is privilege the new bias?

[heresiarch]

i've noticed the concept of "privilege" seems to getting bandied about with some frequency lately (both among my friends and the feminist/anti-racist blogosphere more generally), often in place of the more hackneyed concept of "bias." and i'm certainly glad to be part of a community of people concerned with issues of social justice and willing to

Comments

[ex_pathogen]

It's rather blunt and will probably raise your hackles, but the way I've seen the concept of privilege thrown around usually seems to revolve around the idea that "you didn't actually do anything yourself, but you should still feel guilty." Which is never something that makes me particularly happy to hear the rest of the conversation, but I was a very bad Marxist.

[latemodel]

Funny thing, in the context of privilege, guilt is actually the exact opposite of what's intended. "White Guilt" is universally used with negative connotations: the idea is that simply feeling guilty doesn't help anyone, and that if you're going to go to the trouble of worrying about it, there are more constructive things to do.

[wire_mother]

i agree. the concept of "guilt", as an internalized feeling, is that it should be something that one works to alleviate, not something that one should wallow in. it's the fetishization of guilt that makes it a bad thing, otherwise it serves as a useful guide to what we should be working to fix.

[heresiarch]

well, i think that's how it's often misinterpreted by people against whom it's leveled.

i mean, my problem is that i don't disagree with the critiques of entrenched inequality it's meant to reference, and in fact, i do think that part of being in a privileged social position is precisely a certain blindness to the realities of power and inequality.

but i also think you can't use the accusation of privilege as an explanation for it.

[atalanta]

Where I am, it is (very) frequently used and usually as an all-purpose conversation-ending trump card. Better even than an accusation of racism - it can be used against anybody at all!

[ex_pathogen]

Heh, citing privilege = Godwining a thread

[latemodel]

This is exactly what she's trying to combat. It's useful as an analytical tool.

[heresiarch]

which is unfortunate, because that closes off dialogue or discussion. do you think it's being used more frequently, though?

[infomorph]

I'm not sure who you're reading, and I haven't read much of this stuff for years, so I can't really respond to your concerns about how critiques of privilege are now being used. In my experience with discussions over white skin privilege in the past, however, there was quite a bit of effort put into not only understanding the mechanics of it but also investigating methods of counteracting it. For example, the journal Race Traitor ("Treason to Whiteness Is Loyalty to Humanity") was all about finding ways for people who had white skin privilege to act/organize/whatever in ways that negated that inherent privilege. "White guilt" was universally looked on as a useless liberal (i.e., non-radical) complex. The idea was that privilege was a social construct that you had to *actively* circumvent to be effective -- so it was not so much a stigma as a hurdle. A difficult and necessary hurdle

[vebelfetzer]

This is my real journal.

Also, I'm privileged.

[heresiarch]

so, because this is one of my few recent public posts, i've been getting a lot of LJ spam here. when i first saw your comment, i was briefly convinced that the spammers were trying to make themselves look more legit by at least tangentially responding to the actual content. i was trying to figure out, however, why they would assert it was their real journal ;P.

glad to see you are real and not spam :D.

[lapsedmodernist]

hey there, I meant to lj-friend you a long time ago, and spaced on it--but now I remedied it; hope that's cool that I added you.