Don’t get me wrong, some people are certainly privileged over others. I have it now in an industrial facility that employs lots of disadvantaged people. They want to keep me so they bought me an iPhone (a support tether) and pay for unlimited usage as long as I answer their calls. I also get five+ weeks of vacation a year and astounding benefits. 300 people have to follow my commands on demand.
However, that has nothing to do with being white, male or anything else. A female supervisor (a former military Captain) has the same privileges as does one man man from Cambodia and another from the Dominican Republic because they became specialized knowledge experts. We just happen to know our own roles better than anyone else and we actually try. It is not a lottery. There are real jobs to be done and most people don’t give a shit if you are a transgender midget if you are the best person for the job. We have lots of freaks and geeks around and they can all be promoted if they can show that they are up for it just like anyone else.
Stop trying to claim that only white males have general access to such roles because it isn’t true. The economy is good enough now that most profitable companies are falling all over themselves to find competent workers especially as the Baby Boomers are retiring in droves. It has nothing to do with race or sex. It is all about competence and it is your own fault if you don’t have the skills.
I am not sure I understand. You trained really hard for your job in the airlines right? Was there anything blocking women or minorities from doing anything that you did? Is there today?
All true. All unimportant. It is part of the struggle for dominance to assert such things.
Still, location — not as easy to alter as is assumed, as with colour, age or gender — does factor into chances.
I think the whole situation is very complicated, and there are aspects that aren’t mentioned in the traditional narrative of who’s privileged and who isn’t. But your situation is one data point among hundreds of millions, so it doesn’t prove much on its own. It’s fine to say that it’s your own fault if you don’t have the skills, but have non-white-males had the same opportunities and encouragement to learn those skills?
Shagnasty, what exactly do you understand the concept of “privilege” to mean?
The concept itself is not bullshit. A lot of the narrative around it, imo, is. And that bullshit narrative more often than note leads to people fundamentally misunderstanding it.
Happy to explain. It is quintessential white male privilege to declare a concept bullshit without having even a wikipedia-level understanding of it. Anyone with less privilege would have learned an ounce of humility before making it that far.
As I understand the word privilege, pretty much everyone benefits from some sort of privilege. Healthy and mobile people benefit from “able” privilege – they don’t experience all the little tiny ways that disabled or mobility-impaired people are mistreated by others and by society in general every day. “Normal”-height people benefit from normal-height privilege – they don’t have to deal with a world that isn’t designed for unusually short or tall people, or a society and people that treat them just a little bit differently (and sometimes negatively) due to their height. And so on. These might be pretty damn minor forms of privilege, but they exist in some circumstances for some individuals.
Further – benefiting from privilege doesn’t mean you have an easy life. Most people with shitty lives benefit from some sort of privilege. I look at it like difficulty settings in a video game (hat tip to John Scalzi) – rolling the dice and getting “white” and “male” is an easier difficulty setting, in general, than rolling the dice and getting “black” and “female”, but there are lots of other characteristics that go into how one’s life develops. A brilliant, highly skilled, highly nurtured, and very hard-working black woman is likely to have a higher quality of life in general than a dumb, uneducated white man who was abandoned as a child and raised in an abusive environment. But that black woman would probably have experienced fewer challenges and had an easier time of success were she a white man with the same skills and background, and that dumb white man would have an even tougher time in getting ahead in life were he born black and female. These differences and difficulties aren’t insurmountable, but they aren’t trivial either, and have significant effects on society.
In other words, privilege is just another way to state that there are tons of little tiny obstacles in life, coming from other people or society in general, that various categories of people generally face each day that other categories do not. I probably will never be looked at askance for shopping in a nice store, but others don’t have that privilege. I would probably never be pulled over just for driving a nice car, but some others don’t have that privilege. There are a million such little tiny things that, small as they are individually, can still add up to have pretty significant effects on how one’s life goes, and how easy or hard it is for them to be successful and have a good quality of life.
There’s nothing wrong with being the beneficiary of privilege by itself. I think good people should recognize that they might benefit from various privileges due to categories like race and gender – this is an indictment on an unjust society, not on these individuals. If we all recognize it, then we can work to dismantle these remaining pieces of injustice in our society. But if we ignore it, or fight against the very concept, then such unjust aspects of our society will endure or even be strengthened.
That is a fair point. I am very privileged but it isn’t because I am a white male. My daughters are too as well as my Nigerian coworker and lots of other people I know. On the other hand, many of my redneck and white trash friends back in Louisiana are not “privileged” at all. They could be arrested and lose everything today if the dice don’t roll in their favor. It has happened already many times. I am certainly not a saint myself but I only play when the odds are in my favor and it has worked so far (sometimes just barely).
I think it’s the word privilege that throws people. It’s not that we have access to more and better things or that we have an easier time of it. Life is hard, even in the best of circumstances no one is guaranteed anything. we all have to make do the best we can. the “privilege” comes into play in what we don’t have to deal with while we try to eek out an existence as best we can. Imagine how much harder your life might be if you had to wonder whether you didn’t get that job because of the color of you skin, or your gender, or your religion. It’s not that we (and I am a straight, white, cis-gendered male) have it any easier (god knows my life has been tough!) it;s just that we don’t have to deal with all that extra bullshit everyday in addition to the regular bullshit that everyone has to deal with.
You’re right, things are getting more equal on some fronts, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying to make it better.
It’s still harder for some to even get to the place where you can hone your skills, than for others.
Exactly. It’s statistical, not directly causal. It’s far from a guarantee: many white men are in poverty or prison, and many blacks, women, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, handicapped, Gays, etc. are doing quite well in life, and thankful for it.
Where it shows is when you start looking at classes statistically. How many CEOs of Fortune 500 Corporations are women, blacks, Muslims, Gay, etc.? Fewer (I think) than would be properly representative of their numbers in the overall population. Ditto for how many millionaires there are in these classes.
(It isn’t all malignant. Some of it is merely self-perpetuating. The children of rich people will get better educations than the children of poor people…and education is strongly correlated with success. The “vicious circle” of poverty would affect some groups of people more than others, even if there were no racism or bigotry at all.)
You might benefit from privilege for a lot of other characteristics as well, but you almost certainly benefit from white and male privilege too. If you’ve ever driven a nice car or shopped in a fancy store, you would have been more likely to be pulled over or looked askance and assumed to be a shoplifter were you black or hispanic and dressed the same way. If you’ve ever been in a technical work place or office environment, it’s likely that your assertions and arguments are taken more seriously and you’re less likely to be interrupted than if you were a woman. And so on – there are countless other such examples.
These sorts of things aren’t insurmountable, but they exist. It’s not your fault that you benefit from privilege. But you do benefit, whether you’ll admit it to yourself or not.
You didn’t explain jack shit because “privilege” doesn’t mean anything or it means whatever you want it to be. Don’t get me wrong, I respect you just fine and you have one of my dream jobs. I am just wondering why you think the way that you do. As far as I know, I don’t get anything from “white male privilege” except for the vastly increased likelihood to be killed on the job, expectations to pay for most everything, child support payments (I don’t mind those). For the newer generations, we are looking at seriously deficient educational standards for males with college attrition rates now falling into the 60/40 range for female/male. If it was the reverse, there would be an outcry to do something. It just doesn’t add up.
You seriously don’t think that, were you black, some shop-owners or workers would have been more likely to think you might be a thief if you shopped there? Or you might have been more likely to be pulled over by a cop? And you don’t think that, were you a woman, your arguments or assertions at a technical field of work might have been more likely to be ignored or interrupted? Or you might be more likely to be groped in a crowded bus, or raped by a first date in college?
An anthropologist friend of mine uses “invisible norm” instead. I think that does a better job of conveying that it’s something you have to look for and seek to understand, not something that comes screaming out at you.
A different friend told me how much her in-laws are made uncomfortable with the notion that they are privileged because that was one of the bits of rhetoric used against Jews pre-WWII. As Jews, they are hyper-conscious of that.
It should be obvious why a concept like “normal-height privilege” is something that doesn’t make sense. Being “normal” is orthogonal to “special”. So yeah, using privilege in this context doesn’t make sense because there’s nothing really special about being a white male .
That’s just one definition, and “special” is before an “or” statement, and thus not required (and I’m not even sure if “normal” is necessarily always orthogonal to “special”). In my understanding of how it’s used in the context of this discussion, my explanation is accurate. If you want to quibble with definitions, then that’s fine – pick another word for discussions between the two of us for this concept. Do you disagree that the concept I described exists, or do you have any problem with my posts aside from semantics about the word “privilege”?
If I had to be perfectly honest, I would not want to be black in America if I had a choice but I think the difference is small as long as they know how to behave around police. My true African friends do not have the same problems as African-Americans. I can understand the sentiment but sometimes you just have to work on problem solving no matter who is at fault.
However, I truly do not believe that white men are the most “privileged” people in America these days. That honor goes to white women (including Jewish ones and some Hispanics) and especially the pretty ones. They can get whatever they want and nobody is going to mess with them. My own daughters are spoiled beyond belief and not repressed in any way. I am trying to figure out a way to repress them just a little just so they will know what a struggle feels like but it isn’t working so far.