On Privilege

What bothered me the most (well besides being called and idiot and dumbass), was the way some of the comments were commended the post like it was some fucking breakthrough radical thing to say that will lead us to the path of true equality.

Denying privilege is not some noble or brave thing to do. (Rush Limbaugh does it every day.)

THANK YOU for doing this, Britni! He must love getting his ass kicked or something. That post was in itself a huge example of privilege. So offensive. Having babies is a privilege, seriously?

It sounds to me like the part that Champagne and Benzedrine is objecting to is the part where he has to do anything in response to his privilege, to maybe give up some of the things that he gets unfairly, to contribute to dismantling the unfairness at all, even by acknowledging it.

He clearly recognizes that the unfairness is there but in this weird double talk exercise of a post, just goes on to complain about privileges that other people have. As evidence that they’re being whiny bitches when they point out his own privileges. As if that means that nobody should have to do anything in response to their privilege. Or that it’s not worth noting in the first place.

Sure, women do enjoy some privileges. Unless we’re looking at the very most disadvantaged of people, there’s some privilege there. The unfair part is that these privileges, the things we start out with on our trek through the world, are so drastically different from person to person. It’s not whining to point out that a heterosexual, cisgendered white man who’s born fully abled into a rich family of a majority religion in a first world country might need to acknowledge and do something about the fact that a queer, transgendered, disabled person born at the exact same moment into a non-white, poor, third world family that follows a persecuted religion is going to have a much harder life. That’s a problem we need to ACT on. And dissing the people who recognize that gets you nowhere.

(And yes, maternity leave is a privilege, because it’s something plenty of people the world over don’t get. They SHOULD get it, but if we look at third world countries and low income families…well, that’s one of those things that cries for action.)

P.S.
Champagne, your post went up after I hit send.

Nobody’s saying that one set of privileges matters more or less than others. It’s more about recognizing a system that in general values certain kinds of people more than others. So the fact that you don’t make a lot of money for whatever reason means that you don’t have as much privilege as a rich person. But it’s not so easy to pin point exactly “how much” privilege each person has. It’s a complex issue, and each person’s individual privilege is based on a literal infinitude of factors.

It matters more that we have a system that creates privilege than that any one individual has more or less privilege than another individual. Yes, the blogosphere does sometimes get caught up in this “Well, you have more privilege than I do because…so are in less of a position to talk about privilege than I am” “No, YOU have more, so you can’t talk,” “No YOU do,” No YOU do!” nonsense. But let’s not miss the forest for the trees.

Paradox, the only way to create an equal society is to stop billeting people into demographics based on race or gender. This privilege bullshit perpetuates the inequality because it defines people by their skin color or gender. You are THIS, the system says, so therefore you are advantaged/disadvantaged.

Until we judge people as individuals rather than racial or sexual statistics than we’re going to divide society and maintain divisions instead of making them invisible.

The notion of privilege is bullshit because it perpetuates inequality and calls extra attention to what should inconsequential differences of race or gender.

(Oh, and I didn’t mean that YOU were a “heterosexual, cisgendered white man who’s born fully abled into a rich family of a majority religion in a first world country.” I have very little info about your background. I was using that as a prototypical example of a person who has a lot of privilege. I recognize that there are more factors in privilege than what I listed, but I’m only human, and I don’t have time to chronicle the universe.)

I’m going to regret getting involved in this. Really, I am.

But I can’t help it when I see this: “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO?”

I expect you to be willing to recognize that because you were born with a penis and I was born with a vagina, you will always be seen as more serious in the workplace, and no one will ever assume that you will just quit to have babies one day. And I expect you to do everything you can to push for women to be treated equally to you in the workplace.

I expect you to be willing to recognize that because you are male and I am female, you are not told that if you walk home in your “shitty Spanish neighborhood” late at night, you are risking sexual assault, whereas if I cannot afford to live in a less ‘shitty’ neighborhood and walk home in said neighborhood late at night, I am apparently just opening my legs for any man who walks by. And I expect you to push for society to recognize that sexual assault has nothing to do with where a person is or what a person is wearing, and everything to do with the fact that someone chose to commit sexual assault.

And so on, and so forth. Recognize the areas of the world where you do have an advantage due to your privilege. And fight the same damn fight that I’ll be fighting my entire life, to balance things out, to make sure that everyone in this world will be treated equally and fairly.

i find it very interesting that he didn’t bother to mention that sometimes companies decide against hiring women *because* of maternity leave; they think that women can get pregnant, if she does, and goes on maternity leave, they lose money/labor.

the only thing i agree with here is that, yes, women can get away with some things men can’t. in many ways, being a man comes with its own unfair baggage, but they are still the group which has more social power, higher pay, doesn’t have to be paranoid about being hurt every time they set foot in a new or slightly suspicious place, etc.

it’s rants like this that make me so frustrated that i want to pull my hair out. like when my friends make comments like “affirmative action is unfair to white people” and “what feminists are REALLY asking for is SPECIAL TREATMENT.” aaargh.

“If you’re born white, you’re automatically more likely to go to college or earn above a certain level. If you’re born male, you’re more likely to achieve a higher position in the workplace, and less likely to be the victim of sexual violence.”

uh, yes. that is the way the world works. if you’re white, male, and heterosexual, you find it easier to dominate a social space, get a job, etc, just because of the fact that you’re born into that group. if you don’t like it and think it’s unfair? then work to fucking change it. don’t sit there bitching about how it supposedly doesn’t exist.

If I knew how to solve it, I’d so have done it like Super Woman arriving on the scene in a flash of glory.

What I try to do is use the privileges I have to try and disseminate privilege to more people. God knows if I’m going about it the right way. I raise money for charities (this is actually my job), I spend my free time teaching people about sexuality and gender (because gender and sexuality privileges interest me in particular) and trying to help them feel okay however they are in that regard. Take a little of the bite out of the arrow of being less privileged in that arena, and help “minority” sexualities be better accepted. I spend a huge amount of time trying to understand the points of view of people who have different privilege situations than I do. And I write about all of this, because lots of people don’t really get privilege or see that there’s an unfair system to chip away at in the first place.

Not saying your methods would look anything like mine, and you’re probably doing some things already. You don’t have to be super man, though. Just an acknowledgment and even a small attempt to chip away at that privilege system is all it takes. (Maybe teaching your kids that they’re lucky to have a dad who works hard for them, lucky to have the privileges they’ve got?) Even that much puts you way ahead of most people. And if everyone did that, it’d work.

When people talk about privilege they aren’t trying to suggest that anyone chose to be born into their race/gender/sexual orientation on purpose. It’s no one’s fault and it is purely a lottery, as C&B mentioned.

It’s not about taking responsibility for the privilege you’ve been born into, it’s about acknowledging that it exists. Once it’s acknowledged that it does exist we can begin to point out the flaws in our society and start working towards the society where everyone -is- judged on their own merit, rather than making assumptions about them based on factors that are irrelevant (i.e. skin color, gender, sexual orientation).

I have to say I was not the least bit surprised to see that the two biggest misogynists I’ve seen in this community (Eliot and Rayne) were agreeing whole-heartedly with C&B’s post. Unfortunately, nothing is ever going to change with those sorts of attitudes. When we choose to get offended by things and become defensive, rather than see the truth in them and try to apply that truth towards change, we’ll just remain in a fucked up place.

Just because you bust your ass to get what you’ve got doesn’t mean that you don’t benefit from privilege. There are so many other things that you take for granted. Things that you’re able to do and not have your intentions second guessed based on that privilege. Get your fucking head out of the sand.

I want to gently point out that gently pointing out that you have privileges is not the same as making assumptions about your beliefs or behavior. It’s not even a personal attack. It’s just a statement of fact. If you came to those same people with a list of things you do to try and combat privilege, the ways that you act on being a liberal minded guy, then they’d applaud that and you could all be friends. They appreciate it if you recognize privilege and try to fight it. We’re a loving bunch, we privilege-fighters. We want all the help we can get.

Also, I can tell you’re drifting into affirmative action territory here, and I just want to preempt that by saying that, absolutely affirmative action is a very far from perfect system. But the difference in how people are treated has already been there for a very long time and it’s based on race, gender, etc. It’s endemic. It was there long before folks started trying to give the underprivileged a leg up.

People who try to find ways to get everyone treated fairly are not malicious. Even when those ways aren’t perfect. So yes, critique the system and critique the attempts to fix the system, but don’t attack the people who are trying to do the fixing. They’re not disingenuous, just human and flawed.

I’d like to state that I am not “privileged” (?) to be hot enough to get out of speeding tickets or get a free random drink from a stranger…. both have NEVER happened to me in my 31 yrs of life.

@ C&B
The first paragraph of Wilhelmina’s comment is what I was talking about. That and more, but I won’t waste it on a guy who thinks that getting free drinks in a bar is some sort of ‘female privilege’. I did not take the time and energy to write down fleshed out responses like everyone else. Thank you for calling me “seriously disturbed”. I have no doubt that my very third world country family will vehemently agree with you (and may also disown me or forcibly marry me to a man, gawd forbid) if I come out as a queer genderqueer and express a desire to get my boobs hacked off. But that’s neither here nor there for a guy who denies the existence of privilege.
Cheers!

It is a bit rash and problematic to throw all kinds of privilege into one basket. The privilege of heterosexuals begins with being in the majority, thus living in a society where most sexual institutions are tailored to your orientation. Something true of neither racial nor gender differences, where privilege is mostly based on biases. I don’t know much about race, thus I will only talk about gender and sex.
It is clear that men and women ( not to mention “unplacebles” in the broad category of queer) are treated differently. But difference does not privilege make. Privilege requires that some group, in total, is better off than another. This is one key mistake made here and I will return to it in a paragraph or two.
So let’s look at privilege: The statistics show quite clearly, that men are overrepresented in almost every status that our culture considers good and high. Furthermore, the main positions with military, political & economical power and influence are held almost exclusively by males. I’m not going to go on, you get the picture and you know the numbers.
But the privilege is not 100% one sided. Not to deny the many vagaries that women are subjected to because of their gender (prominently mentioned here already), but there is something like, for lack of a better term, “victim privilege”. That is the privilege of tending to be seen as the victim as opposed to the victimizer. It can be seen in how male rape victims tend to get left out of the rape culture discussion, how a man hitting on a woman in the office tends to be seen as harassment, while the opposite situation isn’t. In short, there are some advantages to belonging to the group which is stereotyped as the victim. I am not saying that those “make up” for sexual violence, abusive beauty standards, lower pay, …. the don’t. But they are there. Which makes a central point: Privilege is not an all or nothing affair. Differences of role and identity constitute patterns of context sensitive advantages and disadvantages, options and barriers and it is probably true that according to any standards that we as “western culture” have, men as a group come out better off then women as a group.
This leads me to a simple conclusion: Being part of a generally privileged group does not imply that any given individual in any given context will have more options and advantages that any other individual who is part of a different, generally disprivileged group.
Being a black homosexual transgender women is not always, in any context you might come upon, a disadvantage. It is so in many and in those generally considered to be important and which are related to high status. Or from a different angle: In some contexts, even a negative bias against you can be an advantage, opening options that would be closed to others.
And maybe this point of view can reconcile the fronts here a bit. It is not much to give up to say that being a woman has some advantages nor to say that being a man has more advantages and that those advantages are in areas generally considered to be more valuable.

C&B,

I really tried to get your point. All I could come up with is that you were saying “suck it up”. The BS ranting suggested you don’t believe it exists. It is really hard to see it if you don’t live it. Even though I see minority friends as equals and treat them as such I am often surprised by comments they make that make it painfully obvious THEY feel inferior. It is a closed mind that is insulted by this and does not try to take some sensitivity to it.

As I sit here feeling completely socially acceptable in my white socks and dress shoes, I am scratching my head in an attempt to sort out your statements. You and I were nurtured by our families, social economic status and society in ways other demographics will never be and this makes such a huge difference.

You say privilege is BS then admit that it exists. Furthermore your frustration with dogma and the dumbass so-called ‘place minority name here’ seems to be that you refuse to “pay some due”. No one has asked you to pay a due except to admit a divide exists. Separating the feelings and impressions of others from a personal attack is the repeatedly point lost in your comments about rape culture, privilege and the like. Throwing you hands up and saying pointing out privilege is not the path to equality is illogical. It would be a perfect world if we could all simply hit the reset button and say, ‘ok, now we are equal’. It won’t work that way. We have to acknowledge the differences and deal with them. Turning a blind eye reinforces its existence and shows a lack of appreciation, or willingness to face the whole issue. The impression given is ‘I am on top, fuck you’.

I really do think you see it exists, and no one is asking you to bleed for the cause, but a little compassion and sensitivity to others is the only way to be truly equal when in fact we will never be the ‘same’.

Hubman,

The efforts of the last 20 years have given you much joy obviously. That is wonderful. The ability to do those things and the fact you carried them through is a great thing to be proud of and I know all parents want their kids to do better than they did, as I am sure yours did.

How many minorities do you know in your same position? The difference is all around us. Is it because they just did not try as hard as you? Or did they not have the same support and opportunities?

Making personal attacks severely diminishes your arguments, suggesting you have no point. My impression is that this is true, and that you think this discussion is designed to make you feel guilty for what you have. There is no shame in success but there are reasons why others have not had the same advantages to achieve it. Discussion of economic divides is certainly one aspect of privilege, but to suggest Britni has no right to speak her mind because she enjoys a privilege is pathetic.

Britni- you see how it feels? You attack the “privilege” that I enjoy, defined however you see fit, and I’m supposed to do something, what I’m not exactly sure. I point out a privilege that you enjoy that others may not, namely economic privilege, and you resort to “fuck you”. Frankly, I expected better of you.

Look at the broader picture. What can I do about my sex, my skin color, my sexual orientation? Nothing. Can I do something with the economic privilege that I’ve attained? Absolutely, and THAT is a discussion worth having, in my opinion.

Profligacy- Ask Britni, she knows what I do for a living, if you don’t already know. I could cite several examples of friends and colleagues who have “overcome” a lack of privilege, due to skin color, sexual orientation, or any other perceived barrier to success.

I did not intend to attack her. I was using her personal circumstances, which she has shared right here on this blog, to point out the hypocrisy of her hammering away at privilege when she enjoys some degree of privilege herself. I think her resorting to “fuck you” is the ultimate failure to express a coherent point.

Let me tell a story for a moment.

I used to work at Staples, in the “business machines” department, i.e. anything that was electronic. I was going to school for PC tech support and always up on the latest information about PC’s. I could go toe-to-toe with nearly any of the guys who also worked in that department and match if not exceed their knowledge. At the time, I was pretty (but fat, strike one) and the only female in the male-run department.

I was the only one not with a customer when this older couple came over to look at computers (late 60′s maybe). They asked questions, I answered them confidently and correctly (so far as they knew, since they were the ones who needed help). I never once faltered or had to say “I don’t know”. A few minutes into helping, a male co-worker who didn’t even work in my department walked through to put back an item. The man of the couple stopped him and said “thank you honey but we’ll ask this nice man here instead”. To which the nice (white) man replied “I don’t work in this department but L here can certainly help you with anything you need”. Mollified, the old man paused a moment before flagging down another guy who did work in my department but was busy helping another customer. The old man was so desperate to get help from a MAN that he would rudely interrupt.

I looked professional, well kept, no cleavage. These men? Scruffy looking young boys who looked like they slept in their work clothes.

But who the fuck cared, they were MEN and for no other reason than their gender, they automatically were more knowledgeable and capable than me.

This happened a few other times and my lack of sales in the department ultimately got me moved to the customer service desk (a girl’s job, since there were never any men there), but this particular incident stood out in my mind. It’s been more than 10 years since that and it still angers me, I still remember it.

First off, both men and women can take maternity/paternity leave. From the Department of Labor website on the Family Medical Leave Act

Covered employers must grant an eligible employee up to a total of 12 workweeks of unpaid leave during any 12-month period for one or more of the following reasons:

* for the birth and care of the newborn child of the employee;
* for placement with the employee of a son or daughter for adoption or foster care;
* to care for an immediate family member (spouse, child, or parent) with a serious health condition; or
* to take medical leave when the employee is unable to work because of a serious health condition.

Doesn’t say mom, just employee. Then in some companies if the mother has taken short term disability they can have some pay for the time, but that is for either six or eight weeks depending on how the baby was delivered.

I believe that privilege exists. I know that as a white, heterosexual woman I have privileges that women of other races, religions and sexual orientations do not.

However that privilege is not the whole reason I am successful. A big part of it is my drive and work ethic.

I think that Hubman and C&B were also trying to address the fact that there are lots of different privilege which was not addressed in your posts.

There is the privilege of coming from a well off home, or having parents that appreciate intellectual stimulation or live in a nice neighborhood with good schools.

Another type of privilege that I really would like to hear a take on is the privilege of being exceptionally attractive, especially in the work force.

@Profligacy: EXACTLY. THIS: No one has asked you to pay a due except to admit a divide exists . . . It would be a perfect world if we could all simply hit the reset button and say, ‘ok, now we are equal’. It won’t work that way. We have to acknowledge the differences and deal with them. Turning a blind eye reinforces its existence and shows a lack of appreciation, or willingness to face the whole issue.

I think what these dudes are failing to realize — and you’ve pointed this out, Brit — is that this isn’t about them. It’s about being respectful to other people who may not have the same forms of privilege. I mean, how hard is that to understand? I don’t get it.

The only point I’m going to respond to is what Megan said:

“I find it interesting that no one touched on how he labeled his neighborhood as ‘Spanish’ to show he’s in the same boat…but also to show how ’shitty’ it was. Uh…hello! Privilege!!”

Uh, no. Hello, indeed, the same assumptions that Hubman, myself and a whole bunch of people are frustrated with.

My neighborhood is largely Spanish, which means I don’t enjoy the ‘privilege’ of living in a community of the same demographic I am (one of the major ‘privileges’ the author of that stupid ‘white knapsack’ essay started off with.)

It’s also a shitty neighborhood, which has nothing to do with the Spanish aspect but the fact that my neighbors are largely very poor and underprivileged – one of the reasons I live there, because it’s the only sort of neighborhood I can currently afford.

Megan made the same sort of typical, offensive, judgmental assumption that is rife throughout discussions of privilege. It’s why the notion is bullshit; because it always boils down to one stranger passing judgment on another.

I so wish we were all able to debate our differing opinions without the drama, the personal attacks and the name-calling. This happens in EVERY comment thread under a post that’s even slightly controversial, which makes me think that some people enjoy and THRIVE on the drama. But I digress…

I’ve seen “privilege” thrown around quite a bit and, quite often, it’s used as an insult or a judgment. I cannot quote exactly because my memory is pretty shitty, but I’ve seen comments going through my tweet stream or on blog posts that say things similar to “This is so full of privilege” and “You’re so cis-privileged” and, I think, even calling someone a “cis-privileged fuck” or “asshole” or something like that.

So, I can understand why C&B would get up in arms about the word “privilege” when it HAS been given the undertones of being a bad thing. His blog post definitely went overboard with it, but I understand the thought behind it. If calling someone “privileged” is not an insult, than people should stop using it that way. Maybe, instead, point out that people who refuse to acknowledge the fact that privilege exists are “privilege-ignorant” or “feel entitled”?