Give up the labels (my issues with the concept of "privilege")
If you browse the liberal english-speaking web you inevitably stumble upon the concept of privilege and the discussion associated with it. I felt uneasy about these discussions for a long time. Here's why.
The unease of cognitive dissonance
Basically, privilege means the fact that members of privileged groups and classes of society are blind to their privileged position. Thus, they believe that the way they are treated by others is “normal”; that it’s the way everyone is treated. If members of less privileged groups speak up and talk about the discrimination and debasement they suffer every day, privileged people - liberal ones in particular - feel a heavy dissonance in their perception. They are confronted to points of view or facts that seemingly don’t add up to a consonant picture. For example:
I believe that all humans are created equal.
I believe that everyone should be treated with equal respect and I certainly do so.
I believe that we live in a democratic society which offers everyone a fair chance to make a good life.
I am a good person.
My success is based on my talent and my hard work.
There’s someone here telling me that my success is not based on my talent and my hard work, but my privileged position in society.
There’s someone here telling me that she did not have a fair chance to make a good life.
There’s someone here telling me that she’s not treated with the same respect as me, not because she’s a bad person, but because she’s part of a non-privileged group.
Etc.
How do you react to that?
Either you have to admit that your beliefs about society and - more difficult - part of your convictions about yourself are wrong. Or you have to deny the other persons’ position and act as if she was talking nonsense.
In a privilege-discussion, you lose a large part of the audience to the second reaction described above. It’s very difficult to face such a state of dissonance and the easiest way to solve it is to simply state that the other person doesn’t know what she’s talking about and move on. Those are the ones that are especially hard to reach and if our goal is to create a less rigid, more friendly society, we need to keep that in mind.
But another part of the audience you lose by the way the discussion is lead. Despite good intentions, the discussion often - sooner or later - degrades into name-calling and blaming of people, not for their opinion or their acts, but for being part of a privileged group. People are excluded from the discussion, their input and their experience are ridiculed and they are often treated as if they were somehow unable to understand and show compassion with non-privileged groups, because they belong to the privileged group. Even though it’s very often sadly true - it is a difficult task to understand and show compassion for misery that happens to other people, but never to you - that doesn’t give anyone the right to assume that this is a characteristic of every member of the privileged group.
The discussion often ends with people trying to determine who the least-privileged person in the room is - or what the least privileged combination possible (is it gay-black-Muslim-woman or is intersexual-Latino-Jewish-man worse?). Finally, only the least privileged person in the room is allowed to freely voice her opinion and share her experience, because everyone else is unable to understand or show compassion for the hardship she faces, seeing that everyone else is privileged and thus blind and ignorant.
I don’t think that this kind of discussion leads to a less discriminating, more human society.
That’s my main issue with the entire “privilege-approach”.
Privilege and discrimination are two sides of the same coin
I don’t deny that privilege exists. On the contrary, I know it exists.
It’s just the opposite way of seeing discrimination. Rather than pointing out that there are people who are treated disrespectfully, who are unable to rise to their full potential as human beings, as person, as members of our society, because of the simple fact that by birth they belong to a certain group or category of people (gender, class, religion, “race”), you point out that there are people for whom almost every door is open, just because they belong to a certain group or category of people (man, upper- or middle-class, Christian, white).
But like discrimination, the “privilege-approach” continues to pigeonhole people and to blame them not for what they do as individuals, but simply for being part of a group. And even if they are not blamed, they are put aside and ridiculed, their problems are belittled and non-privileged people often believe that the simple fact that you are born into a privileged group makes your life easier and more agreeable - so don’t even try to tell them you have got your share of problems, too, because a privileged person’s problems and troubles can never reach the level of a non-privileged one; or so we are told.
Privilege is supposedly the easiest difficulty setting for the game called real life - and if you are stupid enough to have problems with that, imagine how it would be for you if you had a more difficult setting.
I cannot agree to that, because problems and what we perceive as problematic or stressful in our lives differs and is extremely subjective. There’s no such thing as an “objective” problem. Who are we to judge someone else's problems?
That’s, by the way, also the reason why I hate the phrase “first world problems”. It implies that if you live in the so-called first world and agonise over something that seems trivial from the outside, your agony is not real and you are an inconsiderate, spoiled brat. In that logic, a white middle-class boy who commits suicide because he has been bullied by his classmates on Facebook is such an inconsiderate, spoiled brat. Less privileged people can’t even afford to own a computer and to be on Facebook. Plus, they probably suffer worse abuse than he did from his bullies, because of their gender or their race, every day.
And yet... someone is dead.
I am alarmed by the way many people so lightly wave off the experience and the suffering of others - and I don't care whether they do so on the privileged or the non-privileged side. Telling someone that his or her way of experiencing the world is wrong, for me, is disrespectful. It is flawed, yes. But that's true for absolutely everyone of us. That's why we need to find a way to communicate with each other. That's why we need to be able to share our experience. A standard accusation against people who are in a privileged position is that they deny the experience of people without such privilege. But I accuse many accusers of doing the same.
Sexism doesn't have a gender, racism doesn't have a race
Unlike the majority of the people in the privilege discussion, I don’t agree that discrimination, racism, sexism etc. are only problematic if they come from a privileged position, i.e. from a position of power. That, e.g. there’s no such thing as sexism against men or racism against white people.
In my opinion, racism means that a person is not judged by his or her acts, but by the colour of their skin and their different physical appearance. Sexism means that a person is judged by his or her gender and attributed stereotypical character traits or abilities. It’s sexist if a woman earns less money for the same job than a man, just because she’s a woman. It’s also sexist if a man is not allowed to sit beside a child on an airplane, because he’s a man and could be a paedophile. And it doesn't matter whether the person who refuses the woman her rightful salary or the man his seat in the airplane is male or female. In my logic, women can use sexist criteria against women and men against men.
Sexism doesn’t mean men discriminating against women. Sexism means men and women upholding a society which judges and weighs people by their gender, rather than by their acts. It’s true that women suffer more injustice because of sexism and we have to acknowledge that fact. But if we see women eternally as victims and men as perpetrators, all we do is add another label to our existing categories, without questioning the categories themselves. Sexism is the perpetrator. It’s so deeply rooted in our culture that we often don’t even see or feel it anymore. We are all making and perpetuating that culture. If women are the victims of sexism, they are not the victims of men as a group. They are the victims of a rigid culture and a very unhealthy distribution of power. The people who have created that culture have mostly been - among other characteristics - white and male. But they are not every man who ever lived.
The same could be said about racism.
The problem of a society that values rigid categories over indiviuals
Our problem is a society that pushes people into rigid roles defined by gender or race or class, rather than to provide them with the freedom to discover and decide for themselves.
We are all part of this society.
We’re all building it.
The problem is not privilege and discrimination alone.
The problem is that we are labeling people and categorise and judge them by it. The problem is that we sacrifice people (ourselves or others, depending on which side of the privilege-discussion we’re on) and their individual rights for the comfort of a seemingly clear and unambiguous environment. It is so much easier to live in a society where we can follow simple, universal rules to judge every person and every situation. And we are so scared of the ambiguous, fluid, changing, fuzzy picture we might otherwise find, that we prefer to keep our comfortable labels.
That’s it - we put people into misery, we discriminate against them, we dehumanise them, simply because we want our picture of the world to be clear, unambiguous and comfortably understandable. Black and white. Good and bad. Beautiful and ugly. Female and male. We want to be able to categorise everyone. Everything that might deviate from that nice, tidy picture is scary and needs to be eliminated. (This is particularly true for cultures based on monotheistic religions, i.e. Jewish, Christian and Muslim. That's why they need each other as enemies so badly.)
Of course it’s also about power, about domination, about greed - but one of the main drivers of discrimination is simply fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of chaos.
Rigid categories show an arbitrary and incomplete picture of a person
We often ignore that this love for tidy categories fit for everyone and everything only means highlighting some aspects of a person and hiding others. Here’s an example.
Consider the following information about Person A and Person B. What do you think of them, judging by this information?
Person A:
President of a leftist soldier committee
University dropout
10 different physical adresses so far
Ideals: Lenin, Trotzki
Member of the board of the communist party
Person B:
Private of the Swiss army
Mayor of the town of Schaffhausen
Opera critic
Ideals: Rodin, Beethoven
Member of the board of directors of the "neue Schauspiel AG"
Example taken (and translated) from: Frederic Vester: Die Kunst vernetzt zu denken. München (dtv) 1999)
What do you think of Person A and Person B? Who are they, judging by the information we've got about them? A communist insurgent and a bourgeois lover of art and music? A troublemaker and a politician?
You probably guessed it. It’s the same person. The information was taken from a file on that person, kept by the Swiss national security. It was arranged in categories on purpose - to evoke two very different, and in the end meaningless pictures.
We do this with everyone. Constantly and often instantly.
Facing and reducing your own stereotypes is difficult and demands a lot of courage
The problem is that it’s hard - very, very hard indeed - to be aware of our own stereotypes and to learn how to act without walking into that trap over and over again; to stop judging the book by its cover.
This task is equally hard for everyone, because everyone has their blind spots. It’s not harder for the privileged. If you blame someone for his privilege, if you deny him the capacity to show compassion, then you are no better. Then you don’t help us dissolve this rigid society for a more subtle, more accommodating one. You’re just continuing the same game on another level.
Yes, privileged people must become aware of their privilege and their blind spots. But so must everyone else. All knowing that becoming aware of one’s own blind spots is one of the hardest tasks you can put someone up to. Privilege is just one variable in a web of tightly knitted actions and reactions of a self-sustaining system which is created by us, but also creates and perpetuates itself.
Privilege and discrimination limit everyone
What we have to realise - the privileged among us in particular - is that all of us lose if we keep up this rigid society of class roles, gender roles, racist roles... Stereotypes don’t just limit the development and the potential of non-privileged groups, they limit everyone. They put labels on us and limit the possibilities of what we could be or could do. Because it doesn't matter who we are or who we want to be - we are only perceived as members of one group or the other, and suffer from it.
Let’s keep the example of gender roles.
Rigid gender roles hurt men and women, and they hurt the communication between them, because it’s one of the stereotypes that men and women can’t understand each other. I think it would be much easier to find common ground between men and women if this stereotype would lose it's appeal.
Rigid gender roles make women earn less. They force the unpaid and undervalued care work on them. Women are first and foremost judged by their appearance and they suffer if it doesn’t fit some randomly defined criteria of beauty. They are the keepers and caretakers of their relationships and are encouraged to be gentle and understanding. If their relationship fails and they have children, they are normally forced to raise the children on their own. If you are a woman and you don’t like children, people don’t believe you. If you are a woman and voice strong opinions - for example in favour of emancipation - a lot of people will ridicule you and speculate that you are single, frustrated, a lesbian, man-hating, fat and/or ugly. Which in turn also means that in the rigid, patriarchal society that we life in, women who are single, frustrated, lesbians, man-hating, fat and/or ugly are considered defective and worthless and are not allowed to voice their opinions.
Men don’t fare much better with their gender role, despite the privilege of the male over the female. First and foremost, men, on average, die earlier than women, because of the unhealthy lifestyle that’s considered to be virile (alcohol, dangerous sports, wave off concerns about one’s health, only weaklings care about their wellbeing - until those strong, manly men die before their time). Men are painted as wild, aggressive beasts that have to be controlled and tamed by kind, supportive women. All they ever think of is sex. They are completely hormone-driven. That makes them potential victims and perpetrators of all kinds of crimes. If their relationship fails and they have children, they often lose them - if they have even been able to form an emotional bond with their children at all, before. They are treated and depicted as emotional cripples who are unable to feel empathy for others, and if they do, they are deemed unmanly. If they visibly care about their appearance, other men and women might easily ask questions about their sexuality.
(I could add quite a long discourse here, about how our “traditional” gender roles are an invention of the 19th century, but this is already getting much too long.)
If we want to live in a more comfortable, more empathic society, we need to get rid of these idiotic categories for the sake of men and women alike. For the sake of black people as much as white. It’s not a fight of privileged versus non-privileged people. It’s not a fight of men against women. It’s a fight of people, individuals against a cruel system of which they are part of themselves.
Self-righteousness is not the way to go. Hate is not the solution. Keeping the labels and the stereotypes doesn’t further our cause, it just perpetuates the system.
If we only consider the outcome of that rigid social system as a privilege to men, we also give men the feeling that they have got something valuable to lose if we change the system. They might think that for them, this system is worth fighting for; that the privilege is worth to cling to. (It's called "privilege", after all) But it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not about winning or losing privileges.
We don’t create a less rigid society if we simply take away the privilege and give it to others or if we distribute it more evenly. History is full of examples of brutal revenge of hitherto non-privileged on the privileged, once they gain power. Revenge is not the answer. Abolish privileges and discrimination is.
We need respect for the other, as a human being
We need to talk about privileges and discrimination. We need to talk about stereotypes and prejudice and how they keep us from making informed judgments. We need policies to counterbalance them in crucial areas, in particular when it concerns political, economical and cultural power.
But above all, the discussion needs respect. Respect in a sense that the other person in the discussion is a human being, and by that, someone like me. Even if the person is different from me. Even if they have got another label attached to them - we are still all the same species, we are all humans. Period.
We cannot afford to dehumanise the other, just because he belongs to a category other than my own. Dehumanisation of the other is the first step towards totalitarianism, the first step towards war, the first step towards tightening rather than deconstructing stereotypes.
Facing our own blind spots, our own stereotypes, especially the ones we are unconscious of, is an incredibly scary task. It’s incredibly easy to see where others are blind. It’s impossibly difficult to see where we are blind ourselves. So, while the concept of privilege is in itself important, it's not the end of the discussion, and in particular, it's not an excuse for putting yourself above others, whether you are privileged or not.
The unease of cognitive dissonance
Basically, privilege means the fact that members of privileged groups and classes of society are blind to their privileged position. Thus, they believe that the way they are treated by others is “normal”; that it’s the way everyone is treated. If members of less privileged groups speak up and talk about the discrimination and debasement they suffer every day, privileged people - liberal ones in particular - feel a heavy dissonance in their perception. They are confronted to points of view or facts that seemingly don’t add up to a consonant picture. For example:
I believe that all humans are created equal.
I believe that everyone should be treated with equal respect and I certainly do so.
I believe that we live in a democratic society which offers everyone a fair chance to make a good life.
I am a good person.
My success is based on my talent and my hard work.
There’s someone here telling me that my success is not based on my talent and my hard work, but my privileged position in society.
There’s someone here telling me that she did not have a fair chance to make a good life.
There’s someone here telling me that she’s not treated with the same respect as me, not because she’s a bad person, but because she’s part of a non-privileged group.
Etc.
How do you react to that?
Either you have to admit that your beliefs about society and - more difficult - part of your convictions about yourself are wrong. Or you have to deny the other persons’ position and act as if she was talking nonsense.
In a privilege-discussion, you lose a large part of the audience to the second reaction described above. It’s very difficult to face such a state of dissonance and the easiest way to solve it is to simply state that the other person doesn’t know what she’s talking about and move on. Those are the ones that are especially hard to reach and if our goal is to create a less rigid, more friendly society, we need to keep that in mind.
But another part of the audience you lose by the way the discussion is lead. Despite good intentions, the discussion often - sooner or later - degrades into name-calling and blaming of people, not for their opinion or their acts, but for being part of a privileged group. People are excluded from the discussion, their input and their experience are ridiculed and they are often treated as if they were somehow unable to understand and show compassion with non-privileged groups, because they belong to the privileged group. Even though it’s very often sadly true - it is a difficult task to understand and show compassion for misery that happens to other people, but never to you - that doesn’t give anyone the right to assume that this is a characteristic of every member of the privileged group.
The discussion often ends with people trying to determine who the least-privileged person in the room is - or what the least privileged combination possible (is it gay-black-Muslim-woman or is intersexual-Latino-Jewish-man worse?). Finally, only the least privileged person in the room is allowed to freely voice her opinion and share her experience, because everyone else is unable to understand or show compassion for the hardship she faces, seeing that everyone else is privileged and thus blind and ignorant.
I don’t think that this kind of discussion leads to a less discriminating, more human society.
That’s my main issue with the entire “privilege-approach”.
Privilege and discrimination are two sides of the same coin
I don’t deny that privilege exists. On the contrary, I know it exists.
It’s just the opposite way of seeing discrimination. Rather than pointing out that there are people who are treated disrespectfully, who are unable to rise to their full potential as human beings, as person, as members of our society, because of the simple fact that by birth they belong to a certain group or category of people (gender, class, religion, “race”), you point out that there are people for whom almost every door is open, just because they belong to a certain group or category of people (man, upper- or middle-class, Christian, white).
But like discrimination, the “privilege-approach” continues to pigeonhole people and to blame them not for what they do as individuals, but simply for being part of a group. And even if they are not blamed, they are put aside and ridiculed, their problems are belittled and non-privileged people often believe that the simple fact that you are born into a privileged group makes your life easier and more agreeable - so don’t even try to tell them you have got your share of problems, too, because a privileged person’s problems and troubles can never reach the level of a non-privileged one; or so we are told.
Privilege is supposedly the easiest difficulty setting for the game called real life - and if you are stupid enough to have problems with that, imagine how it would be for you if you had a more difficult setting.
I cannot agree to that, because problems and what we perceive as problematic or stressful in our lives differs and is extremely subjective. There’s no such thing as an “objective” problem. Who are we to judge someone else's problems?
That’s, by the way, also the reason why I hate the phrase “first world problems”. It implies that if you live in the so-called first world and agonise over something that seems trivial from the outside, your agony is not real and you are an inconsiderate, spoiled brat. In that logic, a white middle-class boy who commits suicide because he has been bullied by his classmates on Facebook is such an inconsiderate, spoiled brat. Less privileged people can’t even afford to own a computer and to be on Facebook. Plus, they probably suffer worse abuse than he did from his bullies, because of their gender or their race, every day.
And yet... someone is dead.
I am alarmed by the way many people so lightly wave off the experience and the suffering of others - and I don't care whether they do so on the privileged or the non-privileged side. Telling someone that his or her way of experiencing the world is wrong, for me, is disrespectful. It is flawed, yes. But that's true for absolutely everyone of us. That's why we need to find a way to communicate with each other. That's why we need to be able to share our experience. A standard accusation against people who are in a privileged position is that they deny the experience of people without such privilege. But I accuse many accusers of doing the same.
Sexism doesn't have a gender, racism doesn't have a race
Unlike the majority of the people in the privilege discussion, I don’t agree that discrimination, racism, sexism etc. are only problematic if they come from a privileged position, i.e. from a position of power. That, e.g. there’s no such thing as sexism against men or racism against white people.
In my opinion, racism means that a person is not judged by his or her acts, but by the colour of their skin and their different physical appearance. Sexism means that a person is judged by his or her gender and attributed stereotypical character traits or abilities. It’s sexist if a woman earns less money for the same job than a man, just because she’s a woman. It’s also sexist if a man is not allowed to sit beside a child on an airplane, because he’s a man and could be a paedophile. And it doesn't matter whether the person who refuses the woman her rightful salary or the man his seat in the airplane is male or female. In my logic, women can use sexist criteria against women and men against men.
Sexism doesn’t mean men discriminating against women. Sexism means men and women upholding a society which judges and weighs people by their gender, rather than by their acts. It’s true that women suffer more injustice because of sexism and we have to acknowledge that fact. But if we see women eternally as victims and men as perpetrators, all we do is add another label to our existing categories, without questioning the categories themselves. Sexism is the perpetrator. It’s so deeply rooted in our culture that we often don’t even see or feel it anymore. We are all making and perpetuating that culture. If women are the victims of sexism, they are not the victims of men as a group. They are the victims of a rigid culture and a very unhealthy distribution of power. The people who have created that culture have mostly been - among other characteristics - white and male. But they are not every man who ever lived.
The same could be said about racism.
The problem of a society that values rigid categories over indiviuals
Our problem is a society that pushes people into rigid roles defined by gender or race or class, rather than to provide them with the freedom to discover and decide for themselves.
We are all part of this society.
We’re all building it.
The problem is not privilege and discrimination alone.
The problem is that we are labeling people and categorise and judge them by it. The problem is that we sacrifice people (ourselves or others, depending on which side of the privilege-discussion we’re on) and their individual rights for the comfort of a seemingly clear and unambiguous environment. It is so much easier to live in a society where we can follow simple, universal rules to judge every person and every situation. And we are so scared of the ambiguous, fluid, changing, fuzzy picture we might otherwise find, that we prefer to keep our comfortable labels.
That’s it - we put people into misery, we discriminate against them, we dehumanise them, simply because we want our picture of the world to be clear, unambiguous and comfortably understandable. Black and white. Good and bad. Beautiful and ugly. Female and male. We want to be able to categorise everyone. Everything that might deviate from that nice, tidy picture is scary and needs to be eliminated. (This is particularly true for cultures based on monotheistic religions, i.e. Jewish, Christian and Muslim. That's why they need each other as enemies so badly.)
Of course it’s also about power, about domination, about greed - but one of the main drivers of discrimination is simply fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of chaos.
Rigid categories show an arbitrary and incomplete picture of a person
We often ignore that this love for tidy categories fit for everyone and everything only means highlighting some aspects of a person and hiding others. Here’s an example.
Consider the following information about Person A and Person B. What do you think of them, judging by this information?
Person A:
President of a leftist soldier committee
University dropout
10 different physical adresses so far
Ideals: Lenin, Trotzki
Member of the board of the communist party
Person B:
Private of the Swiss army
Mayor of the town of Schaffhausen
Opera critic
Ideals: Rodin, Beethoven
Member of the board of directors of the "neue Schauspiel AG"
Example taken (and translated) from: Frederic Vester: Die Kunst vernetzt zu denken. München (dtv) 1999)
What do you think of Person A and Person B? Who are they, judging by the information we've got about them? A communist insurgent and a bourgeois lover of art and music? A troublemaker and a politician?
You probably guessed it. It’s the same person. The information was taken from a file on that person, kept by the Swiss national security. It was arranged in categories on purpose - to evoke two very different, and in the end meaningless pictures.
We do this with everyone. Constantly and often instantly.
Facing and reducing your own stereotypes is difficult and demands a lot of courage
The problem is that it’s hard - very, very hard indeed - to be aware of our own stereotypes and to learn how to act without walking into that trap over and over again; to stop judging the book by its cover.
This task is equally hard for everyone, because everyone has their blind spots. It’s not harder for the privileged. If you blame someone for his privilege, if you deny him the capacity to show compassion, then you are no better. Then you don’t help us dissolve this rigid society for a more subtle, more accommodating one. You’re just continuing the same game on another level.
Yes, privileged people must become aware of their privilege and their blind spots. But so must everyone else. All knowing that becoming aware of one’s own blind spots is one of the hardest tasks you can put someone up to. Privilege is just one variable in a web of tightly knitted actions and reactions of a self-sustaining system which is created by us, but also creates and perpetuates itself.
Privilege and discrimination limit everyone
What we have to realise - the privileged among us in particular - is that all of us lose if we keep up this rigid society of class roles, gender roles, racist roles... Stereotypes don’t just limit the development and the potential of non-privileged groups, they limit everyone. They put labels on us and limit the possibilities of what we could be or could do. Because it doesn't matter who we are or who we want to be - we are only perceived as members of one group or the other, and suffer from it.
Let’s keep the example of gender roles.
Rigid gender roles hurt men and women, and they hurt the communication between them, because it’s one of the stereotypes that men and women can’t understand each other. I think it would be much easier to find common ground between men and women if this stereotype would lose it's appeal.
Rigid gender roles make women earn less. They force the unpaid and undervalued care work on them. Women are first and foremost judged by their appearance and they suffer if it doesn’t fit some randomly defined criteria of beauty. They are the keepers and caretakers of their relationships and are encouraged to be gentle and understanding. If their relationship fails and they have children, they are normally forced to raise the children on their own. If you are a woman and you don’t like children, people don’t believe you. If you are a woman and voice strong opinions - for example in favour of emancipation - a lot of people will ridicule you and speculate that you are single, frustrated, a lesbian, man-hating, fat and/or ugly. Which in turn also means that in the rigid, patriarchal society that we life in, women who are single, frustrated, lesbians, man-hating, fat and/or ugly are considered defective and worthless and are not allowed to voice their opinions.
Men don’t fare much better with their gender role, despite the privilege of the male over the female. First and foremost, men, on average, die earlier than women, because of the unhealthy lifestyle that’s considered to be virile (alcohol, dangerous sports, wave off concerns about one’s health, only weaklings care about their wellbeing - until those strong, manly men die before their time). Men are painted as wild, aggressive beasts that have to be controlled and tamed by kind, supportive women. All they ever think of is sex. They are completely hormone-driven. That makes them potential victims and perpetrators of all kinds of crimes. If their relationship fails and they have children, they often lose them - if they have even been able to form an emotional bond with their children at all, before. They are treated and depicted as emotional cripples who are unable to feel empathy for others, and if they do, they are deemed unmanly. If they visibly care about their appearance, other men and women might easily ask questions about their sexuality.
(I could add quite a long discourse here, about how our “traditional” gender roles are an invention of the 19th century, but this is already getting much too long.)
If we want to live in a more comfortable, more empathic society, we need to get rid of these idiotic categories for the sake of men and women alike. For the sake of black people as much as white. It’s not a fight of privileged versus non-privileged people. It’s not a fight of men against women. It’s a fight of people, individuals against a cruel system of which they are part of themselves.
Self-righteousness is not the way to go. Hate is not the solution. Keeping the labels and the stereotypes doesn’t further our cause, it just perpetuates the system.
If we only consider the outcome of that rigid social system as a privilege to men, we also give men the feeling that they have got something valuable to lose if we change the system. They might think that for them, this system is worth fighting for; that the privilege is worth to cling to. (It's called "privilege", after all) But it’s not a zero-sum game. It’s not about winning or losing privileges.
We don’t create a less rigid society if we simply take away the privilege and give it to others or if we distribute it more evenly. History is full of examples of brutal revenge of hitherto non-privileged on the privileged, once they gain power. Revenge is not the answer. Abolish privileges and discrimination is.
We need respect for the other, as a human being
We need to talk about privileges and discrimination. We need to talk about stereotypes and prejudice and how they keep us from making informed judgments. We need policies to counterbalance them in crucial areas, in particular when it concerns political, economical and cultural power.
But above all, the discussion needs respect. Respect in a sense that the other person in the discussion is a human being, and by that, someone like me. Even if the person is different from me. Even if they have got another label attached to them - we are still all the same species, we are all humans. Period.
We cannot afford to dehumanise the other, just because he belongs to a category other than my own. Dehumanisation of the other is the first step towards totalitarianism, the first step towards war, the first step towards tightening rather than deconstructing stereotypes.
Facing our own blind spots, our own stereotypes, especially the ones we are unconscious of, is an incredibly scary task. It’s incredibly easy to see where others are blind. It’s impossibly difficult to see where we are blind ourselves. So, while the concept of privilege is in itself important, it's not the end of the discussion, and in particular, it's not an excuse for putting yourself above others, whether you are privileged or not.