Now THERE is privilege! 
Seriously, though, they may be made up, but they’re hardly irrelevant. Or else we wouldn’t need to be talking about racial or social issues to begin with.
Sure. Now how about a boy who grew up in a trailer park and is in remission for leukemia, but is also the son of immigrants, documented or otherwise? How do you think the daily life of a black Harvard professor’s son compares in the details to those of his white peers? There’s absolutely no difference whatsoever?
“Taking the attitude that certain people should just shut up and agree with you because of their race” is not a conversation. That’s not people talking to each other, and that’s not what I’m talking about.
I gave you an example of the substantive conversation around this march, and for some reason, you snipped it out when you replied to me.
I strongly disagree. You can challenge opinions without dismissing them, that’s a conversation. That’s what we do here in GD.
I said the NYT article was a huge upgrade over the hack-job editorial that preceded it. I did not endorse every quote in it, I endorsed it as journalism.
Moving on, asking white allies to a black civil rights movement (as opposed to the women’s march) to actually listen to the problems facing the black community isn’t a crazy thing.
The second one I’d need to see in context, as written, it’s hard to parse.
“Privilege” is obviously very multi-variate. If you you want to do it right, you could use something like the credit score model that distills people’s financial history into one simple number based on predictive statistics. The method works fairly well but takes a lot of research and complicated statistical formulas.
A PITA (Privileged Indicator Total Assessment) could take things like the following into account:
I smell a startup idea. Scientists have already made recent progress on my Gay-O-Meter which I should have done myself but the PITA score is another winning idea whose time has come and can finally tell us who is truly privileged and who isn’t. All you have to do is compare your number with your friends, family or even perfect strangers if you get into an argument.
This is it why the phrase is offensive, right here. The phrase is said to an individual, but it is meant to address a group. It reduces the individual to their perceived group membership. If folks are okay with that, then the phrase perfectly comports with that mentality - that stereotypes or prejudges people based on their race or gender or any number of other characteristics.
It is representative of identity politics.
I think this is snark – if so, I think you’re not understanding privilege. Privilege isn’t (or shouldn’t be) competitive – I see privilege just as a way to demonstrate some of the little injustices, totally beyond one’s control, that many people don’t have to face routinely. And I think, in general, a black person (or Hispanic person) faces more of these little injustices than a white person, on average; a woman faces more than a man, in general; a trans person faces more than a cis person, in general; etc. It doesn’t mean that every black person has it harder than every white person. And I don’t think it’s meant to be competitive (though assholes will be assholes, when citing privilege as well as when dishing out injustice) – it’s not useful, IMO, to talk about whether a Hispanic person has more or less privilege than a black person, for example.
If there weren’t massive inequalities in our society on the basis of group membership, there’d be no need for talking about groups.
Stereotyping and prejudice are never justified, but talking about groups is.
As someone in a right to work state (silly phrase), I wonder sometimes how the dynamic between unions, employers, and employees would be different if union benefits only applied to those who paid union dues. I can think of an issue where the people who most need union representation, the poorest and lowest wage workers, would arguably be those least able to pay their dues. But I wonder what differences there would be beyond that.
I’m happy they’re fighting against cultural appropriation. I’m tired of people from other cultures appropriating democracy, modern medicine, free speech, and the internet.
It’s time they returned them to their rightful owners.
Though I suppose the march would be hard to organize without the internet. Perhaps they could pay a fee, or something.
I wonder about this as well. It seems rather irrational, not to mention rude, of me to talk about and impute characteristics/statistics of a group that the person I’m talking to is a part of (black, white, male, female, queer, rich, poor, etc.) while I’m talking with that individual. It strikes me as just trying to make some rhetorical point instead of actually using the concept of privilege to bring awareness and make legitimate change.
Privilege exists in the manner the person you quoted described it, but the concept is a sociological one, which means it’s inherently about averages. I, a straight, while male, am more than just the averages of those groups just as a gay, black female is more than the averages of those groups. But it seems that people are indeed being boiled down to the averages of the various groups they belong to when one individual tells another individual to “check their privilege.”
Luckily, I know people who are perfectly capable of talking about these sorts of issues, even heatedly, without being this sort of dick.
Jesus Christ, this thread has gotten ridiculous in the past six hours. Y’all have fun with these straw men.
Yup, I totally screwed that up. But that 100k vote difference doesn’t support Shodon’s claim that black and women voters did not show up to vote for Clinton.
Others more capable than me have been handling this conversation better, but reading it has confirmed what I suspected: “identity politics” is another RW snarl word used to trivialize those who oppose them and avoid any real discussion of issues.
I agree there are massive inequalities in our society as you describe.
How do you describe when a person attributes characteristics of a group to a specific member of that group? Consider the adopted white child who is raised in a black community predominately black and lower income. That person grows up, moves away for college, and while expressing views is told to check their privilege.
How about the adopted black child that is raised by Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince and when they move away, instead of people telling them to check their privilege, they assume they need financial aid or remedial education. That’s the problem with the phrase.
Grouping demographics together to look for causes, impacts, outcomes, ways to address inequality, that’s completely useful. Telling that to a person is a shitty way to communicate.
Some people will be obnoxious and use the concept of privilege as a cudgel. But I think it’s still a valid concept and shouldn’t be dismissed just because of a few assholes.
The problem is that it isn’t well defined so far and people tend to use it as a very lazy weapon. Once you get the overall analysis more correct, it will possible to get people like me on board. Until then, it just sounds like blabbing and blaming about things that no individual has control over. I already do everything I can in the direct sense. What do you want me to do otherwise?
…while so far your OP has made enough sense to enough people that it has generated 3 pages of discussion: I will be quite honest and I can’t figure out what your OP is trying to say at all.
You found a quote in another essay. Can you cite the essay so we can see the quote in context?
Some people indeed have blamed identity politics for Trumps success. Are you one of these people? Are you claiming that Trump used identity politics and won? Or that Trumps opponents used identity politics and lost?
When you say “Is this just another way of blaming bigotry” what do you mean by that? Who is doing the blaming?
I can’t quite parse this question: “Or shouldn’t cis-gendered right-handed heterosexual whites be the one category that is identity-free?” Do you want cis-gendered right-handed heterosexual whites to be the one category that is identity-free? Or do you think that cis-gendered right-handed heterosexual whites are the one category that is identity-free?
Exactly.
The other thing I want to mention is a lot of these semantics about “You don’t know people’s situation!” can be quite silly too. In all likelihood, their background is more or less what you’d expect it to be. Sure, a white person might have been adopted by an Asian couple - but they probably weren’t, so it’s not really a reasonable assumption or scenario to entertain.
When you see a person in their early 20s driving a late model Mercedes-Benz, they might have started their own business and done well at it - but it’s considerably more likely a rich parent or partner bought it for them.
I’m not saying people should always assume the worst; however - but be realistic about things.
Or they have an upper-middle class parent that bought them a Mercedes with recurring mechanical issues not readily apparent on the road. Knew one guy in that situation.
Hey, you know what else is a double standard?
The fact that there are two African-American senators.
The fact that 43 is a record number of female senators.
The fact that not even 200 years ago, it was possible for two people to get off a boat, and one of them was considered property due to the color of their skin.
The fact that not even 100 years ago, women weren’t allowed to vote.
If a republican said"we need more white people and more men in the Senate", it would not be the same thing. What Sanders is appealing to is the idea that when it comes to our representatives, it might be sensible for them to represent us. That it’s bizarre that our representatives are mostly straight white guys, when we’re such a diverse and multifaceted culture.
I make less than $10 an hour. And I am very privileged to be a white guy, because if I wasn’t white, I wouldn’t have my job. It turns out my boss is just a little bit racist and sexist. I don’t think we will ever have a person working in my department who is a woman, or black, or turkish, and I am glad that I am this privileged, because he’s not the only one, and these sorts of things are pretty common. It’s part of the reason why the unemployment rate for African-Americans is about double what the unemployment rate for white people is. I am privileged. I’m not rich, but I’m employed, and a black guy in my situation would not have gotten that job.
See above. Groups are not irrelevant; the whole reason we have these groups is because being a member has a profound effect on you and your life, and you can’t just leave them either. It’s arbitrary, but it is not irrelevant.
This is that “intersectionality” that chicago tribune article considered so heinous. It’s not as simple as “white people have it better than black people”. It was never that simple, even when slavery was a thing.
ID politics: less privileged = more privileges.
That’s an interesting claim. If you’ve ever had one of these lectures online, I’m not sure how you could be so certain that it is true.