More thoughts on privilege....
Okay, folks. Let’s sit down and have a chat about privilege. Yes, again. But before we can discuss privilege, we need to discuss jargon and language specificity. Why? Because the thing that’s driving me batty about people discussing “privilege” is the use of (what at least should be) a narrowly-defined tool as a general-purpose one. A pin-striping brush and a paint-roller may both apply paint to a surface, but they ain’t now, nor will they ever, be the same thing. Theres’s a few issues overlapping here, so I’ll try to address them in turn. First, the jargon, then the concept of “marked” vs “unmarked”, and probably a few others as we go.
So, jargon. We start in socio-cultural anthropology, where Peirce introduces the concepts of legisign, qualisign, and sensign. Legisign is essentially the class of all things Q - all left-handed people, or all 10-speed bicycles (do they even MAKE those anymore?), or accounting software documented in Esperanto. It’s the type of thing, or the class of thing, if you want to be closer to computer science’s jargon. The thing of it is, a legisign only exists in the abstract, never in reality. Just like Platonic ideals, or Aristotelian forms, you’ll never see a “left-handed ice-cream scoop” without some sort of qualifications. The Platonic ideal as embodied by its physical shadow. The Aristotelian force embodied in form. Why? because the thing in itself (if not necessarily Kant’s Ding-an-sich) is not a legisign, but the sinsign -- the physical embodiment of the legisign concept. From there, the qualisign is the set of distinguishing features of the sinsign that make this whatsits different from that whatsits. The scratch along one side. The way the one corner isn’t quite square. The squeak if you move too fast. This one reboots your system if you try to print. The things that qualify an object as different from the rest are its qualisign. See how easy that was to parse out? The thing to remember is that legisigns only exist in the abstract, as the composite, or perhaps the aggregate of the sinsigns and their qualisignifications. Still with me? Good.
So, privilege. Privilege exists, don’t get me wrong, but not in the way many people would claim. Privilege, in its simplest terms, is not seeing why saying or doing something could be taken as offensive or hurtful by someone in the audience. Perhaps a more aptly phrased definition would be saying privilege means not needing to think why others might be resentful/hurt/offended by what you say or do (since after all, there’s no way their lives could be so drastically different from yours, right?). Privilege can lead to not caring if what you say or do could be taken as offensive, but that’s secondary to this essay. After months of discussing this on and off with my fiancée, I’ve come to the conclusion that “privilege” is best understood as existing at the legisign level of class-interactions. Why? Because there’s simply too damn many overt and covert factors informing any single social interaction to accurately identify privilege consistently. Sure, you can identify the most egregious ones - the virulent misogyny of “Men’s Rights Activists”, the misandry of radical feminism (this too exists, perhaps without the social infrastructure of misogyny to reinforce its influence and effects, but the concept of a woman hating a man for being male, or categorically judging all men because they are male still does exist), the virulent racism of various ethnic supremacists, and so on, but if I, a white man, go down to the corner store and buy a newspaper from a black news vendor…is that demonstrating privilege? If I’m a black man refusing to sell liquor to a Native American…is that privilege? Perhaps, but who truly knows? Privilege can be perpetuated (or benefited from) through unintentional means, covert means, just as much as by intentionally privileged behavior -- perhaps even more so. But who among us can be completely aware of how our behavior is fitting into the greater patterns of similar actions and attitudes, to say that we are (or are not) being privileged?
Additionally, privilege is best ascribed to the class of person rather than the individual because everybody is bloody damn different. No two white men are interchangeable, any more than any two black men, or a hispanic woman and aleutian woman. We are each wrapped in our own social context. My context is likely to be more congruent with another white man’s, but that does not mean it will be, and certainly doesn’t mean that it is. When any two people interact, there are a whole host of powers that are being co-evaluated. Relative education levels. Skin colors. Ethnicities. Speech patterns. Appearances. Heights, hair colors, the list can be extended as far as you like. Out of this, one might see privilege in action, perhaps not. To say that one or the other MUST be experiencing privilege by virtue of belonging to one group or other is to say that all members of that group are interchangeable, individually meaningless tokens of the privileged group, and there’s been too much advancement in Anthropology, Sociology and Philosophy since Hegel first proposed the concept of class-level social analysis of history, or when Marx then applied it to his socio-economic reading of humanity. If you’re going to argue that each person’s individual experience is existentially significant to the discussion (a la Kierkegaard and Sartre) on the one side of the issue, and discount the other’s as being irrelevant in light of “the group”...it comes off as inconsistent at best, and could be interpreted as insulting or worse. Societies and cultures are NOT composed of perfectly spherical people on a completely frictionless plane, able to be selected at random without loss of generality.. These may work for introductory thought experiments, but once you begin to analyze the real world, the multivariate complications must be acknowledged.
Does this mean privilege doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. I am still more likely, as a white man, to have an easier time in life than a black man, or a white woman, or some other “marked” category. It simply means that I am not absolutely guaranteed an easier time of it, in all situations and under all conditions. The SF writer and long-time blogger John Scalzi recently wrote a well-reasoned blog essay on this very facet of privilege, likening being a Straight White Male (in Anglo-European society, at least) to playing the easiest difficulty setting on a video game. The full essay is well worth reading, and for those interested, SF writer Jim Hines has written a follow-up with supporting facts and figures spelling out the disparities between various demographic groups in America
Moving on, there is the issue of what happens when members of a privileged group act to either perpetuate their privilege, or react to perceived threats to their privilege (real or not). Yes, the result is properly termed a situationally appropriate “-ism”. But I am also becoming convinced that the definition cannot, should not, end there. There is a common definition of “-isms” in sociology of being prejudicial attitude combined with social power. This is a useful starting point for the discussion, but in some ways I think it falls short. It implies that “-isms” are significant only in terms of how far- (or deep-) reaching their effects are, rather than in the attitudes themselves. It allows the statements like “I’m a woman, I can’t be sexist,” or “I’m black, I can’t be racist” to be said truthfully. And while that definition would certainly grant truth to both statements, it is still equally true that both the woman and black person could still be prejudiced or bigoted. Furthermore, the attitude+power definition seems to demand a hierarchy of classes. Is it racism for the Chinese woman to call a Mexican man a ‘Spic’? Or the Costa Rican woman calling a Japanese man a ‘Jap’? When a Cherokee calls a Black a ‘N***’? Or are perhaps all of these not “-ist,” since none are said by an empowered white?
Further, the definition implies that the attitudes themselves are acceptable, it’s only when you have social power to implement them or propagate them that they become bad. Is that truly what we wish to condemn in “-ist” behavior? This model, much like the Armchair-Sociology 101 definition of privilege that so many people tend to refer to, are too simple to be worth much in the real world. They are very useful starting points to get people thinking about the systems and forces in play, but that’s ALL they’re good for, in the long run. People interact far more messily than these neat analogies and definitions assume. We are not living in a physics word problem; we aren’t all perfectly spherical people (able to be selected at random without loss of generality) living on a frictionless plane.
In parallel to the concept of privilege, is the issue of markedness. In anthropology, a behavior or social trait can be marked or not. If it’s unmarked, that means it’s the accepted norm. If it’s marked, that means it’s somehow differing from that. English is the unmarked language in America. Men wearing pants is unmarked in most of the world. Heterosexuality is the unmarked sexual behavior in much of the world. A southern/New Yorker/Bostonian/California valley accent is marked speech in America. Being left-handed is marked. Being transgendered is marked. And the list goes on. The reason I bring up markedness is that the unmarked norm is often treated as a valueless default to which the marked variants bring some unique difference. “White americans don’t have their own culture, but Spanish-Americans, Russian-Americans, Native Americans, etc do!” -- ask Sarah Hoyt about the subject and prepare for a few hours of ranting. And yet, while in many situations the unmarked case is treated as the valueless baseline, it is equally treated as the valued norm -- if a new sitcom has an all-white cast, we aren’t too surprised, but if it’s all-black (and on a non-niche-market network -- ABC not BET), we take notice and say “they’re going against the grain with this one!” we take note of how something is marked in order to differentiate it from the rest -- whether that differentiation will be for praise, criticism, or other is secondary.
And why does all this happen in the first place, and why do people often get very offended at the assertion that there is privilege, or that they are part of a privileged system? I suspect that the answer to that lies in a combination of Anglo-european history and even more basic human nature. As we strive in our inextinguishable curiosity to understand the universe around us, we incorporate that understanding into our cultural values through the stories we tell each other, and to challenge those stories, especially without a ready-to-go story on hand as replacement sparks a lot of resistance and resentment, even anger. It all starts with the story we’ve spent centuries, if not millennia, telling ourselves in some form or other, that our success or failure is entirely our own doing. Whether it was God’s favor upon our good works or a Darwinian success of the best/strongest/hardest-working, we’ve been investing in some form of individuated success or failure -- if you didn’t succeed, you obviously weren’t working hard enough, being devout enough, or something. Easy, simple. And it’s held up reasonably well to inspection all this time, it must be right, right? And we all want to take pride and be justified in our accomplishments, as a rule: I’ve accomplished this, I did it of my own sweat-equity, the triumph is mine and mine alone.
And into this deeply-set and well-ingrained idea comes the concept of privilege: it isn’t your victory, at least not fully. There were systemic factors that helped or hindered your success. It’s not just that you were the smartest, fastest, or most successful, it’s that you were also likely part of a group that set you ahead socially, or economically, or whatever combination of factors that facilitated your success. Oh yes, it’s possible to succeed without those benefits, with luck and skill and determination, but having those subtle built-in benefits certainly does help. This story we tell ourselves could still possibly be true, you know: we just have to remember that however much control we might have over our actions, we still have no control over how those actions will be received by those around us. We can’t control if someone will love what we’ve said, or hate it with a blinding passion.
But acknowledging that means we’re no longer able to tell ourselves the comfortable story of “it only matters what you do: if you set your mind to it, you can do anything!” Our victories are no longer ours alone, our failures no longer ours either. We can no longer simply praise the successful and condemn the failure, we must start taking additional factors into consideration, and that flys in direct contrast to another of the well-established stories we tell ourselves (or perhaps a corollary to what’s already been said): everything can be looked at analytically, rationally, dispassionately. We are a scientific-minded people these centuries, after all. Two people, given the same education, the same chance to apply for college, the same opportunities to apply for jobs, the same availability of loans and business funds should be able to replicate each other’s work, right? If one succeeds and the other fails, it stands to reason that the failure just didn’t work hard enough, didn’t apply himself, should have strived more.
So where does this end up? It ends with us hopefully taking better stock of what is happening behind the scenes of our lives. Perhaps acknowledging that not everyone has it as easy or hard as you do. Perhaps realizing that your success just might be due to more than just your own abilities. Perhaps thinking a bit now and then why other people might be bothered by blithe assumptions of how the world works, or how their life has gone. Maybe just moving forward with the understanding the the world isn’t as simple a machine as we like to tell ourselves it is.
So, jargon. We start in socio-cultural anthropology, where Peirce introduces the concepts of legisign, qualisign, and sensign. Legisign is essentially the class of all things Q - all left-handed people, or all 10-speed bicycles (do they even MAKE those anymore?), or accounting software documented in Esperanto. It’s the type of thing, or the class of thing, if you want to be closer to computer science’s jargon. The thing of it is, a legisign only exists in the abstract, never in reality. Just like Platonic ideals, or Aristotelian forms, you’ll never see a “left-handed ice-cream scoop” without some sort of qualifications. The Platonic ideal as embodied by its physical shadow. The Aristotelian force embodied in form. Why? because the thing in itself (if not necessarily Kant’s Ding-an-sich) is not a legisign, but the sinsign -- the physical embodiment of the legisign concept. From there, the qualisign is the set of distinguishing features of the sinsign that make this whatsits different from that whatsits. The scratch along one side. The way the one corner isn’t quite square. The squeak if you move too fast. This one reboots your system if you try to print. The things that qualify an object as different from the rest are its qualisign. See how easy that was to parse out? The thing to remember is that legisigns only exist in the abstract, as the composite, or perhaps the aggregate of the sinsigns and their qualisignifications. Still with me? Good.
So, privilege. Privilege exists, don’t get me wrong, but not in the way many people would claim. Privilege, in its simplest terms, is not seeing why saying or doing something could be taken as offensive or hurtful by someone in the audience. Perhaps a more aptly phrased definition would be saying privilege means not needing to think why others might be resentful/hurt/offended by what you say or do (since after all, there’s no way their lives could be so drastically different from yours, right?). Privilege can lead to not caring if what you say or do could be taken as offensive, but that’s secondary to this essay. After months of discussing this on and off with my fiancée, I’ve come to the conclusion that “privilege” is best understood as existing at the legisign level of class-interactions. Why? Because there’s simply too damn many overt and covert factors informing any single social interaction to accurately identify privilege consistently. Sure, you can identify the most egregious ones - the virulent misogyny of “Men’s Rights Activists”, the misandry of radical feminism (this too exists, perhaps without the social infrastructure of misogyny to reinforce its influence and effects, but the concept of a woman hating a man for being male, or categorically judging all men because they are male still does exist), the virulent racism of various ethnic supremacists, and so on, but if I, a white man, go down to the corner store and buy a newspaper from a black news vendor…is that demonstrating privilege? If I’m a black man refusing to sell liquor to a Native American…is that privilege? Perhaps, but who truly knows? Privilege can be perpetuated (or benefited from) through unintentional means, covert means, just as much as by intentionally privileged behavior -- perhaps even more so. But who among us can be completely aware of how our behavior is fitting into the greater patterns of similar actions and attitudes, to say that we are (or are not) being privileged?
Additionally, privilege is best ascribed to the class of person rather than the individual because everybody is bloody damn different. No two white men are interchangeable, any more than any two black men, or a hispanic woman and aleutian woman. We are each wrapped in our own social context. My context is likely to be more congruent with another white man’s, but that does not mean it will be, and certainly doesn’t mean that it is. When any two people interact, there are a whole host of powers that are being co-evaluated. Relative education levels. Skin colors. Ethnicities. Speech patterns. Appearances. Heights, hair colors, the list can be extended as far as you like. Out of this, one might see privilege in action, perhaps not. To say that one or the other MUST be experiencing privilege by virtue of belonging to one group or other is to say that all members of that group are interchangeable, individually meaningless tokens of the privileged group, and there’s been too much advancement in Anthropology, Sociology and Philosophy since Hegel first proposed the concept of class-level social analysis of history, or when Marx then applied it to his socio-economic reading of humanity. If you’re going to argue that each person’s individual experience is existentially significant to the discussion (a la Kierkegaard and Sartre) on the one side of the issue, and discount the other’s as being irrelevant in light of “the group”...it comes off as inconsistent at best, and could be interpreted as insulting or worse. Societies and cultures are NOT composed of perfectly spherical people on a completely frictionless plane, able to be selected at random without loss of generality.. These may work for introductory thought experiments, but once you begin to analyze the real world, the multivariate complications must be acknowledged.
Does this mean privilege doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. I am still more likely, as a white man, to have an easier time in life than a black man, or a white woman, or some other “marked” category. It simply means that I am not absolutely guaranteed an easier time of it, in all situations and under all conditions. The SF writer and long-time blogger John Scalzi recently wrote a well-reasoned blog essay on this very facet of privilege, likening being a Straight White Male (in Anglo-European society, at least) to playing the easiest difficulty setting on a video game. The full essay is well worth reading, and for those interested, SF writer Jim Hines has written a follow-up with supporting facts and figures spelling out the disparities between various demographic groups in America
Moving on, there is the issue of what happens when members of a privileged group act to either perpetuate their privilege, or react to perceived threats to their privilege (real or not). Yes, the result is properly termed a situationally appropriate “-ism”. But I am also becoming convinced that the definition cannot, should not, end there. There is a common definition of “-isms” in sociology of being prejudicial attitude combined with social power. This is a useful starting point for the discussion, but in some ways I think it falls short. It implies that “-isms” are significant only in terms of how far- (or deep-) reaching their effects are, rather than in the attitudes themselves. It allows the statements like “I’m a woman, I can’t be sexist,” or “I’m black, I can’t be racist” to be said truthfully. And while that definition would certainly grant truth to both statements, it is still equally true that both the woman and black person could still be prejudiced or bigoted. Furthermore, the attitude+power definition seems to demand a hierarchy of classes. Is it racism for the Chinese woman to call a Mexican man a ‘Spic’? Or the Costa Rican woman calling a Japanese man a ‘Jap’? When a Cherokee calls a Black a ‘N***’? Or are perhaps all of these not “-ist,” since none are said by an empowered white?
Further, the definition implies that the attitudes themselves are acceptable, it’s only when you have social power to implement them or propagate them that they become bad. Is that truly what we wish to condemn in “-ist” behavior? This model, much like the Armchair-Sociology 101 definition of privilege that so many people tend to refer to, are too simple to be worth much in the real world. They are very useful starting points to get people thinking about the systems and forces in play, but that’s ALL they’re good for, in the long run. People interact far more messily than these neat analogies and definitions assume. We are not living in a physics word problem; we aren’t all perfectly spherical people (able to be selected at random without loss of generality) living on a frictionless plane.
In parallel to the concept of privilege, is the issue of markedness. In anthropology, a behavior or social trait can be marked or not. If it’s unmarked, that means it’s the accepted norm. If it’s marked, that means it’s somehow differing from that. English is the unmarked language in America. Men wearing pants is unmarked in most of the world. Heterosexuality is the unmarked sexual behavior in much of the world. A southern/New Yorker/Bostonian/California valley accent is marked speech in America. Being left-handed is marked. Being transgendered is marked. And the list goes on. The reason I bring up markedness is that the unmarked norm is often treated as a valueless default to which the marked variants bring some unique difference. “White americans don’t have their own culture, but Spanish-Americans, Russian-Americans, Native Americans, etc do!” -- ask Sarah Hoyt about the subject and prepare for a few hours of ranting. And yet, while in many situations the unmarked case is treated as the valueless baseline, it is equally treated as the valued norm -- if a new sitcom has an all-white cast, we aren’t too surprised, but if it’s all-black (and on a non-niche-market network -- ABC not BET), we take notice and say “they’re going against the grain with this one!” we take note of how something is marked in order to differentiate it from the rest -- whether that differentiation will be for praise, criticism, or other is secondary.
And why does all this happen in the first place, and why do people often get very offended at the assertion that there is privilege, or that they are part of a privileged system? I suspect that the answer to that lies in a combination of Anglo-european history and even more basic human nature. As we strive in our inextinguishable curiosity to understand the universe around us, we incorporate that understanding into our cultural values through the stories we tell each other, and to challenge those stories, especially without a ready-to-go story on hand as replacement sparks a lot of resistance and resentment, even anger. It all starts with the story we’ve spent centuries, if not millennia, telling ourselves in some form or other, that our success or failure is entirely our own doing. Whether it was God’s favor upon our good works or a Darwinian success of the best/strongest/hardest-working, we’ve been investing in some form of individuated success or failure -- if you didn’t succeed, you obviously weren’t working hard enough, being devout enough, or something. Easy, simple. And it’s held up reasonably well to inspection all this time, it must be right, right? And we all want to take pride and be justified in our accomplishments, as a rule: I’ve accomplished this, I did it of my own sweat-equity, the triumph is mine and mine alone.
And into this deeply-set and well-ingrained idea comes the concept of privilege: it isn’t your victory, at least not fully. There were systemic factors that helped or hindered your success. It’s not just that you were the smartest, fastest, or most successful, it’s that you were also likely part of a group that set you ahead socially, or economically, or whatever combination of factors that facilitated your success. Oh yes, it’s possible to succeed without those benefits, with luck and skill and determination, but having those subtle built-in benefits certainly does help. This story we tell ourselves could still possibly be true, you know: we just have to remember that however much control we might have over our actions, we still have no control over how those actions will be received by those around us. We can’t control if someone will love what we’ve said, or hate it with a blinding passion.
But acknowledging that means we’re no longer able to tell ourselves the comfortable story of “it only matters what you do: if you set your mind to it, you can do anything!” Our victories are no longer ours alone, our failures no longer ours either. We can no longer simply praise the successful and condemn the failure, we must start taking additional factors into consideration, and that flys in direct contrast to another of the well-established stories we tell ourselves (or perhaps a corollary to what’s already been said): everything can be looked at analytically, rationally, dispassionately. We are a scientific-minded people these centuries, after all. Two people, given the same education, the same chance to apply for college, the same opportunities to apply for jobs, the same availability of loans and business funds should be able to replicate each other’s work, right? If one succeeds and the other fails, it stands to reason that the failure just didn’t work hard enough, didn’t apply himself, should have strived more.
So where does this end up? It ends with us hopefully taking better stock of what is happening behind the scenes of our lives. Perhaps acknowledging that not everyone has it as easy or hard as you do. Perhaps realizing that your success just might be due to more than just your own abilities. Perhaps thinking a bit now and then why other people might be bothered by blithe assumptions of how the world works, or how their life has gone. Maybe just moving forward with the understanding the the world isn’t as simple a machine as we like to tell ourselves it is.