker denies one thing and the listener believes they're denying something else.

Then again, some people clearly do think that even having access to privilege is morally wrong. I disagree with those people.

[imagines.livejournal.com]

"When yet another police officer fails to stop me in the street what, realistically, can I do about it? It's not my fault."

You can't *make* the police officers stop you as often as they stop POCs—and you probably wouldn't want to! But if statistics are released showing that POCs are stopped/ searched/ etc. at a higher rate than white people, that IS something you can react to if you want to—by way of complaint letters, or even just talking about the problem with other people.

If you passively and unwillingly receive a privilege, it is not wrong of you, but it is a symptom of a greater societal problem. This is not a case where I can point a finger and say, "You there! Stop giving this person privilege because they are white/ male/ middle-class/ wears very nice clothes/ etc.!" So no, I wouldn't blame a person for having privilege, but I would ask them (as I ask myself) to be careful of what they do with their privilege, and how they respond to other people's lack thereof. For instance, in my city, you will run into people who believe so many of our black residents are extremely poor because "they just don't try hard enough." But just as it isn't a personal moral failing just to have privilege, it isn't a moral failing just to lack it.

...and I am perhaps overly optimistic, but I can't force myself to believe that humans are incapable of working together to provide more opportunities to those people who have been shut out of access to certain privileges. I would like to see actual equality someday, although to be honest, I'm not quite sure what that would look like. It's great that everyone can vote and shop in the same stores and live in the same areas regardless of race...but there are still factors at play that prevent people from doing just that. So there's a great deal less social racism (or at least oh my god I HOPE so), but institutional racism is still a great big problem. And it's a hell of a lot harder to stop, because you CAN'T blame any one person for causing it.

That is what I mean when I talk about privilege, and I for one will say "exploit" when I mean that. :)

[gerald_duck]

(This isn't 100% related to what you've just said — which I agree with entirely.)

One thing that vexes me is that many people seem to think that, because I'm an involuntary recipient of privilege, I have an obligation to be active in fighting that privilege.

Yes, it's good to fight privilege, but not doing so is morally neutral rather than bad. And I don't see why it's any better to fight a privilege one personally receives than any other privilege.

There are a lot of ways to do good in the world, and nobody has the time, resources or skills to do all of them. We choose our battles. Personally, I happen to be an expert in security engineering, so tend to fight most on issues where security concerns impinge on civil liberties. This doesn't mean I think those areas are the most important, or affect me the most, they're just where I can be most effective.

Equally, I donate money where I think money will do the most good. I give my time and my money to entirely different organisations.

In other aspects of life, when I can, I'll challenge wrong things that are staring me in the face. But generally I simply seek to do no harm.


To get, finally, to the specific point, I don't feel I have any obligation to write a letter of complaint about how often POCs are stopped and searched, just because it's an area in which I receive privilege. And, indeed, I never have written such a letter and possibly never will. You say "that is something you can react to if you want to", but some people seem to think I'm bad for not doing so.

[gerald_duck]

Incidentally, have you ever read any of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels? They present an interesting and plausible view of a post-scarcity egalitarian society and touch upon a very important problem: what an individual's motivation to do anything at all might be if true equality is guaranteed regardless. (The Player of Games is my favourite of the Culture novels by a long, long way — I actually gave up reading some of the others that I tried, because he seemed to be making reading deliberately difficult.)

[jedusor.livejournal.com]

I am a white, working-class, lesbian woman with standard intelligence and a good-quality post-compulsory education. Four of those things (arguably five) I was born with; only one of the five have afforded me any privilege to date.

Huh? There's no way any of "white," "mentally able," and "educated" haven't given you advantages in life.

[gerald_duck]

What about being in the UK? I'd have said that was a pretty big privilege.

[gerald_duck]

Whether or not I'm comfortable calling various states — or, more specifically, the people who have to live in them — disadvantaged, possibly depends on who's listening. I'm quite sure they are disadvantaged, and provided I'm talking to people who'll think about what the disadvantages are, there's no harm in saying so.

It seems pretty likely you'll have read Guns, Germs and Steel, which I feel does a very nice job of explaining how the disparities between nations and continents arose. Then, of course, Europeans compounded those advantages through exploiting them — advantage begets advantage.

I get the impression the disparity in standard of living between, say, the average person living in Africa and the average person living in Europe was considerably larger than the disparity between different ethnicities within Europe. Certainly, in bald statistical terms, Europeans earn three times as much (PPP) as Africans, but the pay gap within the UK is "only" about 25%. That doesn't necessarily mean living in the UK is more of a privilege than being white, but it's at least suggests being British is a pretty big deal.

[gerald_duck]

To be clear, I was only questioning your saying "being white has afforded me the most privilege out of the attributes I was born with".

I don't believe one has to fight the greatest privilege one was born with to the exclusion of all others. I don't believe one should necessarily emphasise fighting the greater privileges. As I said up there, I don't even believe one need fight the privileges one was born with at all — it's more important to pick the fights you're good at.

[gerald_duck]

If you think neither exploiting privilege nor fighting it is morally bad, where do you think the neutral point lies?