Wait, what? You equate affirmative action with “a form of protected-class discrimination”? That is… well, an approach more notable for its ideological purity than its historical realism.
Yeah, sorry about that, :o I didn’t realize at the time that you kind of do have a rather draconian approach to the definition of concepts like “hiring quotas” so the joke wasn’t quite as funny as I thought! 
Well, recall that I did specify some concrete actions for becoming more aware, namely exposing oneself to the shared experiences of other groups through their communities, media, etc. Those oft-maligned “diversity goals” in hiring/admissions/etc. can be useful for helping that process along.
I mean, honestly HD, it seems to me you’re kind of painting yourself into a corner here. You say you want to understand more about how to counteract the unjust social impacts of privilege differences, and you acknowledge (at least, I think you have) that not being aware of privilege can reinforce discrimination and prejudice, but when you’re told that actively seeking out diverse perspectives from different backgrounds tends to increase awareness of privilege, you seem to retreat into the claim that paying attention to backgrounds would be ipso facto illegal because EEOC, or something. I’m just not sure you’re really thinking this through.
When you are dealing with entry-level positions, maybe it’s better to go random then to pick a criteria that says more about someone’s background than it does about their ability to do the job well. That rankles the English teacher in me, but honestly, I think it makes sense.
Again, my field is more college admissions than hiring, and I already laid out examples there of how I think context has to shape evaluation. The resume issue has a parallel: these days it is increasingly the norm for upper-middle class and even middle class parents to hire a professional to guide their kids through the college application process. This results in a much slicker, focused application. Do you think it would be reasonable for a college to use the slickness of the applications–which include things like good looking resumes and perfect grammar in the essays–to do that first cull? They have the “too many resumes” problem in spades.
It depends on the form that affirmative action program takes, but certainly some of them amount to “discrimination” in my eyes. That shouldn’t really come as a great surprise. Various states have chosen to ban affirmative action, and there’s been a string of SCOTUS cases on the matter. It’s a touchy subject, to say the least.
A few posters (such as Kimstu and Miller, IIRC) accurately characterized my intention with this and answered your question (i.e. no, it’s not illegal), which I noted in a post.
I think you are being vague and unclear, so let me ask you a simple yes/no question:
Do you support affirmative action programs?
Yes – I figured I was pretty clear on that when I talked about AA partially mitigating the negative effects of privilege. I don’t necessarily support every single one, but in principle I support AA.
But this doesn’t have anything to do with what I think hiring managers (and college admissions professionals and the like) should do. These posts more or less did a good job of describing what I meant:
Speaking for myself, it depends on the program. Different AA measures are employed and scrutinized in different ways in different situations. It’s a pretty complicated set of mechanisms, ranging all the way from applicant pool broadening efforts to specific placement goals to explicit hiring quotas (which BTW are not legal unless judicially imposed in consequence of a finding of persistent illegal discrimination).
So I’d have to see what particular affirmative action program in what particular situation was being referenced in order to know whether or not I support it.
Thank you!
ETA: FWIW, in principle I oppose AA, but I don’t necessarily oppose every form it’s ever taken. There are some I find more offensive and some that bother me less.
Do you understand that my position on AA is entirely separate from what I advocate for hiring/admissions managers in order to mitigate the negative effects of privilege? AA is government, not private action.
It’s not entirely clear to me. For example, federal contractors are private companies that oftentimes have to comply with government regulations to stay in business.
I’m separating the policy of AA, which might include mandating certain things for employers and/or schools, from what I’m advocating that private individuals should do, morally, to help improve society and mitigate the negative effects of privilege and its lack.
If every single employer, and every single admissions manager, did this, or nearly everyone, then there might be no need at all for AA policies any more – which is part of why I advocate for this behavior. A society with no need for AA is a better society, and I hope we get there someday, the sooner the better.
…while others have adequately answered your question, I just wanted to clear up a few “country related” questions.
We do have “free health care” here. Two years ago my dad had a stroke. We didn’t realize it was a stroke at the time. He just stopped being able to see. “I can’t see the television!” he kept complaining. It wasn’t until I googled “sudden blindness” that we realized that something serious was happening and we bundled dad into the car and took him to hospital. We dropped him at the front doors and I went to park. In the minute it took me to do that the Triage nurse had assessed him as critical and he had been taken immediately through to emergency.
My dad spent over a month in hospital. The first few days in Critical Care, under 24 hour monitoring by the most amazing medical crew. They eventually moved him to one of the wards. Then they moved him to Porirua Hospital so he could recover.
When they bought him home we were given a huge amount of support. The district nurse dropped off a walker, some stuff for the shower and some other things, and committed to a monthly visit if we wanted it. We also got offers of regular “home help” if we needed it: but we turned those down. (For now.)
All of that: zero dollars out of pocket.
But dad needs a lot of help now. His memory isn’t so good any more. He has had a few falls, a few accidents. He’s spent a few weeks back in hospital. Our family have had to make some serious changes to how we do things now. We’ve had to make sacrifices. So “free health care” doesn’t fix everything. And this is our dad. Our family. Our whanau. We look after him.
The frame with the loans? Those aren’t student loans. All students under a certain income threshold/criteria are eligible for a “student allowance.” All those that aren’t eligible are eligible for an interest-free student loan. Those loans highlight the differences in getting credit: a real problem for low income families, who get into trouble for any sort of reason, look to the banks but the banks turn them down, so they have to resort to high interest finance companies.
That frame of Paula looking after her dad? Heartbreaking. Paula’s story? That is my story. I’m Samoan/Maori. I worked in hospitality. Hardest job in my life. Going to work when the sun was up and then coming home while the sun was rising the next day was normal.
My greatest achievement was being Functions Manager for the Royal Visit of the Queen, being in charge of the front of house team for her State Lunch. But I’ll never forget the feeling I had a couple of weeks later. We had a meeting with a client who was running a conference in a few weeks time: and I bought along one of my supervisors just to sit in. (The supervisor just happened to be white.) This client never once looked me in the eye. Everytime they had a question they asked my assistant, who would reply with either a “yes” or a “no” or a “you should ask the boss!” while pointing at me. It was one of the most painfully awkward meetings I have ever had. My assistant felt so terrible he even apologized to me afterwards. (“What are you apologizing for? You didn’t do anything wrong!!!”)
I am constantly reminded of “my place.” Like when I’m in a room and I’m the only brown face and someone will say something remarkably racist and everyone will laugh, and then someone will look at me and say “well not you mate, you are one of the good ones.” I’ve had to overcome a lot to get to where I am today. I own my own business and its been running for six years now and it is doing well.
I think about privilege a lot. I am in an industry that dramatically skews white male. I am using my position as a business owner to open up opportunities to minorities and to women. I am using my privilege to help “level the playing field”. I don’t have quota’s. But I have started consciously started thinking about my decision making. I’ve made a lot of small, but significant changes to how I do things. I’ve got a long way to go. But recognizing the privilege that I have was the very first step I took. Breaking down the barriers to the industry is what I am investigating now. Its a work in process. One that may take the rest of my life.
Thanks for sharing, Banquet Bear.
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.
I don’t think they are analogous at all. A kid running a race doesn’t get a boost from his parents every time he goes around the track.
But your typical middle class college kid does get regular “boosts”, especially a kid that gets out of college without any debt. Who let the kid live at home during the summer so he could pocket his minimum wage earners at Starbucks? His parents. Who pays for his cell phone bill and car insurance, and reminds him to fill out their FAFSA form every year? His parents. Who pays for his tuition? Even if the kid is on scholarship, he likely has his parents to thank for putting him in the position where he can get one. Not all parents are willing to wake up at 5:00AM every morning so their kid can get to sports practice, or pay $$$ for Princeton Review.
If I see a kid running a race and he has his own pit crew helping him along, I’m not going to hate on him for finishing first. But I don’t want to hear that kid bragging about how he did it all on his own. I want to hear him express a little gratitude for the pit crew so that everyone might appreciate the value of teamwork.
Radiolab just did a fascinating episode on poverty myths. The show starts off by discussing how one of the most famous “self-made” men in American history–Ben Franklin–was kind of asshole for tooting his own horn so much. Not because it is a lie per se, but because not everyone–like his sister–had the same advantages he had. In all his self-tooting, he never acknowledged those advantages, leaving people with the false impression about the keys to success. (One key to success: abandon your sick and dying parents. They’ll just drag you down. Besides, your sister will take care of them.)
I think a lot of it is a semantic issue; for me anyway, the notion of “privilege” implies something unearned, and to some degree unwarranted. The word connotes some sort of idea of beyond-the-norm advantage or experience that someone gets through some sort of extraordinary means- wealth, luck, geographic positioning, etc… Note that the operative components here are beyond the norm and extraordinary means.
On the flip side, there are things whose presence doesn’t connote privilege- they’re just normal, everyday things. Their absence in someone else also doesn’t connote privilege in those who do have it either. These are things that might be considered “rights”- things like clean water, clean air, shelter, education, etc…
The insidious thing about this new usage of the word is that it’s all relative, rather than being something applied to a society at large, and I’m not at all convinced that describing the other 300 some-odd million people in the US as “privileged” because we have reasonably clean drinking water, while people in Flint, MI don’t, is a good idea. That’s not a situation of privilege/lack of privilege; it’s more of a criminal situation and a denial of a basic human right.
Similarly, describing children whose parents read to them as “privileged” is kind of insidious as well; it implies that this isn’t, or shouldn’t be considered the normal, unprivileged behavior, which I think may be a mistake. Wouldn’t we, as a society rather normalize that behavior as normal and unpriivleged, and work on bringing everyone up to that standard, instead of describing it as privileged, and implying it’s special and not normal?
Unearned? I think so. Unwarranted? Absolutely not part of the connotation.
This isn’t an either/or thing. Yes, it could be useful to describe ourselves as privileged in our access to clean water. It’d be a useful concept if someone were like, “The families in Flint are a bunch of whiners; why don’t they just use bottled water?”
Because I’ve got cheap clean running water, I don’t really have to think through the logistical implications of using bottled water for everything from tooth-brushing to boiling pasta. That’s a way in which I’m relatively privileged compared to the folks in Flint.
It’s not unwarranted. It’s not a bad thing. I’ve never heard anyone suggest “privilege” is a bad thing, except for people who reject the concept.
It’s as if I objected to wasabi because it’s so overwhelmingly minty and is served in buckets. My objections aren’t based on what wasabi actually is. I might still think it’s yucky, but my reasons make no sense.
Objections to the concept of privilege based on things that aren’t part of the concept of privilege are flawed objections.
Here’s the deal, though. Over 50% of American school children live in poverty. That number was 38% in 2000. I don’t know how you were raised, but if it was middle-middle class, that was the normal, everyday thing for you, it’s the normal, everyday thing for you now, but it’s not the normal everyday thing for *most *kids. And when we pretend that living a middle-middle class is a privilege that most kids have, it is a distorted view of “normal.”
Thanks for this! I just listened to this episode on my morning commute and now have a new podcast (On the Media) to check out. I enjoyed this episode, though I did disagree with some characterizations. I’m always interested in new and interesting podcasts.