Not everyone’s, just the people who don’t know what they mean but insist on complaining about their usage anyway.
God forbid I should show my age, or admit that I’ve been out of college for more than 10 years. Check your own privilege.
“Don’t Share My Wealth. Share My Work Ethic.”
I’ve never heard anyone use the phrase “check your privilege”, but it conjures up an immediate image of a Jerry Springer show, someone says that phrase and the audience erupts in clapping and cheering.
And then someone else responds with “you’re either part of the solution or part of the problem” and a different group starts cheering.
This is right before chairs get thrown.
Oh, good. And I was about to write you off as a *complete *ijjit.
I have, but I also have it very clear that they are confusing “equality” with “homogeneity”. They’re the kind of people who seem to spend an inordinate amount of their political careers redefining terms; many of them manage to speak incomprehensibly while limiting their speeches to what should in theory have been very simple words (the incomprehensibility comes from the changed definitions).
No one likes to be told to shut up. There is a very specific time when people should shut up - when they are denying the reality of others’ experience based on their own privileged experience.
E.g. Person who has never worked two jobs or lived five miles from a good supermarket without owning a car
Unfortunately such people, when told “Shut up and listen” often only hear the “shut up” part. Privilege is a sophisticated explanation for why they need to listen, which unfortunately has to be called on so often in modern debate that it is wielded to the point of cliche.
My personal experience only: I hear it often, almost always used appropriately. Yes, it is used to shut people up - but to shut up people who aren’t listening to other people. If you’re not poor, you’re allowed an opinion on poverty, but you aren’t allowed to tell poor peope what it’s like being poor. If you’re not a woman online, then don’t try saying that you don’t believe that the harrassment is really that bad. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have an opinion on harrassment.
Note: I’m not one of those poor oppressed 20-something straight white males who can’t say anything anywhere without being criticised for it, so I can’t assume I know what life is like for them. Maybe they get unfairly told to check their privilege all the time. I’m happy to have them explain that to me.
An eloquent portrait in miniature of the American polity.
This.
Oh, I wouldn’t argue that there are idiots in this part of the spectrum, and they are usually junior elected types from Berkeley and the fringes of Oregon. The conservative ranks contain complete babbling idiots, too, and even if you’re strongly partisan it’s unreasonable to taint “all righties” and “all lefties” with the tar of these schmucks.
I’d agree to the degree that there are a lot of left-leaners who haven’t really thought through their positions, which can lead to some absurd conclusions… but that’s not limited to that side of the spectrum, either.
Here’s the thing- what’s the baseline? Privilege as a word implies advantages above and beyond some baseline, and there hasn’t been any baseline established.
Instead, it seems to be that some groups are mistreated, and therefore anyone not being mistreated is “privileged”. I think that’s a perversion of the term- it’s not quite binary like that. The baseline is not what the disadvantaged groups experience; that’s out of the norm, just like having a trust fund, or a judge for a parent is.
What makes it worse is that being perverted, it’s used in the “Check your privilege” phrase to basically shut someone up as if their experiences are invalid because they’re not part of the disadvantaged group, or sucking up to them.
As someone once argued, wealth and status are far more important than race or gender. Oprah Winfrey is arguably far better off than some homeless unemployed white man.
I graduated from grad school last year. It wasn’t splattered everywhere. And I’m in LA, which I would think would be full of demands to privilege-check.
Or maybe you are sensitive to it, so you see it where it isn’t, and I am not sensitive to it, so I don’t see it where it is. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
If we can define several dimensions of privilege (intelligence, parent income, quality of the neighborhood, quality of the schools) we can find the median and define privilege as some standard deviations above it and underprivileged as some below it. Obviously some things we can’t do anything about. But you don’t need a baseline, just some understanding of the norms. Some of these have nothing to do with being mistreated. There is always going to be income distribution. The problem is pretending these things don’t exist. If a subset of applicants get SAT tutoring and a subset can’t afford it, don’t claim that the SATs are fair for all. They may be theoretically, if they’ve got the cultural bias out, but not practically.
I’ve never heard it used, but I don’t hang around places where it might be. But I can see how it can be used in other ways. Say someone with an IQ of 150 is blathering about how people in low paying jobs can get better ones if they tried a little harder and gotten into CalTech. It might be useful to remind that person that our society should treat people with IQs of 100 fairly also, and that not being able to ace calculus classes may not be a moral failing. Romney saying that people who want to start businesses should just borrow money from their parents like he did is a perfect example of this kind of cluelessness.
What whining? I stopped reading after OMG HE PUT HIS HANDS ON MY LAPTOP WITHOUT TRYING TO GET MY ATTENTION FOR MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES.
Absolutely. My problem’s with the terminology, not what it actually represents. By framing the discussion as a binary system with the disadvantaged groups as “normal” and anyone else as “privileged”, it sets it up for the vilification of the dominant group, when in fact it may not (probably IS not warranted).
To use your example, it probably breaks down like some students have SAT tutoring and decent schools, the majority have decent schools and no tutoring, and some other students have cruddy schools and no tutoring.
The “privilege” crowd at issue here would be basically pointing fingers at the decent schools crowd, and decrying them for having “SAT privilege”, even though it more accurately should be that the cruddy schools are disadvantaged, the tutoring crowd is privileged, and the rest are neither.
I suppose the reason is that we live in a society that is comprised of very distinct socioeconomic classes that often breaks down by race or geography. And the perception these days is that it’s becoming harder to break through those barriers (or that it’s becoming one barrier - the Top 1% and Everyone Else).
If you’re well off, someone who is poor would say that you have unfair “privilege” - good home, good schools, access to employment, infrastructure, security.
If you are poor and demand a good home, good schools, access to employment, infrastructure, security and so forth, the well off would say you are acting “entitled” and should “work harder”.
A lot of people misunderstand “privileged” to either mean or imply “guilty of something.” Now to be clear, I actually cannot recall a time when I have heard a leftist use the term in a way which I thought indicated they were under that misunderstanding, but perhaps these examples just haven’t drawn my attention.
What I have seen a lot of, on the other hand, is non-leftists (or leftists who don’t typically use the word and who are decrying its use) using the term in a way that shows they’ve misunderstood its meaning.
A group being “privileged” does not mean they are guilty of anything or that anyone should be angry at them just for being privileged. To tell them they are privileged is not to accuse them of anything. There’s nothing to accuse them of. They are typically as much victims of “the system” as they say as the non-privileged are. To point out their privilege is just to emphasize that to them the power they hold that they may not have known they had, and at the same time to emphasize that their experiences are both not universal AND, if generalized from, would lend themselves to to making assumptions about “how things are” which are harmful.
I think it’s because the US is a very commercial, materialistic society, coupled with the fact that Americans view their country as being the among the wealthiest in the world, as well as having the most opportunities.
And yet we have people who want to live the lifestyle that the celebrities they follow on twitter and instagram have, and yet don’t want to work hard to get there, don’t want to be responsible, or refuse to achieve that level of financial success legally.
And there are others who, because they make so much money and are viewed as being successful, they feel that their wealth entitles them to bending, subverting or breaking the rules/law. Or maybe they feel because of their hardwork, or because of their financial, personal, or familial responsibilities that that they are owed a break of some sort. Take for example “affluenza”.
So for you the “shut up” part is integrated into the message, correct?
The thing is, once you’ve told someone to shut up in this fashion, you’ve also told them you are not worth listening to.