So I’m trying to be more socially and politically aware in the past year or two (more or less around the time I became an Officer of Elections), so I’m trying to better understand the concept of privilege. Filtering through all the emotion and rhetoric surrounding it, like a lot of concepts that people on social media have attached to, is making this somewhat difficult.
Specifically in this thread, I’d like to hear more about the juxtaposition of privilege against hard work. From some sources, I hear the two talked about in a mutually exclusive or almost mutually exclusive manner (ie. hard work yields results with little to no affect from privilege or hard work has little to do with results compared to privilege). From different sources, I hear the two talked about in a more complex, nuanced way (ie. privilege can affect the amount of hard work needed for one person to reap the same result as another even to the point of making a result impossible to attain by one person).
Of course, these differences result from each person relaying the concept in their own way and filtered through their own experiences. Any sober explanations of privilege as it relates to hard work and results in our society would be appreciated. Thanks in advance
Since my freshman year of college, I’ve thought of this question as the Hegel vs. Marx question: Hegel emphasizes the individual’s role in his (19th century German philosophers didn’t really realize women existed) own life, whereas Marx emphasized society’s. Since my freshman year of college, I’ve thought this dichotomy was bogus: of COURSE both are important.
So, yes. I grew up in a family of college-educated white people, with a very wealthy granddad who could pay my dad’s way through medical school. My mom read to us all the time as a kid, and fiercely and adroitly advocated for me as I went through school.
My dad was able to pay my way through college, so I graduated without debt; and I’ve had other advantages (growing up white and heterosexual and male). This is huge in my life’s outcome.
At the same time, my own level of work has been important. If I’d taken all my advantages and committed to working 80 hour workweeks, I’m pretty sure I could be a super-rich attorney at this point. If I’d taken all my advantages and committed to smoking a lot of pot and working retail, I’m pretty sure I could be a 40-year-old stoner at this point.
Adjust either thing–my social circumstances, or my own ethic–and my life would change. It’s not either/or.
It is nuanced, because the one doesn’t necessarily guarantee the other. Let’s say my parents are loaded, can offer huge sums to the university they went and and hey, it just so happens that there’s a place for me there when I get to that age. A person without those sums, or those connections, would have to work very hard to get into that university… but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I didn’t also work very hard. Or that, even with those bonuses, if I’d dropped out of high school I still would’ve been accepted to study there. Likewise, if they could pay for a top-of-the-line private schooling, that’s a benefit… but doesn’t obviate me actually buckling down and learning.
Privilege is like having free use of a car. It may be that you don’t need it and it has no effect; it’s not going to help you out in every single situation in your life; it’s not something that can’t necessarily be achieved by someone who doesn’t start off with that advantage. But it is a bonus that can be taken advantage of that others may well not have. And, occasionally, you might end up suggesting you and your friends all meet up somewhere 100 miles away without realising that what for you is a long drive for them means finding out what buses go there and buying a ticket if there is one, or finding someone to cadge a lift off.
I guess if I had to sum it up, privilege doesn’t guarantee more results, but it does mean more opportunity. Whether you take advantage of that opportunity is still up to you, but they are there to a greater extent to be taken advantage of.
Cool. Speaking as a straight white male, I hope that is true. Hard work and empathy aren’t really my thing although people keep pressuring me to do way too much of both.
The privileged have more opportunities to be rewarded for their hard work. The unprivileged lack opportunities, so their hard work doesn’t take them very far.
I don’t think this fact diminishes the importance of work ethic no matter who you are. It’s just that you can’t necessarily assume that the privileged guy is a harder worker than the unprivileged guy.
Lots of people work hard and have rough lives. (coal miners, for example)
Some people don’t work hard and have cushy lives (US Senators, )
Some of it is just luck, or connections, or whatever. I work hard in a safe environment and make a very satisfactory income. I’m not sure I work harder than a coal miner. Other lawyers work just as hard as I do, or even harder, and make half or a quarter of my income. I landed in a firm that has been quite successful, and I’ve made the most of it. However, there were forks in the road along the way that would have led me to different places, if not for seemingly unrelated decisions. (I was all set to move to Alaska one year to take a job offer, but couldn’t sell my house and changed my plans. I turned down an offer I got in law school because it was in a city my then girlfriend didn’t want to live in. Who knows where my career would have gone if any one of 20 decisions had been made differently?)
I’d say hard work is a necessary but not sufficient factor in becoming successful. Privilege helps, but so do other things like character, creativity, appearance, and luck.
I am sure every intelligent person would agree that it’s not exclusively one or the other, but a combination of both. The more relevant question is how should society be organized in order to encourage hard work? Being aware of privilege is great, but policies designed to eliminate privilege never work. Policies should instead be designed to let people born at the bottom of the privilege ladder climb to the top.
Example #1: The Soviet Union, circa 1925. The communists are in power. Their goal is to completely wipe out the privileged upper classes who have been oppressing the masses, and make everyone equal. While they certainly do kill or imprison or drive into exile a lot of privileged people, they don’t give anyone a motivation to hard work. Laborers are paid the same (very inadequate) amount regardless of how much work they do. As a result, they have no motivation to work. And the same is true all the way up the chain of administration to the highest levels of government. As no one is motivated to work, mass starvation and social collapse loom.
Example #2: Ancient India. The caste system. Whatever caste you are born to, that’s where you will stay, with a perhaps a very few exceptions. For those at the bottom, there’s little motivation to work hard for self-betterment, since society won’t let you reach the top. For those at the top, there’s little motivation to think about or care about the well-being of those at the bottom, since there’s no danger of a challenge from below.
Example #3: Britain in Shakespeare’s time. Society is divided into social classes, with legally enforce barriers between them. The Guild System and other institutions restrict the work that people can do. However, there is some social mobility. People with talent who work hard can greatly increase both their money and their social standing–just look at Shakespeare’s career. So Elizabethan England becomes one of the world’s most prosperous up to that point. Art and science and business flourish.
Example #4: The USA, circa 1880. The most economically free society in history thus far. The government allows people to work almost any job they want. There’s no guild system, and unions and intrusive regulation aren’t yet preventing many people from doing the job they choose. Inventors and artists can copyright and patent their stuff, giving them a strong profit motivation for hard work. Legislation such as the Homestead Act rewards farmers for developing new land. There is economic inequality, in massive numbers. There is privilege, not doubt about it. Look up how much money the Vanderbilt family had. But the privilege and inequality don’t matter. What matters is that Americans at all levels are working hard to improve their own circumstances, and succeeding in doing so. As the decades roll by, the average American keeps getting richer and richer, new technologies keep getting invented, and life keeps improving.
Of course, the group most clearly left out of economic freedom was black people. Government blocked them from working, living, and running businesses as they would choose, which left them in poverty as libertarian economic theory would predict. Nonetheless they had more freedom than they did under slavery. Between 1865 and 1965, black people’s prosperity increased considerably as millions founded businesses, went to college, and left the deep South in search of more free economic climates.
The question we face now is not how do deal with inequality between blacks and whites, or any group. Finger-wagging lectures about privilege won’t address the issue. The right question to ask is, how do we create a social and economic system where poor blacks and others born with low privilege have the freedom to work for their own betterment?
Also the privileged have less opportunity to truly fail. If I come from a wealthy family and flunk out of college, I still likely have a chance to get my shit together. If I don’t come from a wealthy family, I might have blown my only opportunity.
That said, I think the term is polarizing because it does inherently sound like it’s shitting on people who very well might have worked their asses off all their lives.
My bolding there. It seems like privilege and inequality mattered quite a great deal in terms of race. Separating out black people doesn’t really let you off the hook for making that point.
Too, your basis for “the privilege and inequality don’t matter” seems to be “generally, people got richer, technology and life improved”. But that doesn’t mean privilege and inequality don’t matter, it just means they weren’t impediments enough, on a total society level, to stagnate society.
There was a great article I read awhile ago about the idea of “slack” versus “grit.” Here you go. The basic point is that if you’re middle-class or wealthier as a kid, you get plenty of chances to fail without ruining your life. Born into poverty, and there’s a lot less slack afforded you.
Might be a helpful way of looking at it, especially for people triggered by words like “privilege.”
I don’t see how it “shits on” anyone more than any other term.
Like, religious people are fond of talking about how “blessed” they are–attributing their good fortune to being in God’s favor. And in doing so they shit on people who aren’t so lucky. “Privilege” isn’t nearly that obnoxious, IMHO.
I really don’t understand why people get so het up about the word “privilege”. I have more privileges than someone who lives on less than a dollar a day in a mud hut somewhere. I have more privileges than a homeless guy living under a bridge somewhere. My ginormous ego doesn’t shrink one bit by me admitting that I’m luckier than someone else since good luck doesn’t take a darn thing from my work ethic. So I’m confused why you think someone is being “shat on”.
To me, the OP’s usage of “privilege” isn’t the same as “white privilege” or “male privilege”. The latter terms get people twisted up for understandable reasons, even if I’m not personally bothered by them. But I don’t see why they should get twisted up when it comes to economic privilege. Seems to me that it goes without saying that the more money you have, the more privileges you have.
Here’s a story I’ve related before about a friend, relating to both hard work and to privilege:
Friend of mine (call her S) is a black female psychologist. Upon graduating with her Psy D, S applied for jobs with various therapy groups. One in particular (a family therapy group) liked her a lot – they had 60 candidates, but they told S that she was by far their favorite. But there was a problem – they were seriously worried about how they would get patients to sign up with her – that many patients would not want a black therapist. They were open with her about this worry.
Side-discussion 1: S is a very intelligent and qualified therapist. Her would-be employers showed no sign of racial bias – and yet they were worried about their business, and that hiring a black therapist might not be the best move for their business. White applicants had the privilege of there being no concern about their race potentially harming the business of the prospective employer.
They ended up hiring her despite these concerns because they were so impressed by her interview (and academic history). They put up her picture on their therapy group website. She is an attractive woman who wore her hair naturally. For the first few months, she had zero patients. Her employers were extremely concerned. Someone had the idea of a new picture – she dressed very conservatively, had her hair styled in a more European (i.e. straightened) fashion, wore glasses (despite no need for glasses), and had the picture taken. Since then, she slowly built up a base of patients and now has as many as her co-therapists (including, paradoxically, an openly racist drug addict who swears that she is the only therapist who can keep him clean).
Side discussion 2: S is a skilled therapist and an attractive woman, but her picture (even when professionally taken) dissuaded potential patients from choosing her as their therapist. Her white co-therapists have the privilege of being able to present themselves on their website naturally (with their natural hair style) without dissuading patients and harming their business.
There is a happy ending – S is very content with her therapy group and has plenty of patients. She’s not a victim and never has been. This is just (in my view, at least) a realistic description of the challenges she faced due to various forms of privilege, or lack therof.
Conclusions: Privilege is generally about society, and not so much about individual prejudice. S’s therapy group shows no evidence of racial prejudice, but because their business is in a society in which there can be racial aspects to things as varying as patients choosing a therapist, they were concerned about hiring a black woman. S didn’t have to just be a good therapist – she had to be the best out of a group of 60, and even then there was a good chance she would not have been hired. She doesn’t just have to dress well and be attractive, she has to chemically alter her hair, wear glasses she doesn’t need, and dress more conservatively then her co-therapists, to get enough patients to be viable. She had to work harder just to have the same chance as less skilled therapists.
I mean, I would never tell a member of an oppressed, stigmatized group to not work hard and educate himself as much as possible. Doing these things may not catapult him into a higher social stratum, but it is certain that he won’t get anywhere if he does absolutely nothing. The importance of hard work in advancing oneself says nothing about the existence of privilege or inequality.
ITR champion is right that hard work was rewarded in 1880s. But hard work is rewarded in the 2010s, too. Louie Anderson said it best in the 1980s. You can start out mopping the floors and before you know it you will be washing the lettuce and working the grill. In a couple of years, you might even become assistant manager! But if you’re privileged enough, you don’t have to go through these tedious steps. That was the case in the 1880s just as sure as it is today.
This is astonishingly ahistorical. Sure, I mean, I guess children were economically free to work in factories and coal mines in 1880, or were equally free to choose to starve on the streets if that tickled their fancy–and it certainly tickled the fancy of a lot of nineteenth-century children. Native Americans enjoyed the liberty to choose between ending their centuries-old traditional ways in order to create European style farms, or of course they could choose to give up their lands. Women had the happy choice between choosing to work at home, or to work the street.
As for the evil gummint enforcing discrimination–you seem to suffer from the misapprehension so common among libertarians that wealthy whites at the time hated these government policies, that white business owners were chafing at the bit to treat black customers and employees equally, but they just couldn’t figure out how to elect friendly politicians.
The idea that the nineteenth century saw a rising tide lift all boats is absurdity incarnate.
I think the whole thing is a lot more subtle than people like to admit. We’ve divided the world into dueling stereotypes–lazy trust fund babies and hard-working poor kids who earned every cent–and obviously it’s not that simple. Somehow in people’s minds, admitting that you had advantages is the same as saying you didn’t deserve anything. Good people can’t also be lucky.
Even here in this thread, people are talking about “if your dad can buy your way into college”. That’s like a 1% of the 1% situation. What is harder to accept is that even among the poor, there are situations that make it easier to get ahead. I work at a magnet school that is primarily poor kids. Before this, I worked in a comprehensive school that was also primarily poor kids. Similar percentage, even. But the poor kids in the magnet tend toward a really specific profile. They live in homes their families own–really shitty houses, 1100 sq ft with one bath room, 2-3 kids in each bedroom, but theirs, and stable. Their parents are married. Often mom doesn’t work, but she earns money somehow–watches kids or helps with the flea market booth, or does everything so dad can work 70 hours a week, week after week. T
These kids are poor–like, they know about eating nothing but homemade tortillas for the 3 days before payday, they don’t have their own bed, let alone their own bedroom. They are often the only person in their family who speaks English and there’s certainly no one available to help with their homework or guide them through their education. There’s certainly no one available to guide them through college applications/financing.
But you know what? Just the stability of owning a home–and these “homes” are often appalling, pre-war houses that have never been updated–give them a huge leg up compared to the kids who move apartments every year at the most, who never have continuous residency in any school district, let alone any school. And while the first set of kids are poor, it’s not the poor of a single mom who makes $8/hour: there is an ability to scrape together money when it really matters.
Those little tiny edges make such a difference. So many of the kids in my program have those edges–which they’ve leveraged into getting a much better education in a place that will ensure they get through the college application process with the money worked out. Most of these kids will join the middle and upper middle classes, one generation removed from dire poverty. No one would call these kids “privileged” and they absolutely work their asses off. Each and every one of them has a personal story of overcoming obstacles that humbles me. But they have been given an edge over other kids, and it does make a difference.
To me, I guess, the point is that it is mentally healthier to be humble, to recognize your own advantages and not to assume that those who ended up in a different place lacked character.
Good point but McDowells was owned by wealthy black family. Why wouldn’t they be, they invented the Big Mick and the Golden Arcs?
My takeaway from the movie is that it is best to own a barbershop in a bad neighborhood where old black and Jewish men can debate historical boxing matches all day long. Second best is to be heir to a Jerry Curl empire or lead singer for Sexual Chocolate. Last (but not least) place goes to the white assistant fry cook.
A month or so ago, I stumbled on a reddit post by a young black woman who was sick of everyone chalking her success up to Affirmative Action, rather than her high test scores and academic performance. Because she believed she has never benefited from AA, she was even more insulted by the accusation.
I chimed in with support because I know how she feels. But I also felt compelled to let her know I’m probably one of those AA beneficaries she wants to divorce herself from so badly. I have no reason to believe that my race and gender have NOT helped me at all in my journey. I doubt I would been admitted to my undergrad institution if it weren’t for these factors. Maybe I would have, but I don’t have a compelling reason to think I would have. And I know I received scholarships and fellowships that I wouldn’t have qualified for if it hadn’t been for these factors. So maybe she’s confident that she’s done it all on her own, but I’m not.
So? And? This doesn’t mean I have been handed every opportunity I’ve gotten and that I’m unqualified. You can be darn lucky in life and still possess all the skills and abilities needed to do a job because you worked hard at acquiring them.
I view this issue from the standpoint of what positive outcomes are most attributable to. Anyone can screw up their lives or be afflicted with a run of bad luck leaving them swimming in a morass of negative outcomes. Privilege does not guarantee success, but makes achieving it much easier. Hard work likewise guarantees nothing, but also includes advantages not available to the privileged, like knowledge, training and social fitness.
Success as defined in our society is generally commensurate with money, even for people with relatively little of it. As long as they are happy, and perceive themselves as successful, then they are and that is all that matters. The problem comes in when people try to project their frame of reference on others.
Privilege gives you nothing but money. Hard work OTOH, has unlimited potential outcomes. Life is not fair, nor should it be.
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