The problem here is you're arguing the abstract, from your personal experience and credo, and I'm arguing the concrete. Yes. Absolutely. There are aspects of my past that chip away at the "privileged" label. Yes. Absolutely. There are aspects of the underprivileged that chip away at their "underprivileged" label. BUT IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. I've spent 20 years of my life apologizing for my whiteness. I'm "allowed" to speak freely about Israel because I'm jewish enough for the Right of Return. I'm "allowed" to have an opinion about racism as one of the few white people in the world to experience racism at the hands of another ethnicity. But I'm not jewish. And the prejudice I experienced is a tiny corner case of what the overwhelming majority of non-white people go through routinely. The bullshit part is that in the kabuki of privilege warfare, these meaningless gambits are enough to have my arguments listened to as a white man. They don't make my arguments more rational. They don't buttress my facts. All they do is allow me to wave my hands in front of my opponent and say "I'm less of a straight white protestant male than that imaginary boogeyman you think you're debating, therefore you're obligated to at least pay lip service to my arguments on their merits." _wage used to do that shit all the time: "Your argument is invalid because my childhood was tougher than yours." The fuck does that have to do with GDP? The whole privilege debate should be logos rhetoric: "here are the facts, here's what they mean." But the whole privilege debate is pathos rhetoric: "here are the facts, your interpretation is invalid because you're privileged." There is NOBODY - No. One. - who does not leverage their diminished privilege in order to argue that someone else has too much. And when you're a white male trying to talk about this shit, arguing that you understand someone else's viewpoint is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that you have lots of black friends. This is why there's such a lower-class white backlash against "privilege" - it is assumed by default that all people with white skin and normative heterosexual preferences have more of it than every person without white skin or without heterosexual preferences. Us white guys aren't even allowed to argue that we have, at some point in the past, experienced hardship because it hasn't been institutionalized hardship. Yeah, the people giving me the stinkeye in the restroom are idiots. but their idiocy is sanctioned. At a baseline, being closed-minded is allowed if you're in the minority position - after all, you're oppressed. Which means, at a baseline, if you're in the majority you're an oppressor. Period. End of line. And you and I can talk in the concrete about what "you" and "I" feel and do but at the end of the day, it'll be a straight white male you don't know hating on your bathroom choices without knowing the first fucking thing about you and at the end of the day, it'll be someone other than a straight white male hating on me for, I dunno, resenting trigger warnings on ancient Greek plays and at the end of the day, you have it harder and I have it easier but this debate? It rarely fosters understanding.
"here are the facts, your interpretation is invalid because you're privileged."
The privilege model, moreover, was producing radicals who tried to convince American workers that they were getting more than their fair share, and that they should give up their already inadequate lifestyles, possessions, and class gains. It was manna from heaven for the ruling class. Holy shit.The term "privileges" was used to describe measures, such as relatively decent schools and medical care, to which whites received greater access. The problem with this conception is that these measures, rather than representing undeserved "privileges," were in fact reforms won by the working class through bitter struggle. These class gains represented the return of a small part of the great wealth held by capitalists that workers had produced. Privilege theory--on the basis of unequal access to these gains under racist American capitalism--converted hard-won class victories, reforms, and rights into "undeserved" workers' "privileges."
This article has totally dilated my understanding of privilege and racism, and of Marxism and capitalism in general. Pushing back the dark. Can you recommend anything more? Some thoughts: how enlightening but totally dispiriting it is to learn that privilege theory is so unproductively divisive on purpose. The theory's Stalinists-Maoists originators wanted to transmogrify the oppressor-oppressed relationship as then understood from capitalists-workers to Americans-Third World peoples. Privilege theory has been modified since its inception in the ~60s to its more contemporary meaning of white-skinned privilege at the expense of POC in the United States. While I could intellectually understand why I should excuse myself from, say, a Black Lives Matter protest I attended while in Boston, it always felt somewhat counterproductive. But I couldn't articulate it why (especially when being reminded of, and sometimes verbally attacked for, my whiteness and maleness and straightness. But I don't want to make this about me.) Whereas in the late '60s and early '70s, the raised fist--Black and white--expressed political, anti-racist, class solidarity for a generation, today's popular symbols of anti-racist resistance (hands raised in the "Don't Shoot" stance, hoodies, and "I am Trayvon Martin" signs) are sometimes argued by privilege advocates to be inappropriate for whites. In what would have been anathema to anti-racist movements of the past, some privilege advocates call upon whites to identify as whites--as part of a community with racists--instead of identifying themselves as anti-racist fighters. I think it a valid argument that racism is a tool of the ruling class to neutralize the working class's greatest tool, cohesion and unity. And furthermore, as total and urgent as racism and an awareness of privilege feels to my peers, it's fair to say that it is subordinate to the ultimate issue, the tension between the ruling-, landed-, capitalist-class and the working-class. But I don't know how likely it is that I could ever convince my black and/or activist friends to join a Marxist organizing group.The destructive and divisive atmosphere often found in today's privilege-checking culture reflects both the toxic sectarian factionalism of the theory's originators, and the light years we have travelled from the civil rights and Black Power movements. Then, white radicals in this country routinely participated in and helped organize demonstrations and activities in support of anti-racist causes and campaigns--the victorious "Free Huey [Newton]" campaign (involving the Black Panther's shoot-out with the police), an international cause célèbre, being one example. Then, Black and white militants joined forces in the interests of necessity and revolutionary unity. In today's left, by contrast, white activists may "excuse" themselves, or be discouraged, from joining and organizing anti-racist protests, on the "privilege" basis that they cannot possibly understand the Black experience of oppression and should not act like they do.
Ted Allen's own theory evolved in much the same direction.
I agree. It's a non-starter. That's why I never use it. As I am wont to say, Suffering is not a penis game where one drops trow to measure.
I wouldn't go this far, although I'm sure some people would. At the end of the day, being a white heterosexual male means that you are likely to experience advantages compared to people who don't fit into one (or any) of those categories. That doesn't mean that you should spend every second of every day trying to atone for that privilege, but that you should try to be aware of your position relative to others. Nor does it mean that any hardship you experience is insignificant or should be ignored because of your (relatively) privileged position. People who try to convince you otherwise are just narcissistic assholes, regardless of their ethnicity/gender/orientation. Which means, at a baseline, if you're in the majority you're an oppressor.
the fundamental basis of this discussion is that narcissistic assholes are allowed to be narcissistic assholes... so long as they aren't white males. And while the right to be a narcissistic asshole is a poor substitute for the right to be given the benefit of the doubt in pretty much every societal transaction, it still means that us white males must studiously bite our tongues when we encounter a narcissistic asshole... because otherwise, we're (A) racists (B) homophobes (C) misogynists (D) all of the above simply for calling a spade a spade, an idiom that dates to Plutarch, but which you're likely to get called a racist over because if someone thinks it's offensive, it's offensive.