I think that’s true because I don’t think the meme of him just sitting alone apparently sulking would have taken off if he had been wearing formalwear. We might be laughing with him, or at him, or a mixture of both, but there’s still an element of lightheartedly poking fun at his outfit in there.
If the claim is that Bernie benefited from white privilege in this case, what would the absence of white privilege look like? Would he still be mocked and made into a meme, but with more sinister undertones?
I have no doubt white privilege exists. And I have no doubt that white privilege can manifest through modes of acceptable dress. I’m just not seeing it here.
I never got the feeling of derision in the memification of the photo, more of harmless amusement with the guy who is doing his own thing. Nobody with any gravitas has suggested Bernie apologize to the Bidens.
Personally, I think this is less white privilege than it is male and status privilege. There were other people at the event, many of them white, who would have been thought less of if they had dressed for the weather rather than the occasion. Nobody is downgrading Bernie in their minds because of the way he dressed.
I think it’s a lot easier to make an argument for white privilege when you’re looking on a macro scale. If you examine the stop and frisk program employed by the NYPD you can quite clearly see that African Americans and Latinos were much more likely to be stopped than whites. If you look at participants in the GI Plan after World War II, you can quite clearly see that black soldiers were unable to take advantage of it as often as white soldiers. And you can see a similar trend when it comes to education, home loans, and many other areas.
When you’re looking on the micro level it’s more difficult to demonstrate privilege. Especially when we’re talking about an event like the inauguration of the president of the United States where almost everyone up there regardless of race or gender is either elite or connected to the elite somehow.
I think it’s more useful to look at it in terms of maleness. No one who cast aspersions on Obama for wearing a tan suit would be swayed by dubbing this “white privilege”, whereas there are probably still people from all points of view who scrutinize women’s clothing more closely than mens.
I think it’s a status thing too, partially. Increasingly a suit is something you wear because you have to, for instance at a trial or funeral, and people who don’t wear a suit on formal occasions even when most others are are declaring that they are so powerful they don’t have to follow convention. If I had been there, I would have been wearing a formal overcoat rather than a parka, or a formal overcoat over my parka if it were cold enough. I’d also choose gloves instead of mittens, although I can understand it if he wore them due to their provenance.
But that’s just because I like the way an overcoat looks, as opposed to a business suit. I am not going cast aspersions on people who choose not to do so, because even if I choose to dress more formally, I dislike the social expectation of it, partly because it does remind me of occasions that aren’t very much fun, partly because I’m bad at tying a tie.
It’s astounding to me that a thread about an old man’s mittens has reached nearly two hundred posts. Here, I’ll explain what happened in one sentence that anyone can understand:
Bernie got a pass on the mittens because he’s Bernie, and young people (who, by and large, are the ones who make and disseminate memes) like him.
There. That’s it. Nothing to do with race. Nothing to do with gender. Nothing to do with privilege. Nothing to do with anything.
Honestly…
Those are not examples of White privilege. Those are examples of outright racism.
Couple of things:
First, I want to say (again) that I don’t think that Senator Sanders’ attire was a manifestation of white privilege, or male privilege, or senatorial privilege, or anything. He was dressed not that differently from any number of people at the inauguration. Certainly it’s true that anyone who was seated at the event, or even standing in the enclosed area (as opposed to witnessing the event from the mall) is privileged in one way or another, and the Senate has been described as the most exclusive club in the world. But all things considered, there’s nothing going on here. Even the mittens – politicians have long worn things like that. They love to say “this scarf was knitted by one of my constituents, a hard-working single mom farmer, and I wear it to remind me of why I’m here in Washington,” and stuff like that. It might even be true in some case. This whole thing is a huge nothing, started by one keyboard warrior, who achieved what I believe was her goal – to establish her credentials as a, well, whatever she thinks she is.
Okay. That said, yes, there is such a thing as sartorial white male privilege. I see it almost every day. I’ve worked in the mega-law firms (meaning firms with well over 2,000 lawyers) for years and years. You know who can get away with sloppy, casual, even sometimes eccentric, attire? Partners with millions of dollars every year in billings, that’s who. Associates can’t. Partners with less status can’t. But some partner with $15 million in billings can, say, have a little ponytail (usually entertainment lawyers). Or refuse to wear suits. And those partners are usually white men. Or at least white men and women (there are a lot more women partners today than there were thirty years ago). My personal observation is that I haven’t seen the women go the eccentric route as much as the men (they usually seem to go for the shockingly expensive clothes route, but that’s a whole other discussion). Make of that what you will.
And I remember the days when Black women lawyers were “encouraged” to have their hair straightened, and locks and braids (not sure I have the terminology right, but hopefully you know what I mean) were right out of the question. Same for Black men, but it was probably easier on the men than the women, since these days just keeping one’s hair very short seems to be in style for Black men. So even for those affected by white privilege, there’s still (arguably) male privilege.
So, sure, privilege of various kinds can be expressed in clothing.
But I don’t think, in this case, that Bernie was doing that, consciously or unconsciously. I just don’t see it. I really, really don’t think it’s there.
In a former career we had a saying: if you show up for the meeting and everybody save for one is wearing a suit … and that other guy is wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and flip-flops … he’s the one who has money.
Fake it 'til you make it.
I think if a woman beloved by Millennials and Zoomers showed up in a frumpy coat or otherwise flauted decorum, they might not memeify her, but they’d definitely fawn all over her in a similar way. With the extra justification that her choice of apparel was a bold feminist act.
She would definitely get more criticism on the right, though.
I really don’t think it had anything to do with race. If anything it was privilege related to his age and position, and gender to a lesser degree.
I’ll admit our culture is hypercritical of women’s clothing choices but most often it seems to be other women doing the criticizing.
While I don’t think it’s particularly edifying to engage in endless nitpicking of how the Bernie Sanders phenomenon is affected by various kinds of privilege, it’s absurdly naive to say it has nothing to do with privilege. Bernie “being Bernie”, and young people “liking him”, are things that are innately influenced by privilege, and there’s no way to magically separate them from privilege.
“It’s got nothing to do with privilege” is apparently the current generation’s version of “I don’t see color”. Both are aspirational rather than realistic statements, admirable in principle but delusional in practice.
I have a disabled friend who shot back that the teacher criticizing Bernie was guilty of abelism because she was attacking an elderly man with a heart condition.
I mean, you’re not entirely wrong. It should come to no surprise that racism and privilege are closely related. What social privilege theory allows us to do is examine these dynamics from the point of view of who benefits rather than simply looking it it from the point of view of who is getting the short end of the stick. The fact that my grandfather was able to benefit from the GI Bill in ways that many African Americans could not is both an example of white privilege and racism. It just depends on how you choose to frame it.
I just don’t see how it could be connected, unless being Bernie Sanders is, in and of itself, a form of privilege.
What forms of privilege does Bernie allegedly have? Well, he’s white, he’s straight, he’s male, he’s cisgender, he’s well off financially, and he’s well known. That’s pretty much it, right? Well, so is Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz is literally all those things. But my intuition tells me that if Ted Cruz had attended any Presidential inauguration in a shabby coat and mittens, the response would’ve been universal derision. His whiteness and maleness wouldn’t have gotten him off the hook at all.
So what’s the difference that makes the difference? The only thing I can put my finger on is that young people who make memes like Bernie (because of his policies, personality, and image) and hate Ted (for the same reasons). So why bother attributing this proliferation of Bernie memes to anything else?
[math prof joke] Only if her criticizing Bernie works out to the same result as Bernie criticizing her. [/mpj]
Do you think that there’s no difference between individuals that have similar types and degrees of societal privilege? Or that if individuals with similar types and degrees of societal privilege have different reputations and public personas, then that means that privilege doesn’t exist or doesn’t have any effect?
This is like all the people who used to proclaim that they “don’t see color”. It wasn’t that they weren’t sincere, it’s just that they didn’t really understand what they were talking about.
I just think that, in this specific instance, there’s no evidence that the online reaction to Bernie’s attire was influenced by any innate privileges he may (or may not) have. By my reckoning, it was simply a product of three factors which are unique to Bernie Sanders; his policy platform (which is very popular with young people), his reputation for authenticity, and his image as America’s endearingly grumpy grandpa. There’s no need to bring any other factors into this because those three explain everything. As Occam said “Plurality should not be posited without necessity”
Furthermore, there’s evidence against the idea that Bernie’s privilege played a role. Eyebrows of Doom found a picture of a black woman wearing something similar at Obama’s 2008 inauguration. If privilege were a necessary requirement for dressing down at an inauguration, she wouldn’t have been able to do so, but yet she did.
No. If it’s an overt discrimination, like a Whites-favouring/Jim Crow-accommodating GI Bill, it’s not White privilege.
Stop-and-frisk you have a better case for, if the retention of same even years after it was known to be racist didn’t make that overt racism, too.
Well, this is the nitpicking part that I don’t think is edifying. Trying to claim definitively that the Bernie-mittens memes are crucially dependent on Bernie’s membership in certain societally privileged categories (membership which he unquestionably does have, by the way: no “or may not” about it) is IMHO just as stupid as trying to claim definitively that they have nothing to do with it.
Race, gender, status, wealth, etc., indubitably affect people’s perceptions of other people. You can’t pretend that those effects don’t exist just because you can’t objectively quantify them in any given case. But you also can’t pretend that those effects are automatically sufficient to explain any phenomenon that you care to apply them to.