this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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This is so important, and so poorly understood by many people who aren't heavily involved in intersectional discourse. It's what leads to people claiming there's no such thing as privilege because their own experience as a working class white cishet male hasn't been spectacular. And of course this misunderstanding isn't helped by a deliberate attempt to suppression the correct understanding of what privilege means by the right.
This is going to be a controversial take, but I believe this confusion comes from applying the wrong word to the concept being conveyed. The word "privelege" means to grant an advantage/immunity to an individual above the usual rights/advangates people get. I acknowledge that language evolves and the word privelege can evolve to mean a lack of impediments that some people suffer under. But that sort of evolution usually takes generations.
There's a perspective matter at play as well: If the "baseline" rights and advantages of "usual" are somewhere below what "joe average" white man gets, then Joe isn't average any more. And that's a perspective shift we need the whole population to acknowledge.
Personally, I'm fine with acknowledging that I don't suffer the impediments of race or gender that many people do. I suffered under different impediments though: As a kid I was very small, not really having my teenage growth spurt until after I left school. I was also poor. These impediments, while not related to race or gender were no less real. Growing up, I sure didn't feel priveleged. Does a gay, financially secure black girl feel priveleged? I recognise that today, I am priveleged the way that term is applied in modern discourse. I am also neither short, nor poor any longer. But for all that, I still feel like "joe average".
I can see how telling a white man who is burdened with some sort of impediment that he's "priveleged" because he doesn't suffer under the impediments you suffer is going to be a hard-sell. I believe we'd all be better served with a different word to convey this concept. We already acknowledge that the current term of "privelege" is misinterpreted and misunderstood. I am not smart nor connected enough to come up with a new word and spread it, though.
@Nath @Zagorath
Oh gosh, I think you just put your finger on something really important at the intersection of a few different parts of the conversation about privilege!
(Pardon me, I'm having a moment.)
There's that anecdote (I wish I had the source!) about how when a white woman looks in the mirror she sees a woman, but when a Black woman looks in the mirror, she sees a Black woman.
...
And so, when a white woman thinks about privilege, because she doesn't see her own race (since she is the societal "default") she only thinks about the ways men are given advantages over her.
Whereas the Black woman also sees the way that white women and men of all races are given advantages.
And a disabled, queer Black woman... you get the picture.
So "privileged relative to what?" is based entirely on the individual's experience and perspective 🙃
...
@Nath @Zagorath
And this is obviously BAD because it means any time you talk to a straight, able-bodied white man who hasn't actively unpacked all of this about privilege, he's immediately going to think about all the ways he's disadvantaged relative to his own baseline, which is, what? Tall, handsome, rich white men.
When you mention privilege, he feels attacked because he immediately thinks of all the ways in which he lacks it, not the ways he has it.
...
@Nath @Zagorath
This dovetails with the "I didn't notice the sexism therefore it didn't happen" problem - he's probably not tuned into the difficulties people lower on the pecking order experience at all.
He has no realistic baseline.
It doesn't excuse his ignorance, but it *does* explain why, from a political standpoint, starting the conversation with privilege *rather than* starting with the challenges faced by other people might be a poor approach, because it engenders defensiveness.
...
@Nath @Zagorath
...and perhaps, none of us have a realistic baseline. I certainly don't have firsthand knowledge of every way to be marginalized!
However, I still think "privilege" when applied correctly is a useful construct. I need to mull this over more in my head to figure out how and when, though. Like, what is the approach that is actually gonna change hearts and minds (or sway organizations struggling with this stuff)?
Thanks for letting me ramble in your mentions.
@Nath @Zagorath
Unfortunately Lemmy doesn't seem to have username mentions working quite as effectively as it should. So I didn't get any notifications. But there was some interesting discussion between you two Mastadoners. Thanks for sharing!
@Zagorath @tess This is a very interesting discussion, so thanks for all the ramblings in the mentions 😊
Here's a couple of my ramblings. (And I'll preface them by acknowledging my own privilege.)
First, too often discussions about discrimination are framed in terms of individual moral virtue. An act of discrimination is framed as simply a personal vice of the racist or the misogynist. If only the bad people stopped choosing to behave badly, it would all be solved.
Enough Twitter pile-ons against enough bad people, and we solve it for good.
But we are not just individuals. We are citizens. We are part of a society. And discrimination is a problem with our society.
It's not just individual actions. It's the inequitable distribution of power and resources. The discrimination is embedded in the structures of social, political, economic, cultural, and institutional power.
For every individual bigot, there's whole social structures standing behind them.
Second, when it comes to privilege and discrimination, most of us are sitting somewhere in the middle.
Sure, there are some intergenerationally wealthy neurotypical cishet white men who are born with basically a guaranteed life in the top 1%, who have never experienced any discrimination of any form. Someone like Lachlan Murdoch is a great example.
At the other end, there are elderly working-class neurodiverse queer Black women with multiple chronic health conditions and disabilities, who society screws over at every turn.
The rest of us are, to varying degrees, somewhere in-between. Privileged in some ways, discriminated against in others.
(And yes, even if you're a neurotypical cishet white guy, if you're not in the 1%, you are still in that middle ground.)
So there's a simple choice for us to make: what kind of society we want to live in.
We can choose to align ourselves with the powerful, uphold the system as it stands, at the cost of continuing to experience the forms of discrimination we currently face.
We can choose to uphold the system, while only working to change the forms of discrimination we experience personally.
Or we can be empathetic, and seek to make our society equitable — including ending the forms of discrimination we don't personally experience.
Ultimately, it's our choice what kind of society we want to live in.
@tess @Nath @Zagorath
Yes. The way I was first taught about privilege, begins with saying that everyone has some ways in which they are privileged in some ways in which they are not
And a little exercise, where everyone in the room thinks about the ways in which they are not privileged. Because those always come to our mind more easily than the ways in which we are privileged!
The ways in which we are, that is the second exercise