Author Topic: My Objection to the Objection to the Privileged  (Read 752 times)

Lord J Esq

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My Objection to the Objection to the Privileged
« on: December 01, 2011, 06:49:49 am »
This topic didn't seem to be a fit for other threads, so I'm creating this specialized thread for it. I wrote this for another venue, but am posting it at the Compendium mainly because I think several of you would benefit from reading it.

~~~

One of the ideas in contemporary progressivism which has gained considerable popularity is the notion of privilege, a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available to one group of people to the exclusion of other groups. I based that wording on the dictionary definition, because I know there will be those who object to everything that follows on the grounds that they don’t like my exact definition. I can’t satisfy people who decide in advance they want to agree with something, and then look after the fact for places to base their disagreement, but, for everyone else, a crisp denotation surely won’t hurt. However, regardless of my wording, when I say “privilege” you probably know what I mean.

Privilege is not the counterpart to the idea of underprivilege. The ambiguity results from the use of the same root word for two related but distinct concepts. Being underprivileged means that a person lacks some combination of the basic material needs of life and the civil liberties and economic opportunities necessary to lead a free and fulfilling life. There is nothing wrong with being “privileged” when we are talking about not being underprivileged.

Rather, privilege in the sense people usually mean it refers to the injustice which results when people are unaware of an injustice because they are privileged not to be subject to the prejudice which breeds it.

This form of privilege also is not an inherently bad thing. You can think of it as “not being the target of discrimination.” That is a state we should all aspire to enjoy! Rather than being inherently bad, privilege causes bad things. It causes bad things because, when people act out of the ignorance that comes with privilege, they often contribute to the injustice at hand. For example, if, as a result of male privilege, a male disparages the efforts of feminist to achieve sexual equality, then his privilege has caused him to support the continuance of sexism in the world.

The concept of privilege is an important one. We are all privileged in various ways, and would do well to identify it in ourselves and guard against the bias that ordinarily comes with it. It is also important to apprise others when they are behaving inappropriately as a result of privilege, or even when they are not behaving inappropriately but simply display the bias of privilege in their thinking.

If this were the end of it, there would be nothing amiss. But too many people abuse the concept of privilege, and turn it into a cudgel which itself creates more injustice. Worse, these people are usually the victims of privilege.

This is where the rocky road begins.

Consider the following assertion from Sparky, a gay male, posted in his objection to the privileged on Womanist Musings in 2010:

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If you are privileged, then you don't understand

That’s his opening paragraph. Right here is the crux of a fallacy which Sparky eventually develops into a dreadful conclusion. Now, to be sure, it isn’t the case that if you are privileged, you do understand. You might understand, but privilege has an obscuring effect on understanding, especially to the ill-informed, and the result is that being privileged makes it harder for a person to understand the nature of the injustice in question. (Privilege can also help a person to understand that injustice, which I will address later.)

Sparky could have made the perfect argument by saying that privilege can make it harder to understand the relevant injustice. But he didn’t. He said you don’t understand, period. And, lest you claim I am picking nits, he reiterated his point in no uncertain terms:

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Being privileged makes you ignorant. Not only does it make you ignorant - it makes you IRREVERSIBLY ignorant. When you are privileged, there are some things you simply cannot understand - no matter how much research, how much effort and how much work you put into this. The mere presence of privilege makes it impossible to understand some of the aspects of marginalisation. No matter how much of an ally you are - it doesn't mean you are not privileged and it certainly doesn't mean you are immune to privileged ignorance.

There is no room for doubt, here. Sparky thinks that privilege creates an insurmountable ignorance—and there are enough people who share his view that it has begun to corrupt the progressive movement’s efforts at social justice.

I remember this same problem from about ten years ago. I was in college at the time, and in those days it was the concept of diversity that was being abused. Prominent progressives were openly calling for discrimination against certain groups of people to benefit other groups—usually in terms of skin color. It was untenable. The dream of a more just society was falling prey to an escalation of the social strife that mars our present day...and all for the sake of fighting bigotry with more bigotry. The conservatives caught wind of this and used it to argue against progressive policies, and they enjoyed some success.

Eventually the diversity bigots abandoned ship, only to regroup years later as the privilege bigots. I think they are made up of many of the same people, and in any case they follow the same tradition of needlessly and destructively pitting groups of people against one another in the name of social progress. Whatever label they choose to wear, these people are enemies of progressivism, and they are not the ones who are achieving a more just society.

It would be uncontroversial to raise that accusation of a privileged person, but, in this climate, to stand on the political left and accuse the oppressed and downtrodden of bigotry is firecracker stuff. It will get you exiled from many liberal circles on the spot. Most people don’t dare touch it. Yet the problem is growing more serious, and the fact remains that bigotry is never acceptable, even from the victims of earlier bigotry.

Seriously, bigotry is never acceptable. That is just not how we move toward a better society. I find it embarrassing and outrageous that people who claim to cherish the pursuit of a better world would seek to dehumanize the privileged. It might be different if there were some legitimate socioeconomic structures underneath “the privileged.” For instance, the “1 percent” control much of the country’s wealth and effectively live in a different world, above the law. Christian fundamentalists actively seek to destroy our way of life as we know it. We can say some very critical things about these groups of people because the members of those groups share enough in common that some carefully constructed generalizations will accurately describe essentially all of the members of the group. But males? White people? English-speakers? Straights? The able-bodied? Skinny folks? Christians? You can’t take such broad divisions of humanity and derive a lot of useful information about them.

“Privilege” doesn’t tell you much about a generic privileged person, except that they are privileged not to be subject to a given prejudice and the injustice which follows from it. “Privilege” does not tell you if that person is stupid, or malicious, or, more to the point, an incapable ally. Some privileged people, sometimes even by the very fact of their privilege, can understand that injustice as well as those who suffer from it directly—for they are spared from the assault of the discrimination and have a better opportunity to collect themselves, whereas the victims of prejudice may have to spend much more of their time and energy just to get by. Thus, privilege brings more than just a predisposition to ignorance. It brings an opportunity to organize. As such, the privileged can do as much or more to put a stop to the injustice than those who are not privileged. With the right combination of passion, awareness, intelligence, and zeal, a privileged person can equal any non-privileged person in understanding and combating the prejudice at hand.

In other words, there is no meaningful difference between the privileged and the non-privileged when it comes to the pursuit of the justice. Situational factors, by far, dominate the question of whether a given person can come to understand and oppose the injustice in our society.

Perhaps it is my scientific outlook on the world which makes this so obvious to me. If somebody declares that I cannot know a thing, I naturally seek to understand what causes that obstruction, and, if I so desire, I will make the effort to clear that obstruction. There are relatively few physical phenomena in the world that we are capable of identifying but incapable of understanding. So, then, when Sparky says that privilege means a person has no way of coming to understand a related injustice, what is his basis for such an audacious claim?

Anecdotes. That’s his basis.

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I had a moment of panic. I checked my reflection in a nearby shop window to see if I had somehow sprouted rainbows or some other clear sign of gayness, tucked my hair into my jacket and hurried back to the office to come to my senses - and to wallow in shame at succumbing to the instinct to hide yet again.

I discussed this with my friend, a straight ally. And he told me how foolish I was and how silly gay people were to hide. He told me at great length how he thought homophobia would end tomorrow if all closeted gay people were to come out and reminded me repeatedly that I had sworn not to hide anymore and how stupid it was to be scared all the time.

That “straight ally” of his was dismissive of Sparky’s panic attack at the thought of being a member of a persecuted class of society, and Sparky was right to be upset with him and had every reason to call him out on it.

He also gave another anecdote:

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In another incident, I was discussing various marginalisations and was told, "you're ok, gay people can hide." In one simple sentence, the whole destructive and toxic element of the closet was glossed over and ignored - even lauded as a good thing. The endless lies and acting, the repression and self-hate, the legacy of trying to "change" gays were all happily brushed away.

This other person was dismissive in the same way, but to the opposite extreme. And, again, Sparky was right to be upset and to criticize.

And that’s it. That’s his whole stated basis for “being privileged makes you irreversibly ignorant.” Those two people have done it in for all straight allies of queer folk. Well, of course, those are just two examples he picked. There are probably more. But, even with 100 examples, the fallacy remains. You can’t just pick out examples of people who fit your claim.

It would have been so easy, and so appropriate, for Sparky to point out that privilege often promotes this kind of ignorance. Many privileged people, probably even the vast majority of them the vast majority of the time, are ignorant of the ill-effects of the injustice to which they are privileged not to be subject. Yet Sparky was adamant that privilege not only always causes ignorance, but that the ignorance is innately inescapable.

The distinction here may be subtle at first glance, but it’s damning. This is a person who has declared his unwillingness to listen. This is a hateful person who prejudicially dismisses the value and contributions of a group of people. He doesn’t want “allies,” unless their only role is to defer to him. He feels that he is alone and that no one who has not shared his suffering can truly be with him. Once again I am not even being deductive. He says it himself:

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My point is that this ignorance is important and no matter how much of a friend you are, how intense an ally or how hard you try - that ignorance will remain. And that's not a bad thing, but it means that you will always be an outsider and never truly get it
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Listen more than you talk and follow, do not lead.

This is the exasperation of someone who expects no help from his “allies,” someone who was offended enough at them that he condemned all queer allies. This is the embitterment of an individual who has been wronged badly enough that he expects to be wronged again by anyone who isn’t in his own shoes. This is somebody who has been broken.

I regret to single him out, because it isn’t about Sparky in particular. It is about the entirety of this group of individuals who have become bigots against the privileged. It is about the needlessness and wastefulness of fomenting enmity and antipathy between groups of people who should be helping each other to achieve a common goal, justice. And it is is about my personal opposition to bigotry no matter where it comes from.

The truth of the matter is that there is no reason that a privileged person cannot come to understand the injustice from which their privilege shields them. The only exclusion we can possibly make is that there is no substitute for the emotional context of personally experiencing an injustice. Only those who are in some way subject to the injustice can know what that feels like. But the injustice itself is a knowable quantity, as are the interests of the people caught up in it.

Sparky blames the privileged for a lot, but his real enemy is something he apparently doesn’t realize. Most “allies” are not worth much—most people are not worth much—when it comes to opposing an entrenched social prejudice. The prejudice runs so deeply, and many humans are so quick to embrace ignorance, that the majority even of those who recognize the problem don’t really understand it. And that includes the victims themselves, the non-privileged. Suffering does not inherently convey understanding. It conveys experience, and that certainly helps, but it flatly is not true that experience of a thing necessarily conveys an understanding of that thing—any more than it is true that not experiencing a thing necessarily denies an understanding of it. These absolutes do not account for the variables which determine comprehension.

So throw them away.

Fortunately for me—and hopefully for you—my pursuit of social justice does not depend on the permission of the victims of injustice, or anyone else for that matter. I pursue what I pursue out of my own ethical convictions. Some of the victims of prejudice are as wretched as the perpetrators of it, and as hateful and ignorant, Sparky included. The victims of injustice can be nasty people as readily as anyone else, and non-privilege by itself does not grant you a single virtue of character. No, my pursuit of justice is not for the victims-turned-bigots, but for all people, including them.

To many people, even among those who are not bigots, it is so very emotionally satisfying to blame privileged people not just for being poor allies, but for the very prejudice itself. I recognize that this blame has to be transferable if many of you are going to take me seriously. “If we can’t blame the privileged, then who?” I will tell you who: Blame the people not who are predisposed to ignorance, but who embrace it even when they are given the opportunity to do otherwise. Blame the people who actually take pleasure in oppressing other groups, or who are so beholden to their ignorance that they cannot help but do evil works and cause suffering. Do not blame those who are fortunate enough not to be the victims of a given prejudice, simply because they are fortunate enough not to be the victims of a given prejudice—and do not dismiss the means and desire among some of those people to help fight against the prejudice.

The purpose of this essay is to give voice, perspective, and instruction to those who are feeling increasingly uncomfortable at the unacceptable behavior of those who wield privileged people’s status as a cudgel against them. I write it not just for the benefit of privileged people, but for that of non-privileged people as well, for we are all both privileged and non-privileged in some way or another. Take me. I may be a male—very privileged indeed—but I’m also a humanist—despised and repressed by the religious majority. I may be white—very privileged indeed—but I’m poor—and poverty is grueling. I may be straight—very privileged indeed—but I like fat people and would prefer to be fatter myself—even when many folks consider fat people to be something less than human. I may be well-educated—very privileged indeed—but I also have a physical disability that limits the use of my leg—which I get to remember every time I walk down a ramp or down a set of stairs. Some injustices I know more personally than others...but I am interested in eradicating them all.

However, do not think it acceptable to use this criticism of privilege bigots as a shield to defend your own inappropriate behaviors and thoughts. If you are privileged, you must always be vigilant against the ignorance to which you are predisposed, and it is extremely difficult to achieve anything productive by criticizing people who already have so much going against them. I write this essay for the very specific purpose of dividing the privilege bigots and their hurtful goals apart from the efforts of other people, privileged and not privileged, to oppose the injustices which torment our world. It is not to become your excuse to be insensitive or self-righteous.

That said, I conclude with an affirmation: It is okay to be privileged. Indeed, that is the status we are pursuing for all people. Privilege does not make you ignorant. It predisposes you to ignorance, and you must be on guard against that risk. Privilege does not make you an outsider. It gives you the special opportunity and perhaps even responsibility to use your state of relief from the prejudice at hand to oppose that prejudice through your privileged means. Privilege does not make you a bad person. It makes you a fortunate one.

Privilege does not deny you the right to be an ally to any cause of your choosing, even if some of the people in that cause refuse to accept you.

FaustWolf

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Re: My Objection to the Objection to the Privileged
« Reply #1 on: December 01, 2011, 10:12:36 pm »
J, thanks for this post, and especially the in-depth treatment of the topic.

I will say that I found my own encounter with this kind of push-back quite useful on a personal level. It helped me (properly, I think) frame what the goal really should be: not eliminating privilege, but extending privilege to everyone, and it seems we're of like mind on that point.

For me to really arrive at this conclusion, though, I had to step into an environment where I could get a teeny, tiny glimpse of what it's like to "check your privilege in at the door." Approaching that boundary...the only thing I can liken it to is being one of those levitating frogs, where the very most basic rules and techniques I could stand on all my life suddenly vanished. To think that blacks, women, fat people, gays, and other underprivileged groups have had to actually learn how to make do with that lack of gravity from day one, and live with it every moment -- the thought of it just turns my stomach in knots, even with my incomplete frame of reference. And the fact that I use this kind of language to begin with reveals that there's a strong emotional component to my own learning process; you can consider it one anecdote, but perhaps there's a grain of usefulness in it if I'm not the only one who's learned effectively this way.

So in that sense, I can see where a nice kick in the ass can help get some allies further into shape. I'd still be talking in terms of "eliminating privilege," something that doesn't make quite as much sense after having had that encounter.

But that's still separate from the question of how an ally's energy can be worked into a movement, and I also lament that some would prefer to shut an ally's enthusiasm down on principle rather than employ it. One reason why I say this is that I think there's always something new to be learned by actively engaging with a community devoted to a social movement. Once an ally is rejected, that learning process is stunted for lack of the one-on-one discussion. On the other hand, allies do enjoy a big consolation prize -- we can help serve the movement from the platforms that privilege gives us. We can engage with our peers on these issues and be taken seriously, and at that point we can have an impact for the better, even with Sparky's misgivings duly noted. Just hoping like hell allies who do this, myself included, have been able to engage enough with the wider community to be on the right track! And it also helps that we have other allies to engage with.

I suspect the assumption of a zero-sum game within the movement is part of what underlies this kind of push-back; for every white male voice that contributes to a discussion, a black female voice must be silenced. I so want to disagree with that and propose that everyone's energy should be whipped together into a giant social movement frenzy...but then again, I do have to reflect on how many young women's voices I may have inadvertendly silenced in high school and college for being so damn aggressive in class discussions. That's always in the back of my mind nowadays, and the reason why I'm a little hesitant to argue much when I come across people with Sparky's leanings. I am in possession of privilege and a rather loud voice already; I've made my peace with the idea of using those things to effect change as best I can on my own and together with fellow allies, even if I haven't gained explicit approval from the underprivileged to do so.
« Last Edit: December 01, 2011, 11:36:15 pm by FaustWolf »