Privilege 101: Why privilege is bad (Part 2)

This post is part of my Privilege 101 series. You may want to read it from the beginning. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.

When I wrote the original post on Why privilege is bad, I was not terribly satisfied with it. It felt like I had relied on descriptive, US-centric ethics without really stabbing at the heart of the issue. So, I am going to give it another go as a way of rebooting the Privilege 101 series. This time, I’m going to attack the problem with pure logic as much as possible.

We start with the premise that society, that is to say societies in general, are good. To support this I offer the following observations:

• Societies increase our chance of survival through the pooling of resources.
• Thanks to the division of labor possible when people band together, societies allow specialization, which leads to technological innovation.
• Societies can also improve our quality of life, both through the above-mentioned technological innovations and through the emotional ties that we create with family and friends.

If we accept that society is good, then it follows that it is in our best interests to ensure our society is as functional and healthy as possible. My next premise is that eliminating privilege/oppression dynamics are in the best interests of society. I offer the following Proof by Demonstration, by way of thought experiment.

So, let’s imagine one iteration of the social activist utopia: Unearned Privilege does not exist. No group is afforded opportunities and benefits at the expense of another group. My prediction is that this would lead to an overall increase in quality of life. More people would have the opportunity to become better educated, which would lead to more capable people in various specializations.

It would also lead to a decrease in crime, both by making crimes of desperation less necessary and by removing the underpinnings that allow violence against oppressed groups to be considered acceptable.

Society as a whole would benefit. And when we benefit society, we benefit ourselves - because what is society if not the sum of its parts?

Privilege 101 - Fighting Privilege

This post is part of my Privilege 101 series. You may want to read it from the beginning. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.

In my last post, I established the argument that privilege and oppression are bad things, and that we should fight them. In this post, I will briefly discuss some ways that we can fight oppression.

The first place to fight oppression is internally. This is known colloquially as Working on Your Shit. We all have Shit - that is, internalized prejudices that subtly influence us. This influence means that we will always do things that prop up the institutions of privilege - in other words, things that oppress people. Identifying and eliminating these prejudices, and working on approaching the world with a full understanding of your particular privileges and how they affect the people around you, is the ultimate goal of Working on Your Shit.

In addition to Working on Your Shit (which is an ongoing process that is never complete), there are plenty of other ways to fight oppression. Engaging in discourse with other people can help them realize that they need to Work on Their Shit, as well.

Raising awareness about the simple fact that oppression exists along various axes is another way to fight. As long as people don’t realize (or refuse to believe) that oppression exists, it will continue to exist. Protests, articles, music, poetry, and even individual conversation can all help raise awareness.

There are a lot of different ways to fight oppression, and they all center around the idea that our culture is damaged, and needs to be fixed. And the only way to change our culture is one person at a time.

(This post ended up being a lot shorter than the previous ones. That’s because so many of the ideas felt like they needed posts of their own. So, the next several posts will probably be elaborations on the ideas presented here.)

Privilege 101: Why privilege is bad

This post is part of my Privilege 101 series. You may want to read it from the beginning. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.

In my last post, I tried to explain clearly what privilege is, and to provide examples to demonstrate that it is a real thing that does exist. Now, let’s talk about why exactly it is bad.

This is something that anyone working to fight oppression assumes: Oppression, privilege, and kyriarchy are bad, and it is worth the time, energy, and risk to fight against them. Just like the assumption in the last post, this may seem obvious to a lot of people already working to fight oppression; however, the purpose of this series is to explain the reasoning behind the assumptions we make, for those who jump into the whole mess without realizing the foundation it is built on.

To talk about whether or not something is bad, we have to look at the problem of morality and ethics. Philosophically, this is a landmine, best articulated by the is-ought problem. I won’t go into detail here; for a comprehensive breakdown of the problem with ethics and morals, See this trilogy of articles. Basically, though, the problem is that there has never been an argument justifying any code of behavior other than “because we think it is a good idea”.

However, I’m going to skip that problem by sticking with descriptive ethics. The United States, at least, is founded on the principle of Equality. To wit, in one of the first public documents of our government, the Declaration of Independence, the founders of the nation said:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Every American schoolchild knows these words, but I often think that many Americans, child or adult, have failed to spend very much time thinking about them. There are several relevant points I want to draw out:

First, all men are created equal. The sexist language is a sign of the age of the document, and it is worth noting that these words were not intended, as written, to apply to all humanity; after these words, the US went on to perpetuate slavery (and later institutionalized racism), misogyny, and an abundance of other legalized, institutionalized injustices. However, as a nation we have embraced, slowly, the realization that all people are people, not just white men. And so we stand by the idea that all people are fundamentally equal.

Also, the unalienable rights listed are not meant to be exhaustive. …among these are… is a key phrase, and the government has (again, slowly over time) recognized certain additional fundamental human rights, such as the right to marry (Loving v Virginia, Zablocki v Redhail, Turner v Safley, and of course the ongoing Perry v Schwarzenegger. The right to an education is also considered a fundamental right, and was the purpose of the founding of the public school system in the US.

Finally, that second sentence, not quoted as often. The purpose of government is to ensure these fundamental rights. So, clearly, our society considers equality to be key; it is the reason for governments to exist, after all. It is, then, necessarily noble and just to fight for equality wherever inequality exists.

Privilege is inequality defined. Privilege necessitates oppression; you cannot gain an unearned advantage without imposing an undeserved disadvantage on someone else. So, if you accept the idea that equality is a worthy goal (again, an idea on which the US was founded, and an idea that pervades European political philosophy as well), then privilege is necessarily bad, and should be challenged.

If you don’t believe that equality is good, then there may be nothing I can do to convince you (see above on the unproveability of morals and ethics).

Privilege 101 - So what is privilege anyway?

This post is part of my Privilege 101 series. You may want to read it from the beginning. To see all of the posts in the series, click here

Privilege, in the broadest sense, is any special entitlement granted to an individual. In contemporary discussion of oppression and -isms, however, it has a more specific meaning: privilege is any unearned advantage or conferred dominance that one group of people has over another. The opposite of privileged, in activist lingo, is oppressed. That is, the privilege (unearned advantages) that one group holds naturally and necessarily oppresses (undeservedly disadvantages) anyone not in that group.

So we come to the first, most basic assumption of activists: Privilege exists. To many of us, it seems strange that people would even question this, but they do. Because privilege is hard to see when you are on the privileged end. The system of oppression works to make it invisible. So, here are some examples of privilege at work.

Sometimes privilege is easy to spot, easy to quantify, and the effects are widely studied and well-known. Men make more money than women, even when they are equally qualified for a given position. People of color are more likely to be convicted of harsher crimes, (as opposed to successfully obtaining a reduced charge or plea bargain) and are given longer sentences for the same crime compared to white people, even on the first offense.

Other examples are more elusive and anecdotal, but no less real. I have personally witnessed people with disabilities being treated with outright revulsion. A really subtle example of privilege is described in this excellent post by Alexandra Erin: the ability for a heterosexual woman (or at least a woman in a heterosexual relationship) to say ‘I have a boyfriend’, in any context, without fear of negative consequences.

Pretty much everyone has privilege in some areas, and lacks privilege in others. For example, in the realm of ethnicity, white people are privileged, and pretty much everyone else is oppressed. When discussing gender, men have privilege and women are oppressed. Also related to gender, cisgendered people are privileged while transgendered people are oppressed.

These different axes of oppression interact in complex ways; in a given scenario, a person might experience privilege and oppression simultaneously. This complex set of dominance relationships is often called kyriarchy.

The primary effect that privilege has is to create a power differential between the two groups in question. This creates an uneven society in which people are systematically oppressed to varying degrees. In my next post, I will talk about why this is a bad thing that we should fight against.

Privilege 101 - Introduction

I have decided to write a series of posts about privilege - what it is, why it is worth fighting, and what some of the terminology used by the activist community means. You might be thinking, “Haven’t many other blogs about privilege/oppression already done this?” Well, yes, but I feel this is useful for a few reasons:

1. Most blogs out there leave quite a few assumptions unstated; I aim to enumerate the assumptions underlying the activist movement. I hope that a very clear, low-level discussion of the foundations of the problem might help some people understand why these issues are important.

2. When I am discussing/debating these issues with friends, I often find that they are more receptive to my words than to the words of strangers. Unfortunately, I express myself best in the written word, especially when I have plenty of time to formulate my thoughts. Even when I’m discussing something via online chat, I find that taking more time to build and elaborate on points, and having the ability to re-organize my thoughts, is very useful.

3. For me, writing something down solidifies my knowledge of it. By writing these posts, I hope to improve my ability to communicate effectively about these issues in real-time conversation.

If you’re still interested, you can see all of the posts in the series by clicking here