Thanks, olives - you’re getting at thoughts that have been formulating as I’ve been reading this thread, that I’m trying to figure out how to express.
I think that, like “feminism”, the term “privilege” has also taken on offensive, divisive connotations for many. It’s the go-to weapon in the Who-Has-It-Worst-Athon. But it’s not supposed to be about making people feel guilty for having problems, or dismissing their problems as trifling or illegitimate. It’s supposed to be a reminder of this:
Each of us is just one of many billions of humans on earth, and therefore, each of us only has direct knowledge of a tiny, tiny sliver of the human experience. We can also learn from others’ experiences, and can teach others about our own. But the vast majority of any one person’s understanding about the world goes unspoken and unshared with anyone else. There is a great deal of our experience that seems so natural, so universal, so obvious, that we don’t realize it needs to be explained to others. And there is also much that we would dearly love to explain if we could, but it must be experienced to be truly understood. I think that, although many of us consider ourselves to be so different from everyone else, we tend to feel this way about what are really very common traits, and fail to understand the ways in which we are truly, deeply different. And though we may often think, “I am a unique individual and an enigma; no one can really understand what it is like to be me,” it rarely occurs to us that, in the same way, we don’t really have a deep understanding of anyone else, either.
The point being that, in order to get along in the world, we have to extrapolate from our tiny sliver of experience, plus the infinitesimal knowledge we glean from others, about the entirety of what it means to be human. And amazingly, this works out the vast majority of the time. But naturally, there will be plenty of things that we consider par for the course, good and bad, which huge swaths of people will never experience, and might never even know about, by dint of their belonging to a different group than ours. And when we are granted an advantage by virtue of being in a specific group, especially when it’s one that we don’t consider to be valuable or noteworthy, that’s privilege. That’s why, when a white guy says, “Privilege? Have you seen my life? Being white and male has gotten me jack shit!” he is, in fact, providing a perfect example of privilege. He can’t see or feel most of the advantages of being white and male because they consist of a million little things that make up his lifelong experience of the world, and it would never occur to him that other people don’t have these same experiences. Why would it? The only way it would is if someone who was not white and/or male showed him that their experiences are different. And of course, that would depend on the other (non-white/non-male) person realizing that the white male has a different experience. And that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d think, either. Certainly, people who are on the receiving end of an injustice tend to spot it more readily than those who benefit, but it takes a really blatant set of circumstances for someone to realize, “Hey, this is happening to me and others like me, and *not *to those other people!” Because again, we tend to - we essentially have to - start from the assumption that what we experience is universal. So most of the time, even if we have a problem, we tend to figure everyone’s in the same boat. But as olives said, this means that everyone has some privileges, and everyone experiences some suffering and injustice. And some of those with the greatest privilege may also have the greatest suffering. They don’t always correlate.
The point, then, of discussing privilege, is not to figure out who has it worst, but to suggest that, rather than just waiting for people to notice an injustice, we should encourage everyone to look at the assumptions they make in their own understanding of how the world works, to consider whether other people may actually have a different experience, and to then identify whether there are systematic injustices in these differences, and if so, resolve them.
ETA: Hey, look Mithrander! You’re thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’! I still think it’s not as balanced for NA women as it should be, but yeah, boy am I grateful to be in North America! Yay privilege!