Jan 29, 2016 01:00
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Some people seem to think that there is a strict hierarchy of privilege, and that you can globally rank all people in terms of privilege top to bottom. (Or that when people talk about privilege, this is what they are trying to do.) This is not how it works.
Some people seem to think that privilege is all that there is, and that _everything_ is about how the groups you are (perceived as being) in (Or that when people talk about privilege they mean that it overrides everything else about a person). This is also not how it works.
Privilege is looking at the fact that I get X as a default, while someone who is not like me doesn't. And that X can be good, or bad, depending on the context (I may get jobs more easily, or I may get abuse more often). I may be privileged in some ways, and unprivileged in others. I will belong to multiple different groups, some of which will be (on average) in a more privileged position, while others will be (on average) in a less privileged one.
It is not about saying that people with certain privileges are evil, or that people should be beaten with sticks to bring them down to a different level*. The important thing is to be aware, in any given situation, whether you have an advantage over other people.
Knowing, for instance, that because of my upbringing, and the class/money my parents had I've been able to bounce back from situations that others would have found a lot harder, and therefore being more sympathetic about it. Realising that while I've also worked hard on things, it's taken less work for me than it would have done for people who got a worse start than I did.
Understanding the systems that surround you, the ones that support you, the ones that keep you down, and the ones that do both in different situations, is always a useful thing. If you want to understand why people do what they do, and why their actions and choices are different from yours, then you need to understand that even if they're in the same place physically, the way they're affected by it, and the way that they perceive it may well be very different to you.
*Although there are people out there who _will_ use it as a stick to beat people with. People are like that. I try to avoid those people, while appreciating that they are largely like that because they are fed up with being talked over, ignored, and generally treated badly, and are thus now very angry. (Or they are recent converts to the concept, and thus very enthusiastic about it.)
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What I'm wondering at is, this.
Privilege operates like a lever on a person's naturual ability, making it easier for them to translate a certain amount of ability and effort in to tangible rewards.
Or conversely, privilege makes it easier for a person to mitigate misfortunes.
But these are practical effects. They are only meaningful in practice. If you are more likely to get a job because you are white and more likely to get a job if you are a man and more likely to get a job if you are a native citizen of the country you are in that doesn't help you at all, in practise, if your chances of getting a job are zero because you are functionally illiterate because your school was awful because you lived in a sink estate and your parents were drug addicts.
And the same person may not experience police oppression as a result of their ethnicity but that won't help them much when the police beat them up because they are being poor in a public place.
And so on.
No amount of relative advantage in one aspect will ever offset the complete and total disadvantage that accrues from other qualities that you have. You are multiplying by zero.
And, if that is the case, then an explaination of privilege to someone who is beyond the privilege horizon is no better than telling them that it could be worse, when, in fact, it couldn't.
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Look at the examples in the article:
"I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented."
"When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is."
"If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race."
"I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time."
Not one of these is about having leverage, or a multiplier of something else. You can't multiply any of these by zero, because they are not numbers on a scale.
They are simply things that some people have, and others don't, which affect people on a day to day basis.
And having something which someone doesn't, is a "privilege". It's what "privilege" means, in this context.
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I'm not convinced this is the case for privilge below a certain level of socio-economic deprevation. Certainly I have doubts that it has much in the way of interesting effects (e.g. strong enough to be worth discussing) when someone is firmly at the bottom of the class or socio-economic pile.
When I look at the examples you've pulled out I'm left thinking what is the statistically significant impact of those things. My guess, at the levels of socio-economic deprevation we're talking about if you are living in a caravan eating welfare bananas, pretty weak. Negligibly weak. Perhaps I am wrong and they continue to have a measurable effect all the way down. But unless they are having a measurable effect on something I think that means they don't exist.
So people of the same colour are widely represented and seen as building the culture. I'm not sure that matters a jot when, because it wasn't people of the same class it still boils down to "but not you, you don't get to join in." And then still go on to suffer life blighting instances of descrimination, lack of opportunity, abribrary abuse of state and private power, and a socio-economic position so precarious that a small bit of misfortune can be fatal.
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I'm not convinced this is the case for privilge below a certain level of socio-economic deprevation
Then I think you need to look at the people who are speaking from those levels, who _are_ clearly deeply emotionally and socially effected by lack of representation.
If you think that having the cops pull you over for being black doesn't have an effect, just because you're poor, then I am, frankly, boggled.
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I'm wondering if one factor, say race, has an impact that is noticably in addition to all the other factors affecting someone who for other reasons, say economic, is already being treated badly by society.
So, if the police regularly pull over young black men who are driving and inconvenience them in a range of ways from wasting their time, through arresting them for things they wouldn't otherwise be arrested for up to shooting them dead and the police do this because they are black - well that clearly sucks.
But, and this is the question I'm trying to articulate, if the police in parallel to pulling over a bunch of young black men are also pulling over poor white trash and they are just as likely to end up falsely imprisoned or dead is the question of race privilege or other divisions of privilge of much relevance. (Because what appears to be happening isn't that the police are racist or elitist but they are bullies who have poor governance and accountantability in a system that places effective power outside democratic channels.)
And, again in parallel, if your school is a disfunctional under-resourced wreak because you live in a largely black neighbourhood and the school authorities never budget money for black schools and that means your chances of going to universtiy are pretty much nil is that, in effect, any different to going to school in a deprived white suburb where the school authorities won't budget the money needed to sort out the problems and so your chances of actually making it to uni are, again, pretty much nil?
And even if you did pass the entrance exams to uni you'd never get there because the police would pull you over and put you in jail for a crime that didn't exist.
And might this maximum of effect hold true across any and all measures you are interested in.
Is there a zero lower bound? And if so, what does that mean?
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In that case those people _don't_ have that privilege over black people, on that specific thing. And anyone claiming they do is wrong.
But that's got nothing to do with zero bounds. Because privilege is not a ladder. A black man and a white woman are both privileged over each other, in different contexts.
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