Relative and absolute levels of privelege
May. 16th, 2012 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI recently read another essay looking for a way of explaining that "Straight white males on average acquire more/better opportunities than non-straight non-white non-males in similar situations" without raising the defensiveness many people experience when talking about privilege.
It used the metaphor of "Some people are playing life on 'hard' difficulty and some on 'easy', but we didn't get the choose the difficulty level". Link:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
However, I was reminded of another of Scalzi's essays that I found very moving, on being poor. I found it very effective, and it also seemed to attract much much less defensiveness. It was a list of things that people experience, starting something like:
"Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV"
"Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away"
Etc, etc
But I wondered, would it have been better if it had started by saying:
"Not being poor is not panicing when your kids for ask for all the crap they see on TV"
"Not being poor is being able to go to the dentist when you have toothache"
Etc, etc
I think that would make people MORE defensive.
It seems like most explanations of privilege start out by telling people "you can get on a train without wondering if you'll be groped/harassed by police/unable to get up the steps" and leave it implied that other people can't, but I think it's perhaps the second half that needs to be emphasised. Most men already KNOW they can get on a tube train without worrying about being groped -- the relevant piece of information they're missing is that half of the human population can't. And yes, everyone SHOULD know, so it's fair to vent that some people just don't get it. But if I'm genuinely trying to get someone to "get it", might it be advantageous to put the thing they're missing up front in every paragraph, in big letters, spelled out in words of one syllable?
It seems to me "privilege" can be absolute or relative. You can say "people whose parents are landed gentry are privileged" or "people who live in the UK are privileged compared to many other people". So saying someone is privileged because they're white is implicitly making two assertions:
(a) that they have some opportunities that would be harder or impossible if they weren't
(b) that people who don't have those priveleges are the correct "baseline" to measure privilege against.
Now, people assuming that straight white males are the "baseline" default sort of person and everyone else falls short is indeed a systematic problem in society. But if you're trying to get someone who isn't familiar with the ideas to "get it", it seems like presenting them with the fairly objective facts about (a), as in the "Being Poor" essay, and inviting their humanity to empathise, is likely to be more effective than saying "OK, humans have a natural tendency to think of themselves as 'baseline' but that tendency is WRONG WRONG WRONG and you should think of someone without any 'privileges' as the baseline for comparison", even if that makes sense.
I notice that the same problem can occur even between two people who DO know the terms. If person from non-straight-white-male-group-A is talking to person from non-straight-white-male-group-B and avers to something that B has easier than A, people instinctively take that as saying that B has it easier in general (and get very cross if that's obviously not true). Even thought according to the literal definition of the concept of privilege, it's just as correct to say there is a (quite small) amount of "Black Privilege" of things black people can do that white people find a lot harder, even if "White Privilege" is thousands of times bigger.
Conclusions
My questions are, is the distinction between "you are privileged" making me defensive and "you are privileged compared to most people" making my empathetic one that only applicable to me, or am I right that most people react the same way?
Secondly, do you think it would work if more "what it's like to have white/straight/male privilege" essays instead focused on telling people what it would be like if they didn't? Do you think it's harmful if postponse the question of the baseline and just start by establishing the large relative difference?
It used the metaphor of "Some people are playing life on 'hard' difficulty and some on 'easy', but we didn't get the choose the difficulty level". Link:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
However, I was reminded of another of Scalzi's essays that I found very moving, on being poor. I found it very effective, and it also seemed to attract much much less defensiveness. It was a list of things that people experience, starting something like:
"Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV"
"Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away"
Etc, etc
But I wondered, would it have been better if it had started by saying:
"Not being poor is not panicing when your kids for ask for all the crap they see on TV"
"Not being poor is being able to go to the dentist when you have toothache"
Etc, etc
I think that would make people MORE defensive.
It seems like most explanations of privilege start out by telling people "you can get on a train without wondering if you'll be groped/harassed by police/unable to get up the steps" and leave it implied that other people can't, but I think it's perhaps the second half that needs to be emphasised. Most men already KNOW they can get on a tube train without worrying about being groped -- the relevant piece of information they're missing is that half of the human population can't. And yes, everyone SHOULD know, so it's fair to vent that some people just don't get it. But if I'm genuinely trying to get someone to "get it", might it be advantageous to put the thing they're missing up front in every paragraph, in big letters, spelled out in words of one syllable?
It seems to me "privilege" can be absolute or relative. You can say "people whose parents are landed gentry are privileged" or "people who live in the UK are privileged compared to many other people". So saying someone is privileged because they're white is implicitly making two assertions:
(a) that they have some opportunities that would be harder or impossible if they weren't
(b) that people who don't have those priveleges are the correct "baseline" to measure privilege against.
Now, people assuming that straight white males are the "baseline" default sort of person and everyone else falls short is indeed a systematic problem in society. But if you're trying to get someone who isn't familiar with the ideas to "get it", it seems like presenting them with the fairly objective facts about (a), as in the "Being Poor" essay, and inviting their humanity to empathise, is likely to be more effective than saying "OK, humans have a natural tendency to think of themselves as 'baseline' but that tendency is WRONG WRONG WRONG and you should think of someone without any 'privileges' as the baseline for comparison", even if that makes sense.
I notice that the same problem can occur even between two people who DO know the terms. If person from non-straight-white-male-group-A is talking to person from non-straight-white-male-group-B and avers to something that B has easier than A, people instinctively take that as saying that B has it easier in general (and get very cross if that's obviously not true). Even thought according to the literal definition of the concept of privilege, it's just as correct to say there is a (quite small) amount of "Black Privilege" of things black people can do that white people find a lot harder, even if "White Privilege" is thousands of times bigger.
Conclusions
My questions are, is the distinction between "you are privileged" making me defensive and "you are privileged compared to most people" making my empathetic one that only applicable to me, or am I right that most people react the same way?
Secondly, do you think it would work if more "what it's like to have white/straight/male privilege" essays instead focused on telling people what it would be like if they didn't? Do you think it's harmful if postponse the question of the baseline and just start by establishing the large relative difference?
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 01:00 pm (UTC)1) Motivated skepticism. People have a tendency apply their best critical thinking skills to positions they instinctively disagree with, and to go easy on positions they find amenable to them.
2) Global evaluations of how someone's life is. This is interesting. How many UKP is a QALY worth? How many people see red at the very thought of such a question? Are we interested in the integral of how people are feeling from moment to moment, or how people feel when people are evaluating their life as a whole? Or how they feel about their life as a whole when they're currently suffering one of the downsides of being in some particular (theoretically) advantaged group?
3) Groups vs individuals. "Men"[1] have a greater chance of being killed in their early 20s; how does that affect how I evaluate my life, seeing as I've cleared that hurdle just fine? Likewise "men" can be parents without taking the big hit to their earning potential that "women" take; for those of us likely to remain childless, what should that do to how we feel about things?
4) Having to think about what you count as. I can think of, oooh, at least four dimensions (or five, depending on how you slice them) where what sort of privilege I might be deemed to have or be lacking depends on on how the question mark that is sitting over some aspect of my identity is resolved. Often, I'm happy to let those question marks be question marks, except for when the topic of privilege comes up.
5) Polysemy of "privilege": there's an idea I hear some time where there's a sense a bit like "security privileges" or "parliamentary privilege", where it's less about how your life is, and more about how your ideas are represented in the popular discourse. Consider a society whose gender ideology is very... chivalrous, and how that would weigh in on various ideas about privilege.
6) In British English at least, "privileged" is generally roughly synonymous with "posh". Partly there's something personal for me, where at school people decided my voice was "posh" and mocked me for it; I have my own hypotheses about why this is, but I can't say for sure. Anyway, as a word, it has all sorts of connotations that make it easy to reject.
Personally I'm much happier about thinking about things like anti-discrimination, anti-prejudice, anti-stereotype, redistributive taxation, rehabilitation etc. where the question of who exactly it is that has it tough can be left a bit vague.
[1] I'm using bare plurals here to be intentionally provocative. I think the discourse would be much better if people abstained from this, and said "all men" or "most men" or "some men" or "53% of men in condition X according to survey Y" or "disproportionately more men: d = 0.7" or whatever. I should write this up properly some day.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 01:28 pm (UTC)I agree it's a bad word (although mostly because I have so much difficulty spelling it) but an over-arching word is useful. I think we may be stuck with this one.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 01:37 pm (UTC)7) Don't count on people reading your essay properly! People can take offense based on a skim-read of what you're saying, and then suffer impaired reading comprehension as a result.
Apologies if I've done this to you.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 02:31 pm (UTC)That's an interesting point. I certainly have the same subconscious impression, which isn't ever so positive, it hadn't occured to me to wonder if some people didn't have that connection as strongly.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 03:32 pm (UTC)I think it might be worth pointing out that I think that being able to sit around saying "I don't like your words, I won't engage with your substantial points until you come up with words I like" rather than thinking about the substantial points *is in itself a privilege* (which I have quite a bit of). Not that I think we shouldn't ever sit around talking about words and looking for good ones; and obviously you started this discussion to be about the words not any specific issue, but just... a thing.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 03:50 pm (UTC)So I very nearly didn't post this at all, in case it came off as lecturing. FWIW, I try very hard to both listen to what other people are really saying, even if they're not saying it the way I would have, and to try to explain things in terms that are meaningful to other people, but I don't think that makes me superhuman, I think that just makes me at best average (I think sufficiently many topics are difficult both in society politics and in everyday life that they need both parties to try to get any decent communication).
But also, even if we shouldn't have to baby straight white men to get a message through, and even though most people don't have the option of spending the time to rephrase stuff the "best" way, many people DO devote a lot of time to outreach and to explaining stuff in the hopes of spreading the message to a wider audience, so it seems only natural to ask "what's the best way of doing this". Not in a "when YOU explain stuff to ME, you should do it like THIS" way but in a "when WE explain stuff to PEOPLE, what works best?" way... Maybe...
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 08:16 am (UTC)