I look at my life and I think, "My god, I am SO LUCKY. I am SO PRIVILEGED." But if someone else looks at my life and said "You are SO LUCKY. So PRIVILEGED", my first response would be the same as anyone's: "Fuck you. That's not your fucking place to say. You don't know ANYTHING about me or my life or what I've had to struggle with." And I would be in the right to think that, though not to say it. The word "privilege" is a failed experiment, despite the fact that I 100% agree with the truth underlying it. If you have to keep explaining a word over and over and over... assuming the person you say it to hasn't already punched you in the face for being an asshole... then the word is not doing its job. Its job is to communicate a concept succinctly, and it is failing by conveying the opposite, making people angrier, less receptive, and at best, guilt-ridden for something they were born with. Is that what we should aim to do to people?
It seems very dangerous to me to call something a failed experiment because people are too stubborn to learn the lesson from it. Couldn't you apply that logic to scientific outreach concerning vaccinations or climate change? There's a reason there's a documentary called An Inconvenent Truth.
Well I wasn't intentionally trying to frame it in the context of actual experiments or science, but if you want to think of it that way.... it would be pretty atypical for the framers of an experiment to respond to an unexpectedly bad/distracted/statistically non-useful outcome with "WELL. It must be the people that are flawed!" instead of "Let's redesign the experiment and try again". Atmospheric CO2 is at 402.80 ppm.
But the experiment itself is a bad analogy. The experiment has been done, now we're trying to share the results with the non-scientist public. Certainly it's important to discern more or less effective ways of doing that communication, but it doesn't affect the result of the experiment.
I wonder what might be a better word, then? Let's try. There's a lot of confusion, as you say, about what is meant by "privilege". What is your definition of that word in this context?
It's not just the word. A huge part of the problem is assuming level of privilege based on surface-level demographic information. You may assume that a given individual is privileged because they're white and male, for instance, but what if they're mentally ill or physically disabled? Is a healthy black woman more or less privileged than a homeless disabled white veteran with PTSD and one leg? When you're talking to someone online and you know that they're white, do you then assume that they're also healthy and have a place to live? The problem is assuming that you know about someone else's life with only the most basic demographic information at your disposal. The problem is that we should be promoting humility and tolerance rather than arrogance and judgement.
In this and most contexts, I do tend to use the dictionary definitions of words (no sarcasm intended). One does not need to have one's own personal definition of the word to make this argument. Few people residing in a group (here identified as "white") that is comprised of hundreds of millions, if not billions, would look at any of the following definitions and think to themselves, "Yup! Other people would definitely be within their right to say that about ME! Hot DAMN, I am TOTALLY the top of the heap!". I wish I could come up with a better word; "intersectionality" is such a tone-deaf intellectualism that it will never catch on with the people whom it most needs to reach. To the bat-thesaurus!
To paraphrase Steinbeck, Americans seem much more likely to characterize themselves as "temporarily de-privileged millionaires". We all see what we don't have, and we fret about the possibility of falling lower in the hierarchy. The reactions of a broke-ass white person, to have a life of worry over bills, impotence in the face of shitty bosses, bad treatment of their kids from the public school, characterized to them as "privileged", is just -- I mean, I just would not go telling someone who has had a hard life, but maybe not the hardest, that they are "privileged". Being technically correct doesn't make it a kind thing to do to someone. noun
1. a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most
2. a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities
3. a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right or immunity, under certain conditions.
4. the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.
5. any of the rights common to all citizens under a modern constitutional government
6. an advantage or source of pleasure granted to a person
Thinking about the broke-ass white person, I can't see any word that describes what we call white privilege that wouldn't stumble on the problem you note. The idea is that all other things equal, your skin color made what would have been a hard life a very hard life. Yeah, you might be broke and have a shitty job, but you're not in prison because a cop planted evidence when they "didn't like your attitude" at a traffic stop for your burned out tail light. Perhaps the problem is that the nature of this concept requires a person to look past their natural reaction and engage in critical thinking. Maybe there's no way to dress it up without substantially warping the meaning.
Agree. Nobody wants to hear the smarmy, "Well it could be worse" response. "Oh your mother died from improper diabetes care in the bass-ackwards Allegheny hospital system? Well it could be worse. You could be BLACK." Jesus. Applied on the individual level, which is truly the only place that changes anything, the "white privilege" approach is appalling. At a certain (higher) class level in society, it functions as a progressive tax on moral superiority, but below a (still pretty high) income and class level, it's a regressive bludgeon. I really think it is not that a broke-ass white person can't think critically (and I don't think you said that, I'm just clarifying), since mostly they can, and maybe a few can't, but more importantly, they've got other shit to worry about in their lives that takes precedence over making space in their brain and time in their daily activities to develop a nuanced and informed view of racism in post-9/11 America. You have to take care of people's basic survival needs and health problems and fears for their children before you expect (keeping in mind that "expecting" is SUCH a class-privileged stance) them to want to sit down and talk about "What The Confederate Flag Means to Me" with a black person. (I just thought of the best argument against me, but I have to go get a haircut.)
I'd say that's mostly because the problem here is that we're focusing on the wrong demographic information. We shouldn't care what race or gender or sexual orientation someone is, we should only care whether or not they need our help. We don't need a social stratification narrative in order to bring help to people who are in need. That does more to fuel outrage culture than it does to actually help anyone.
That's true, but that's the end goal. Right now, there are a lot of people who disagree with that, and not only do they vote but they also have an influence upon society. We need to persuade them. Right now, they think of things in terms of social stratification, and so we have to play in that ballpark, because they refuse to play in ours. We have lots of anti-discrimination laws, and that's good. I think any worthwhile civilization should have those, without exception. But there is still the cultural and social battle to be had, a battle of ideas.We shouldn't care what race or gender or sexual orientation someone is, we should only care whether or not they need our help.
Who exactly are you talking about anyway? Who thinks of things in terms of social stratification? Because intersectional feminists are a pretty tiny portion of the population and aren't really even remotely what I'd call mainstream.We need to persuade them. Right now, they think of things in terms of social stratification, and so we have to play in that ballpark, because they refuse to play in ours.
Why? This is a terrible strategy in my eyes. Letting your opponents dominate the conversation without ever challenging your narrative doesn't get you anywhere.
The mainstream. The people who, if they don't dominate the conversation at least in the beginning, just leave and strengthen their own beliefs while they do it. They already understand the world in X way. We want to replace it with Y way. Before we get to do that, we have to convince them to doubt that X way is the best way. Only when we've done that do we have room at all to start talking about Y way.Who exactly are you talking about anyway?