Privilege and society

[billvon 2,395]

Another long ass post, this one about privilege.  It's something I've been talking about with several friends of mine, and I wanted to get some thoughts on paper (or pixels or whatever.)

Privilege is something that is close to the center of many of the discussions society has been having lately about race, and gender, and sexual orientation.  And there is no topic that is so divisive - as John Scalzi notes, mention the word privilege and some people “react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon.”

Often when you talk to people about privilege, their first response is defensive. They often try to redefine the word so as to not include themselves in what they consider to be an odious bracket.  You hear things like "I'm not privileged!  I worked for everything I got!"

But that's not what privilege is.  It does not mean "you are successful only because of what people gave you."  Privilege refers to the benefit you get by virtue of your race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or family/community connections, or nationality, or natural abilities.  It sets the starting point, not the end, of anyone's progress through life.  Scalzi uses a good analogy – it’s like playing an online game on the easiest setting, whereas other people have to play on a harder setting.  It doesn’t mean you (or they) are poor players, and it doesn’t mean you are evil.  It just means that the “game” starts out easier for you.

I understand the feeling of having to defend yourself, though, because I used to do the same thing.  I had stories that showed just how un-privileged I was, because I wanted to make it clear that I was successful all on my own, that I (and no one else) was responsible for my successes in life.  One of my go-to stories was the story of how I made my last tuition payment with nickels and dimes.  I was working three jobs by the end of my college career, trying to make that last payment in time to graduate; one of them was running the local laundromat.  And since I couldn't wait three weeks for my last paycheck, they let me take it in change, because that would let me meet the deadline at the cashier's office.  And so I showed up there with trays and trays of change, carrying just enough to pay my final bill and graduate with my class.  That's not the story of someone privileged, right?  Privileged people don't have to (literally) scrape nickels and dimes together just to graduate!

What that story misses, of course, is that I was doing that at the best engineering school in the country.  And that I had made it into that school because of a whole host of factors, like my birthplace, who my parents were and what community I was raised in.  Those connections had a lot to do with my earlier success in school, success that led me to MIT.

I had another story from my college days that I used to tell which demonstrates how unconscious that privilege was for me.  During the setup for a dorm party one day, a friend and I heard someone screaming outside.  We opened the door - and there, at the top of the stairs, was a couple being mugged.  My friend and I took off after the thief.  He threw the purse away within 100 yards, but we kept after him, because we didn't want a mugger roaming around our campus.  We chased him into a copse of trees at the end of campus.  He ran out the other side, with me to the side of him, still trying to pace him.  That was a big mistake on his part, because the other side of the road was the jurisdiction of the Cambridge police, and they were ready for him with weapons out.

Another story of how I wasn't privileged - because privileged people don't have to chase muggers in their schools, right?  They have people for that.  But looking back, I thought nothing of running out of a clump of trees towards cops with their guns out.  Because the mugger was black and I was white, and I knew they'd be able to tell who was the mugger.  And that was a decision on a completely unconscious level, because I grew up in an environment where the police were on my side.

The desire to be seen as unprivileged is, I think, a somewhat recent development in historical terms.  When we look back at the popular entertainment in the time of Shakespeare the heroes were all privileged members of society.  Kings, princes, the children of powerful families, wealthy merchants.  I think this is because back then, underprivileged people didn't just get low-paying, thankless jobs, or get hassled by the cops - they died of starvation, and often had to watch their families starve.  No one wanted that, and no one wanted to be associated with that.

For the past few hundred years, though, society has reached the point where starvation has become less of an issue.  And as that has happened, our heroes have gradually become the people who overcame great odds and succeeded anyway.  Harry Potter, a penniless orphan who goes on to defeat the big evil.   Luke Skywalker, who not only starts out as a poor orphan farmboy, but later discovers that he has a father who is literally the worst guy in the galaxy - and he still overcomes all that and wins the day.

And perhaps no hero story is as indicative of our current view of privilege than the story of Tony Stark, a rich military contractor, who cannot become the hero Iron Man until all that is taken away from him by terrorists who kidnap him and hold him prisoner in a cave.  Only then, when he loses all that privilege, can we see his story as heroic.

It’s no wonder, then, that we want to see ourselves as without privilege.  We want to be like the heroes our society (and our media) portray.  And often that is completely unconscious; few people think “I want to be just like Iron Man” but we pick up the underlying message nonetheless.

This sense of “privilege as an insult” can lead to unintentional gaslighting of minorities, women, LGBT people and disabled people – because when a wealthy white man tells a minority woman “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I didn’t get any benefits that you didn’t” he’s telling her that she’s crazy and she doesn’t understand reality.  And there’s really nowhere to go from there; any real discussion ends, because you can’t have a rational conversation with someone who thinks you are crazy.

I think it’s critical that we accept that some people in society have privileges over others.  That doesn’t mean they are inherently lazy, or biased, or bigoted, and it doesn’t mean they didn’t work for what they got.  But it’s simply a fact that some segments of society have privileges that others don’t.  Some of that comes out of the structural racism/homophobia/bigotry in our society, which has developed over centuries for a host of historical reasons.  Some of this is based in our own biology – homophily is something we evolved as a protective mechanism, and it makes us see someone familiar as someone of “our tribe” and inherently more trustworthy than someone with a different appearance, accent or presentation.  But whatever the source, it’s real, and a great many people in the world have to live with it.

This can be very hard to see (as it was for me.)  We all choose the company we keep, and it’s easy to join a community of like-minded people within which almost no one has a dramatically different amount of privilege than anyone else.  And that can make it look like no one in that group has much privilege, because we tend to see differences, not commonalities.  The things common to the group – race, socioeconomic status, citizenship - become the baseline “normal” rather than being seen as something that might confer an advantage.

So the next time you talk to someone about DEI issues, be cognizant that most people born in the US have privileges that most other people in the world don’t have.  Accept that other people will see the privileges you have much more clearly than you do, and realize that the privileges other people have that you don’t have may not be clear to them.  Do that and you can get past the initial discussion and start hearing about the real DEI issues that are important to people.

[JoeWeber 2,297]

6 hours ago, billvon said:

Another long ass post, this one about privilege.  It's something I've been talking about with several friends of mine, and I wanted to get some thoughts on paper (or pixels or whatever.)

Privilege is something that is close to the center of many of the discussions society has been having lately about race, and gender, and sexual orientation.  And there is no topic that is so divisive - as John Scalzi notes, mention the word privilege and some people “react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon.”

Often when you talk to people about privilege, their first response is defensive. They often try to redefine the word so as to not include themselves in what they consider to be an odious bracket.  You hear things like "I'm not privileged!  I worked for everything I got!"

But that's not what privilege is.  It does not mean "you are successful only because of what people gave you."  Privilege refers to the benefit you get by virtue of your race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or family/community connections, or nationality, or natural abilities.  It sets the starting point, not the end, of anyone's progress through life.  Scalzi uses a good analogy – it’s like playing an online game on the easiest setting, whereas other people have to play on a harder setting.  It doesn’t mean you (or they) are poor players, and it doesn’t mean you are evil.  It just means that the “game” starts out easier for you.

I understand the feeling of having to defend yourself, though, because I used to do the same thing.  I had stories that showed just how un-privileged I was, because I wanted to make it clear that I was successful all on my own, that I (and no one else) was responsible for my successes in life.  One of my go-to stories was the story of how I made my last tuition payment with nickels and dimes.  I was working three jobs by the end of my college career, trying to make that last payment in time to graduate; one of them was running the local laundromat.  And since I couldn't wait three weeks for my last paycheck, they let me take it in change, because that would let me meet the deadline at the cashier's office.  And so I showed up there with trays and trays of change, carrying just enough to pay my final bill and graduate with my class.  That's not the story of someone privileged, right?  Privileged people don't have to (literally) scrape nickels and dimes together just to graduate!

What that story misses, of course, is that I was doing that at the best engineering school in the country.  And that I had made it into that school because of a whole host of factors, like my birthplace, who my parents were and what community I was raised in.  Those connections had a lot to do with my earlier success in school, success that led me to MIT.

I had another story from my college days that I used to tell which demonstrates how unconscious that privilege was for me.  During the setup for a dorm party one day, a friend and I heard someone screaming outside.  We opened the door - and there, at the top of the stairs, was a couple being mugged.  My friend and I took off after the thief.  He threw the purse away within 100 yards, but we kept after him, because we didn't want a mugger roaming around our campus.  We chased him into a copse of trees at the end of campus.  He ran out the other side, with me to the side of him, still trying to pace him.  That was a big mistake on his part, because the other side of the road was the jurisdiction of the Cambridge police, and they were ready for him with weapons out.

Another story of how I wasn't privileged - because privileged people don't have to chase muggers in their schools, right?  They have people for that.  But looking back, I thought nothing of running out of a clump of trees towards cops with their guns out.  Because the mugger was black and I was white, and I knew they'd be able to tell who was the mugger.  And that was a decision on a completely unconscious level, because I grew up in an environment where the police were on my side.

The desire to be seen as unprivileged is, I think, a somewhat recent development in historical terms.  When we look back at the popular entertainment in the time of Shakespeare the heroes were all privileged members of society.  Kings, princes, the children of powerful families, wealthy merchants.  I think this is because back then, underprivileged people didn't just get low-paying, thankless jobs, or get hassled by the cops - they died of starvation, and often had to watch their families starve.  No one wanted that, and no one wanted to be associated with that.

For the past few hundred years, though, society has reached the point where starvation has become less of an issue.  And as that has happened, our heroes have gradually become the people who overcame great odds and succeeded anyway.  Harry Potter, a penniless orphan who goes on to defeat the big evil.   Luke Skywalker, who not only starts out as a poor orphan farmboy, but later discovers that he has a father who is literally the worst guy in the galaxy - and he still overcomes all that and wins the day.

And perhaps no hero story is as indicative of our current view of privilege than the story of Tony Stark, a rich military contractor, who cannot become the hero Iron Man until all that is taken away from him by terrorists who kidnap him and hold him prisoner in a cave.  Only then, when he loses all that privilege, can we see his story as heroic.

It’s no wonder, then, that we want to see ourselves as without privilege.  We want to be like the heroes our society (and our media) portray.  And often that is completely unconscious; few people think “I want to be just like Iron Man” but we pick up the underlying message nonetheless.

This sense of “privilege as an insult” can lead to unintentional gaslighting of minorities, women, LGBT people and disabled people – because when a wealthy white man tells a minority woman “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I didn’t get any benefits that you didn’t” he’s telling her that she’s crazy and she doesn’t understand reality.  And there’s really nowhere to go from there; any real discussion ends, because you can’t have a rational conversation with someone who thinks you are crazy.

I think it’s critical that we accept that some people in society have privileges over others.  That doesn’t mean they are inherently lazy, or biased, or bigoted, and it doesn’t mean they didn’t work for what they got.  But it’s simply a fact that some segments of society have privileges that others don’t.  Some of that comes out of the structural racism/homophobia/bigotry in our society, which has developed over centuries for a host of historical reasons.  Some of this is based in our own biology – homophily is something we evolved as a protective mechanism, and it makes us see someone familiar as someone of “our tribe” and inherently more trustworthy than someone with a different appearance, accent or presentation.  But whatever the source, it’s real, and a great many people in the world have to live with it.

This can be very hard to see (as it was for me.)  We all choose the company we keep, and it’s easy to join a community of like-minded people within which almost no one has a dramatically different amount of privilege than anyone else.  And that can make it look like no one in that group has much privilege, because we tend to see differences, not commonalities.  The things common to the group – race, socioeconomic status, citizenship - become the baseline “normal” rather than being seen as something that might confer an advantage.

So the next time you talk to someone about DEI issues, be cognizant that most people born in the US have privileges that most other people in the world don’t have.  Accept that other people will see the privileges you have much more clearly than you do, and realize that the privileges other people have that you don’t have may not be clear to them.  Do that and you can get past the initial discussion and start hearing about the real DEI issues that are important to people.

Well stated, thank you. Sadly, I fear the majority of those who would benefit from a close reading of your post view privilege as the simple, natural order of things not as something in need of recognition and understanding. Such efforts would be unnecessary expenses of time that could never yield them benefit in the here and now.

[wmw999 2,120]

Nailed it in many ways. 
Everyone has, to go with those privileges, challenges — some of them societal/institutional, some familial, and some individual. They don’t negate each other. 
Wendy P. 

[BIGUN 1,051]

6 hours ago, billvon said:

So the next time you talk to someone about DEI issues, be cognizant that most people born in the US have privileges that most other people in the world don’t have.  Accept that other people will see the privileges you have much more clearly than you do, and realize that the privileges other people have that you don’t have may not be clear to them.  Do that and you can get past the initial discussion and start hearing about the real DEI issues that are important to people.

If there were no such thing as privilege, the word wouldn't exist. When you first started talking about, "Homophily," it was a throwback to undergrad school and is part of the curriculum for both inter and intra-personal communication.  Privilege is real. I "think" the issue most people have is when you throw "white" in front of it. Since we're sharing; allow me to share a moment of "awakening." 

Learning of homophily in college caused me to reflect on an instance in Central America.

1. When first in country; I would go to El Centro in the evenings. It was a great place to learn about the people, the culture, etc. But, I just simply enjoyed it. It took me to a different place and time of which I was jealous - a simpler life. As the evening progressed and the crowd waned, mid-teenage girls would come over and touch my arm and drag their fingers across it as they moved on.  Their mothers would look at me with a sense of affection.

That night, I had a discussion with Carlos; A Hispanic operative born in Central America, raised in southern Florida and who had been assigned as my interpreter. I asked him what the fuck is up with these little girls touching my arm like that while their mothers watch - and even more importantly what happens when the fathers show up. Carlos went on to explain that there is a social hierarchy. "You'll notice that most of the girls touching you are darker. If you were to have children with them; their children would be born with lighter skin and move up in the social hierarchy." I think it was the first time I had an awareness of just being white and nothing else, not rich, nothing - just white.             

[kallend 1,623]

9 hours ago, billvon said:

Another long ass post, this one about privilege. 

. . . .

Here's my short ass post about privilege.

I came from a working class family in south east London who had no family history of significant education.  My dad left school at 14 and my mother at 13.  Walking to school (no school buses or Moms with minivans back then) we walked passed bombed out houses and buildings from the Blitz and V1/V2 attacks.

 

My privilege was a government that realized the value of education for anyone who could benefit.  Our physics teachers had real degrees in physics, our chemistry teachers had degrees in chemistry, our mathematics teachers had degrees in mathematics.  I qualified for a full scholarship to Cambridge paid by the government - no way my parents could have afforded it.  I then qualified for a full scholarship for my PhD paid by the government.  This policy was, of course, pretty much discontinued by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

It makes me sad that so many kids in the USA fail to meet their potential because of penny-pinching governments driven by short sighted voters who only value tax reductions, that deny young people an opportunity to have an education worthy of their abilities.

 

[Phil1111 910]

Privilege is difficult to understand until you travel or understand immigrants and what they have gone through.

[gowlerk 1,905]

My personal privilege is simply to just be able to more or less coast through life comfortably with little ambition and minimal effort to improve myself. All because I was born into a country and a part of society where the living is pretty damned easy. When i got bored I stumbled into skydiving and all the rewarding relationships it has brought me. I am the second laziest man I know, yet I am surrounded most of the trappings of family life and possessions that are the important things. I grew up in a working class family who provided me with a wonderful childhood, I wasted my teen years in indulgences, I threw away my chance at education, yet here I sit fat and happy. Oh, what a lucky man I am.  

[brenthutch 383]

The privilege that has most profoundly impacted my life, it the privilege of delayed gratification.  

[JoeWeber 2,297]

16 minutes ago, brenthutch said:

The privilege that has most profoundly impacted my life, it the privilege of delayed gratification.  

You're an edger?

[wmw999 2,120]

28 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

You're an edger?

He said gratification, not grassification. 
Wendy P. 

[wolfriverjoe 1,340]

5 minutes ago, wmw999 said:

He said gratification, not grassification. 
Wendy P. 

Different kind of 'edger'.

 

[JoeWeber 2,297]

1 hour ago, wolfriverjoe said:

Different kind of 'edger'.

 

Some folks just love denial.

[billvon 2,395]

4 hours ago, BIGUN said:

As the evening progressed and the crowd waned, mid-teenage girls would come over and touch my arm and drag their fingers across it as they moved on.  Their mothers would look at me with a sense of affection.

In Thailand at the World Team events, there were always a crowd of young women dressed to the 9's at the landing area, and occasionally one would try to talk to the (mostly white, mostly male) jumpers.  A friend of mine had a woman give him a note that said something like "you are a strong, confident man, I would like to talk to you" with a phone number.  Another guy got injured, spent about a month in the hospital there - and wound up married.

I didn't talk to them directly, but a friend did and he said something like "they see this as their ticket out.  A bunch of rich white Westerners who are only here for two weeks and are then going back to the US or Europe or wherever."  And when I looked around I didn't see rich people.  (Eli?  Darryld?  The _packers_?)  But of course these were people who could afford to fly halfway across the world and spend two weeks skydiving for no benefit other than a place in the history books.

Another case where it's hard to see your privilege until you look at it through someone else's eyes.

[billvon 2,395]

4 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

Some folks just love denial.

And some folks don't even see it as denial; they honestly think they don't have any advantages over other people, for the reasons I listed above.

Scalzi posted a piece on this (link below) and then got a LOT of comments on it.  They were grouped into a few categories::

No that's not what privilege is and here's my definition which makes me look better.  We just saw an example of that right here in this thread.

You should have included wealth/class.  It is certainly true that those things can give you advantages.  But in his analogy, those are more akin to what character you end up with in a dungeon-crawl type game.  Does your character have high intelligence?  Great, that makes things easier.  High charisma?  You have a great future as an actor or an "influencer."  But you are already playing on an easier setting.

I'm a straight white guy and my life sucks so I don't have privilege!  Yep, there are always examples of people who do unusually poorly (or well.)  Doesn't change the fundamental premise.

Affirmative action proves that straight white males don't have privilege!  As Scalzi mentions, the very fact that we have a program to try to combat systemic racism in the US sort of proves that the problem exists.

Talking about privlege is sexist and racist and is an attack on white straight men!  This starts to get at the heart of the issue, which is that many straight white men are very threatened by the idea that they have some inherent advantage over others - and that's what I was trying to address above.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

[JoeWeber 2,297]

18 minutes ago, billvon said:

And some folks don't even see it as denial; they honestly think they don't have any advantages over other people, for the reasons I listed above.

Scalzi posted a piece on this (link below) and then got a LOT of comments on it.  They were grouped into a few categories::

No that's not what privilege is and here's my definition which makes me look better.  We just saw an example of that right here in this thread.

You should have included wealth/class.  It is certainly true that those things can give you advantages.  But in his analogy, those are more akin to what character you end up with in a dungeon-crawl type game.  Does your character have high intelligence?  Great, that makes things easier.  High charisma?  You have a great future as an actor or an "influencer."  But you are already playing on an easier setting.

I'm a straight white guy and my life sucks so I don't have privilege!  Yep, there are always examples of people who do unusually poorly (or well.)  Doesn't change the fundamental premise.

Affirmative action proves that straight white males don't have privilege!  As Scalzi mentions, the very fact that we have a program to try to combat systemic racism in the US sort of proves that the problem exists.

Talking about privlege is sexist and racist and is an attack on white straight men!  This starts to get at the heart of the issue, which is that many straight white men are very threatened by the idea that they have some inherent advantage over others - and that's what I was trying to address above.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

As someone who has struggled mightily to screw up as much as possible and came from a family that didn't have money or education I never gave privilege a passing thought. It wasn't until someone came along and explained that I wasn't the F-up I seemed to be and gave me a chance, a lot of mentoring, and expressed confidence in me that I discovered I had a couple of interesting knacks. From then on everything started going easier. It has never been lost on me that without that help things may well have worked out very differently. I am keenly aware of how privileged I am.

[JerryBaumchen 1,047]

6 hours ago, kallend said:

Here's my short ass post about privilege.

I came from a working class family in south east London who had no family history of significant education.  My dad left school at 14 and my mother at 13.  Walking to school (no school buses or Moms with minivans back then) we walked passed bombed out houses and buildings from the Blitz and V1/V2 attacks.

 

My privilege was a government that realized the value of education for anyone who could benefit.  Our physics teachers had real degrees in physics, our chemistry teachers had degrees in chemistry, our mathematics teachers had degrees in mathematics.  I qualified for a full scholarship to Cambridge paid by the government - no way my parents could have afforded it.  I then qualified for a full scholarship for my PhD paid by the government.  This policy was, of course, pretty much discontinued by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

It makes me sad that so many kids in the USA fail to meet their potential because of penny-pinching governments driven by short sighted voters who only value tax reductions, that deny young people an opportunity to have an education worthy of their abilities.

 

Hi John,

Re:  Here's my short ass post about privilege.

OK, here's mine.  I was born in 1940; so my youthful years were the 40's & 50's.  Privilege was ( while we did not know it then ) :  Free, white & over 21.  Some of you may remember that term.

As I look back up my family tree, I am the first to ever graduate from college. Looking back at the guys I ran around with in grade school/high school, I am the only one with a college education.  There are times when I wonder, 'Why did I do it?'

Probably, as I have mentioned, I did not want to end up on the wrong end of a shovel.  That means I abhor manual labor.  One other major factor is that at 19, I enlisted in the military ( three yrs, 10 months & 24 days; but who's counting? ).  The military provided me the maturity to do something in life.

The most influential person in my life was my maternal grandmother.  She loved reading; and until her dying days, could carry on a decent discussion of the news of the world.  From her, I got my love of reading.   Additionally, probably because of her is why I post here.

While I never was smart enough to get a scholarship, I did get the GI Bill ( every little bit helped ); and once got a $50 scholarship because of my grades in college.

Like Bill V, I have been privileged to have been born white and in this country.  I do not take these things for granted.  I have been fortunate and I am thankful for that.

I believe that no matter what job you have, be the best that you can be at it.  I ( now ) believe that tuition at a community/junior college should be free.  As long as one keeps their grades up.  This country still needs good, skilled trades workers.

I often think about how I struggled to get the money to keep going to college.  For the most part, it was that I simply refused to quit.  However, my success also made it so that I could provide my children with their college educations, at no cost to them.  I even paid for my son's three years of law school.  For this, I am also grateful.

I am a strong believer in going as far as you can in education.  So far, I have given nearly $100,000 to each of my two grandchildren's college funds.  To be able to do this, I am also grateful.

Life has been good to me.  When you walk up to my front door to ring the doorbell, you will see the photo attached.

Jerry Baumchen

 

[SkyDekker 1,121]

On 5/22/2021 at 8:39 PM, billvon said:

Another long ass post, this one about privilege. 

Like Kallend, I will follow with a short one. I have addressed this issue before on here. There is no doubt I would not be where I am without the privilege I have enjoyed along the way.

If only I had realized earlier in my life how incredibly privileged I was, I could have done more.