Privilege (and accepting it exists)

[billvon]

Privilege.

It's something that is close to the center of many of the discussions society has been having lately about race, and gender, and sexual orientation. And there is no topic that is so divisive - as John Scalzi notes, mention the word privilege and some people “react like vampires being fed a garlic knot at high noon.”

Often when you talk to people about privilege, their first response is defensive. They often try to redefine the word so as to not include themselves in what they consider to be an odious bracket. You hear things like "I'm not privileged! I worked for everything I got!"

But that's not what privilege is. It does not mean "you are successful only because of what people gave you." Privilege refers to the benefit you get by virtue of your race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or family/community connections, or nationality, or natural abilities. It sets the starting point, not the end, of anyone's progress through life. Scalzi uses a good analogy – it’s like playing an online game on the easiest setting, whereas other people have to play on a harder setting. It doesn’t mean they are poor players, and it doesn’t mean they are evil. It just means that the “game” starts out easier for them.

I understand the feeling of having to defend yourself, though, because I used to do the same thing. I had stories that showed just how un-privileged I was, because I wanted to make it clear that I was successful all on my own, that I could have succeeded no matter what my starting point was. One of my go-to stories was the story of how I made my last tuition payment with nickels and dimes. I was working three jobs by the end of my college career, trying to make that last payment in time to graduate; one of them was running the local laundromat. And since I couldn't wait three weeks for my last paycheck, they let me take it in change, because that would let me meet the deadline at the cashier's office. And so I showed up there with trays and trays of change, carrying just enough to pay my final bill and graduate with my class. That's not the story of someone privileged, right? Privileged people don't have to (literally) scrape nickels and dimes together just to graduate!

What that story misses, of course, is that I was doing that at the best engineering school in the country. And that I had made it into that school because of a whole host of factors, like my birthplace, who my parents were and what community I was raised in. Those connections had a lot to do with my earlier success in school, success that led me to MIT.

I had another story from my college days that I used to tell which demonstrates how unconscious that privilege was for me. During the setup for a dorm party one day, a friend and I heard someone screaming outside. We opened the door - and there, at the top of the stairs, was a couple being mugged. My friend and I took off after the thief. He threw the purse away within 100 yards, but we kept after him, because we didn't want a mugger roaming around our campus. We chased him into a copse of trees at the end of campus. He ran out the other side, with me to the side of him, still trying to pace him. That was a big mistake on his part, because the other side of the road was the jurisdiction of the Cambridge police, and they were ready for him with weapons out.

Another story of how I wasn't privileged - because privileged people don't have to chase muggers in their schools, right? They have people for that. But looking back, I thought nothing of running out of a clump of trees towards cops with their guns out. Because the mugger was black and I was white, and I knew they'd be able to tell who was the mugger. And that was a decision on a completely unconscious level, because I grew up in an environment where the police were on my side.

The desire to be seen as unprivileged is, I think, a somewhat recent development in historical terms. When we look back at the popular entertainment in the time of Shakespeare the heroes were all privileged members of society. Kings, princes, the children of powerful families, wealthy merchants. I think this is because back then, underprivileged people didn't just get low-paying, thankless jobs, or get hassled by the cops - they died of starvation, and often had to watch their families starve. No one wanted that, and no one wanted to be associated with that. And there was no way to leave that class; you could be born into money, or remain poor for life.

For the past few hundred years, though, society has reached the point where starvation has become less of an issue. And as that has happened, our heroes have gradually become the people who overcame great odds and succeeded anyway. Harry Potter, a penniless orphan who goes on to defeat the big evil. Luke Skywalker, who not only starts out as a poor orphan farmboy, but later discovers that he has a father who is literally the worst guy in the galaxy - and he still overcomes all that and wins the day.

And perhaps no hero story is as indicative of our current view of privilege than the story of Tony Stark, a rich military contractor, who cannot become the hero Iron Man until all that is taken away from him by terrorists who kidnap him and hold him prisoner in a cave. Only then, when he loses all that privilege, can we see his story as heroic.

It’s no wonder, then, that we want to see ourselves as without privilege. We want to be like the heroes our society (and our media) portray. And often that is completely unconscious; few people think “I want to be just like Iron Man” but we pick up the underlying message nonetheless.

This sense of “privilege as an insult” can lead to unintentional gaslighting of minorities, women, LGBT people and disabled people – because when a wealthy white man tells a minority woman “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I didn’t get any benefits that you didn’t” he’s telling her that she’s crazy and she doesn’t understand reality. And there’s really nowhere to go from there; any real discussion ends, because you can’t have a rational conversation with someone who thinks you are crazy.

I think it’s critical that we accept that some people in society have privileges over others. That doesn’t mean they are inherently lazy, or biased, or bigoted, and it doesn’t mean they didn’t work for what they got. But it’s simply a fact that some segments of society have privileges that others don’t. Some of that comes out of the structural racism/homophobia/bigotry in our society, which has developed over centuries for a host of historical reasons. Some of this is based in our own biology – homophily is something we evolved as a protective mechanism, and it makes us see someone familiar as someone of “our tribe” and inherently more trustworthy than someone with a different appearance, accent or presentation. But whatever the source, it’s real, and a great many people in the world have to live with it.

This can be very hard to see (as it was for me.) We all choose the company we keep, and it’s easy to join a community of like-minded people within which almost no one has a dramatically different amount of privilege than anyone else. And that can make it look like no one in that group has much privilege, because we tend to see differences, not commonalities. The things common to the group – race, socioeconomic status, citizenship - become the baseline “normal” rather than being seen as something that might confer an advantage.

So the next time you talk to someone about DEI issues, be cognizant that most people born in the US have privileges that most other people in the world don’t have - and that race and sexual orientation have a big impact as well. Accept that other people will see the privileges you have much more clearly than you do, and realize that the privileges other people have that you don’t have may not be clear to them. Do that and you can get past the initial discussion and start hearing about the real DEI issues that are important to people.

 

[C C]

Privilege.

It's something that is close to the center of many of the discussions society has been having lately about race, and gender, and sexual orientation. [...]

No doubt presented here with honorable intentions, but... Meh. Just another derivation of cultural hegemony.

Originality has been exhausted. That's all philosophers can do nowadays to either start their careers or further them: Is to borrow from or reframe old ideas/conceptions, thought orientations, and conspiracy schemes for driving reform -- and mask them well enough so that they can appear new and glittering to the latest naive generation, or older ones whose memories have degraded.

At one time in the in past the term "privilege" would still be generic enough to not be dragging around ideologic baggage, and one might be more receptive to using it to point-out an _X_ or conceive _X_ circumstance in a certain context with a platitude or moral outrage attached. But like this symbol, it has been substantially appropriated enough since then that it has a trailing umbilical cord attached that's difficult for critical observers to ignore.

Which isn't to say that there are not many caught under these revamped vintage spells who genuinely mean well. There might be a useful cognitive discernment about society that could even be extracted from Nazi philosophy (via great effort, vaguely similar to the US and Russia borrowing tainted rocket technology). But likewise I wouldn't pamper it with warm milk and lullaby until it grows big, strong, massively self-interested, and exploitive in its own right.

If Westerners want to be nice and thoughtful for some other reason than to salve their guilt-trips or to opportunistically exploit the latest crusader movements for personal status, political or business careers -- then simply do it. Just make it part of one's everyday behavior rather than gathering under an ideological or government implemented banner, and preaching on the soapbox till the cows come home. To preen about how noble and virtue-point scoring one's particular paternalist group is in a kind of "fat, pompous priest publicly praying and putting on pretentious public displays" way, like the days of the old religion.

 

[Tiassa]

Privilege.

It's something that is close to the center of many of the discussions society has been having lately about race, and gender, and sexual orientation.

I think at the point that the first criticism to mind is that it is a privileged consideration of privilege, you're doing alright.

Still, two points that stand out: First, Iron Man is what people need in a way not utterly disconnected from Batman being what they need. Tony Stark is the happy-go-lucky version of the virtuous rich hero; Batman is the Dark Knight, kind of like how people cheered for Randy Savage when he tried to murder Ricky Steamboat. It's not just that they cheered, because, sure, it's drama, and all, but to listen to wrestling fans, they do seriously debate the morals and ethics of these characters, and we Americans long ago adopted the antihero°.

And people cheered Randy Savage because the heroes were too virtuous; they cheer the Batman because they seek vendetta, not justice; the hero in the Iron Man suit is a really nice guy who can afford to hire stewardesses to sexually harass, ostensibly bribing and influencing government officials along the way.

That such antitheses of virtue are what people might need in order to affirm virtue is the other part of that, and a striking proposition.

If we consider the prospect of intended audience—i.e., who was this essay written for?—we can also explore the boundaries of its application. In that context, the first portion, leading up to the Iron Man paragraphs, is telling in its own way. The craft of the essay is striking insofar as it reads like a preacher aiming one step up from the everyday balbutive of congregational chatter and buzz. It really is well-written.

But if the first two-thirds tell us much about author and audience, the Iron Man paragraphs turn toward purpose, and the late portion is actually pretty clear: "This sense of 'privilege as an insult' can lead to unintentional gaslighting"; true enough, but while it is important to appeal to people according to terms they can comprehend, the essay conveys throughout a sense of distance, as if this question of privilege is some sort of far-away, and not so close to individuals, and that pervasive sense that, it's just an accident, see, has long failed to communicate with certain demographics. Or, rather, it communicates too well. To wit, sure, I agree, "it's critical that we accept that some people in society have privileges over others", but where you start out talking about your own experiences as an example in order to bring questions of privilege close, the point of acceptance is phrased to keep distance between the reader and what priveleges which people enjoy. Or that it's "simply a fact that some segments of society have privileges that others don't"; I don't disagree, but it's unclear what that observation does or is supposed to mean. And, sure, some of it is structural, and some of it is in our biology, but there remains a behavioral question, and your rhetoric places that question somewhere away from the audience. And it's one thing to acknowledge that, "whatever the source, it's real, and a great many people in the world have to live with it", but there persists an underlying question of what that actually means, which in turn is fundamental to understanding what to do about it.

But that's just it: It's one thing to "see", as you apparently have; and it is good advice to listen and "start hearing about the real … issues that are important to people". And you are not wrong that questions of societal privilege do not mean one is successful only because of other people; it's just, the whole thing seems more about assuaging some hurt feelings among certain ranges of the privileged, and there really isn't anything about it that would forestall those from continuing on 'round the mulberry bush.

That is, of course, the tough question. One hardline critique is that your form is sometimes received as a performance piece for the sake of being seen, and in that context its failure, or the gap in the line, as such, interpreted as calculated and deliberate. Here's an example, so you understand what I mean: There is someone I know who might nod all the way through, and agree with you entirely, but there is nothing about your reflection and advice that would discourage him from "hearing about the real DEI issues that are important to people", and still assessing them according to prejudice.

†​

Toward that, there are myriad discussions we might have about reluctance to indict oneself existentially. Certain long, dark nights of the soul are none of my business, but sometimes people only come to reckon with the sins they carry because one of theirs has been hurt. And in this, I might think of something particular, like what a parent believes and how children might suffer.

What does this mean mean, though, to the privileged? What is their dark night of existential self-indictment? Is it really the question that "you are successful only because of what people gave you"? It's not that the question doesn't come up, but I hear it most in a context similar to yours, not from the people who would ostensibly be accusing this or that privilege. Still, insofar as we both know that's not really it, the easy totem makes a certain sense: The idea of accounting the full weight of one's incidental participation is a complicated and daunting prospect; the thought of accounting the number of occasions and number of people one might have hurt along the way, and trying to explain and apologize and amend, can be downright terrifying.

And there is also a question of suffering and consequence, itself; we ought not wish traumatic circumstance and reckoning on anyone, but part of the point is to wonder if and why such experiences are or ought to be necessary.

†​

Additionally, in consideration of audience, it is worth noting that poor white trash, as such, are not accounted for if we focus on success. In terms of privilege, a poor white man is still white and male. Compared to the Black man? Or pretty much any wonan? The poor white man needs to offend some other aspect of classism, like trespassing above his social rank, before society starts taking away his inherent privileges. This is, of course, a very complicated part of the discussion, but there are far too many days, when, for example, boys being boys is excuse enough.

But part of what makes that stand out is the internationalist appeal that, "the next time you talk to someone about DEI issues, be cognizant that most people born in the US have privileges that most other people in the world don’t have". Again, we consider audience: Who do you actually think you're addressing? It's a very curious rhetorical framework.

And maybe that's why the whole thing feels unresolved. I keep trying to triangulate your last paragraph, and in truth keep coming up with a hamster wheel. In your context, there is an audience you're talking to, and what you're saying has some meaning and value to them; there is something about it I'm missing. Thus, when the first criticism to mind is that it seems a privileged consideration of privilege, you're doing alright.

But it's true, I don't see where your discussion goes next, or what would prevent people from "hearing about the real DEI issues that are important to people", and still assessing according to prejudice. I mean, sure, no guard is absolute, but that potential is pretty much unguarded.
____________________

Notes:

° If we consider a period of the antihero from, say, Jim McMahon on through Donald Trump's presidency, we can find a continuum that includes how many Batman films, and pro wrestling (different McMahon), to be certain, but there really is and has been a lot of it in American society. Even longer, consider soap operas, and decades, even generations, given to sympathizing with make-believe characters who are actually terrible people. More recent times have informed us of seemingly inconsistent outcomes that turn out to depend on whether or not the affected believes such influence is possible, but we don't really know the boundaries of that. And Iron Man as heroic virtue is hardly nonsensical, but do we even recognize the warts-and-all part of that, or are his offenses of privilege the sort that people sympathize with and even envy? In any case, the Trump presidency as a product of American antihero worship is only surprising inasmuch as we let it go so far in the first place.

 

[sideshowbob]

I'm a white male. When I'm standing beside an indigenous man and we hear a police siren, I'm tempted to say to him, "It isn't me they're after."

 

[Seattle]

Something comes to mind about preaching to the choir. Back in the day the TV show "Archie Bunker" was popular. Why? Because most everyone was already a "Meathead" and very few were "Archie Bunkers".

I know a guy from the climbing gym (nice guy, sensitive, a little insecure) who worked for the city in some social services capacity. He used to always post on Facebook about some feminist issue and lecture guys to do better. Of course all of his friends on Facebook already agreed with most of what he was posting. I guess it made him feel better?

Later he quit his job and is now self employed as a "Life Coach". He will help you meet your goals, grow your business, become more productive, help you lose weight as he used to be overweight himself.

We as individuals and as a society can always improve and generally do. We can also turn everyone into a victim in a pandering and demeaning way if we are not careful as well.

It's similar to Joe Biden. He is a much better person than Donald Trump. He and the members of his party are more professional, empathetic or "woke" but he is also increasing the budget and national debt to levels not seen since WWII. Soon everyone will be dependant on the government for one program or another. Taxes will have to go through the roof eventually and individual initiative and performance will matter little.

Everyone was warning that the existing national debt just isn't sustainable and instead of tackling that and upcoming issues with Social Security, Medicare, the size of the U.S. military he is doubling down almost ensuring that the U.S. economy is going to be trashed years down the line. I think he is probably eventually going to be seen as a Carter type of Presidency...great guy, well meaning but a disaster.

We aren't addressing doing something concrete about the homeless problem, the size of our jailed population, the size of our military (we have some 800 bases in 70 countries...China has one). Those things and our debt are what we should be doubling down on. Universal Healthcare, what happened to that. That's not even mentioned.

DEI issues, micro-aggressions, systemic racism, picking your own gender, constantly talking down to minorities about how of course they can't get ahead because they just don't have a chance...isn't helping anyone. How would you like it if some other group was always apologizing to you about how your life just isn't fair but they are going to help you.

The government has been "helping" people in inner cities for decades. How has that worked out? It has just kept them down. It's important that workplaces embrace diversity and don't become an "old boys" club but much more emphasis should be placed on actually teaching people how to have success rather than just focusing on a kumbaya moment. This is a moment where it's more important to switch from sensitivity to addressing/educating how to make it on ones own in our system. That's when minorities will rightly feel good about their position in our society not when they simply receive public monies and drag the overall economy down to a more "equal" level. A society in poverty is equal.

I think on some level we can all accept privilege and in a sense that is what everyone is shooting for. Sure, we in the U.S. are more privileged that someone in Burkina Faso. I'd like to keep it that way while still recognizing that in Burkina Faso they'd like to be able to say the same thing about us.

 

[pjdude1219]

Everyone was warning that the existing national debt just isn't sustainable and instead of tackling that and upcoming issues with Social Security, Medicare, the size of the U.S. military he is doubling down almost ensuring that the U.S. economy is going to be trashed years down the line. I think he is probably eventually going to be seen as a Carter type of Presidency...great guy, well meaning but a disaster.

so how long do democrats have to take responsibility for republican fuck ups? the vast majority(roughly between 70-80% of the national debt was accrued under republican president in the past 40+ years are so.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

race, and gender, and sexual orientation.

Privilege refers to the benefit you get by virtue of your race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or family/community connections, or nationality, or natural abilities.

ummm

hello ?

why is socioeconomic class not here ?(how rich people are/the wealth people are born into or adopted into or married into)
(im still reading but i have hit a brick wall of your terms of reference)

nickels and dimes

2 things
1 employers wont pay in cash on the due day
2 colleges wont accept cash
3 this is probably part of the wrought about lending for student education but thats a whole different subject
(im still reading)

• i agree with your analogy of privilege only if you include financial

Because the mugger was black and I was white, and I knew they'd be able to tell who was the mugger. And that was a decision on a completely unconscious level, because I grew up in an environment where the police were on my side.

i get your point

• but also

there is another point
and that point is around assumed authority of right & wrong
i do not wish to give away tools to abusers so wont get too technical
but... the reality is
some people think they are obviously in the right & everyone else must recognize that
& it has nothing to do with skin color
it is a power & moral based core programming thing

The desire to be seen as unprivileged is, I think, a somewhat recent development in historical terms.

kings
queens
princes & princesses
walking disguised among common folk is not new
it dates back atleast to some documented times of the Egyptian pharaohs

there is some complex social & cultural & moral & gender concepts in there that get quite complex

a woman walking as a man ...
etc etc

• bias

cognitive etc etc etc

When we look back at the popular entertainment in the time of Shakespeare the heroes were all privileged members of society.

only the rich could afford & knew how to record history
additionally

• biological absolute drivers of human biological evolution

the need to gain more
looking up to wealth
mimicking wealth storys as cultural history to indoctrinate the progress of acquiring more things to aid better survival etc etc

• half way through & the 1st time you mention money

you could be born into money, or remain poor for life.

heroes have gradually become the people who overcame great odds and succeeded anyway

as opposed to mass serial killers as military leaders etc ?
rich celebritys still maintain the class divide of greed of an upper class system as trendy & desired in spite of not being serial killers or intellectuals or very god at anything at all

Harry Potter, a penniless orphan who goes on to defeat the big evil. Luke Skywalker, who not only starts out as a poor orphan farmboy, but later discovers that he has a father who is literally the worst guy in the galaxy - and he still overcomes all that and wins the day.

& yet they all are in fact privileged by specific unique skill & good luck

Only then, when he loses all that privilege, can we see his story as heroic.

and his position to have nothing is afforded by his wealth

this here is pure gold

It’s no wonder, then, that we want to see ourselves as without privilege. We want to be like the heroes our society (and our media) portray.

the question is do we still demand a hero complex personality template as a conceptual frame to reference ?
... is there such a thing as hero complex ?
do all people seek to align desire toward a hero ?
is "hero" an intrinsic concept of modern human thought ?

few people think “I want to be just like Iron Man” but we pick up the underlying message nonetheless.

yes & no
i should not go too deep
but to say
many people subconsciously act out their desires
regardless of them consciously declaring they do not desire for a hero
they copy their hero traits to make themselves more desirable to themselves and others.

• ages of intellect
• mind games of the times

This sense of “privilege as an insult” can lead to unintentional gaslighting of minorities, women, LGBT people and disabled people – because when a wealthy white man tells a minority woman “I don’t know what you’re talking about, I didn’t get any benefits that you didn’t” he’s telling her that she’s crazy and she doesn’t understand reality. And there’s really nowhere to go from there; any real discussion ends, because you can’t have a rational conversation with someone who thinks you are crazy.

this is typical babyboomer logic mind games
"brick walling" a reality to save their own illogical immorality
it is the breeding infection from serial killer parents of WWII(people forced to kill & deal with mass killing & death with no real tools)
it is a form of living trauma which propagates its self like a living virus
absolutely not going into that in any detail at all, but your spot on

This can be very hard to see (as it was for me.) We all choose the company we keep, and it’s easy to join a community of like-minded people within which almost no one has a dramatically different amount of privilege than anyone else. And that can make it look like no one in that group has much privilege, because we tend to see differences, not commonalities. The things common to the group – race, socioeconomic status, citizenship - become the baseline “normal” rather than being seen as something that might confer an advantage.

i like how you say that
how many times has society been told the corny sounding line of "looking in the mirror"


(finished reading your post )

• i like your conclusion summery plea, though its hard to believe what is actively ignored by many will suddenly become intellectually morally based comparative thought concepts

So the next time you talk to someone about DEI issues, be cognizant that most people born in the US have privileges that most other people in the world don’t have - and that race and sexual orientation have a big impact as well. Accept that other people will see the privileges you have much more clearly than you do, and realize that the privileges other people have that you don’t have may not be clear to them. Do that and you can get past the initial discussion and start hearing about the real DEI issues that are important to people.

the human species has to get past this DEI impasse to save the modern world as we know it
its a HUGE leap not a jump or step

just china or just india industrializing its self to modern western culture 20 years ago
will wipe out the planet
thats just a simple fact
DEI is a global issue that is required to form a common goal
unfortunately greed is controlling it currently and naming it globalization & making it into a war


as covid takes off and the death count starts to mount into the hundreds of millions
things may change
we shall see

 

[Tiassa]

… but he is also increasing the budget and national debt to levels not seen since WWII.

Think of it this way: A Democrat is president, so Republicans complain about the budget, deficit, and debt. A Republican becomes president, so Republicans trash the budget and economy. Afterward, a Democrat is elected to clean up the mess, and there will always be a conservative to complain about increasing the budget and debt to levels hitherto unseen. The thing is, had the Republican not increased the budget and debt to levels thitherto unseen, the subsequent Democrat would not need to spend even more money, pushing the budget and debt to levels hitherto unseen, in order to fix things.

So, when I hear this roadworn conservative lament, my first instinct really is to remind that maybe they shouldn't have gone out of their way to break things so badly in the first place.

Remember: While calculated cruelty is indeed part of our human frailty, not all human frailty is calculated cruelty. Don't let the cruel hide behind the rest of us. (Would we be elevating the cruel, or denigrating the rest of humanity, in order to assuage whose hurt feelings?)

 

[Seattle]

so how long do democrats have to take responsibility for republican fuck ups? the vast majority(roughly between 70-80% of the national debt was accrued under republican president in the past 40+ years are so.

I'm not personally concerned with parties and blame. The Republicans are responsible for the debt under Republican control and the Democrats are responsible for the debt under Democrat control.

The fact of the matter is Biden is proposing historic increases that will dwarf even the out of control debt of the past.

The only good thing about Republicans is that they don't try to punish those who manage to succeed but when the debt is growing it still ends up hurting everyone. Taking a bad situation and making it much worse...I'm kind of out of words for that one.

 

[Seattle]

Think of it this way: A Democrat is president, so Republicans complain about the budget, deficit, and debt. A Republican becomes president, so Republicans trash the budget and economy. Afterward, a Democrat is elected to clean up the mess, and there will always be a conservative to complain about increasing the budget and debt to levels hitherto unseen. The thing is, had the Republican not increased the budget and debt to levels thitherto unseen, the subsequent Democrat would not need to spend even more money, pushing the budget and debt to levels hitherto unseen, in order to fix things.

So, when I hear this roadworn conservative lament, my first instinct really is to remind that maybe they shouldn't have gone out of their way to break things so badly in the first place.

Remember: While calculated cruelty is indeed part of our human frailty, not all human frailty is calculated cruelty. Don't let the cruel hide behind the rest of us. (Would we be elevating the cruel, or denigrating the rest of humanity, in order to assuage whose hurt feelings?)

We all know the "road worn laments" of party politics. If the problem is the debt, it isn't fixing the debt to increase it dramatically. Politicians (Republican and Democrat) all seem to ignore the debt. This doesn't make it OK or make the problem go away.

I'd rather have a balanced budget (with small over-runs for recessionary times) then it would be a lot more honest. Both parties have their favorite programs that they like to spend on but never really pay for whether it's a defense that should actually be cut in half or funding programs like free education, or infrastructure that suddenly became important and every other program that may sound good if it comes at no cost but in reality there is a cost.

If you have the discipline to balance the budget and spread the taxation across all the voters then I wouldn't have much of an issue with whatever was decided. That's not how politics works. Whatever party is in control just blames the other party for everything but that doesn't solve anything. Just as you aren't solving anything with your comment. Usually when you don't have a good argument you can just call whatever the other person said a "talking point" and then that's supposed to be a valid counter-argument. It's not.

I know that's not the road worn lament that you expected to hear but it is what it is.

Your comment was about as shallow as the bumper sticker to the affect of "You can buy a $100 million dollar fighter but you can't pay our school teachers what they deserve".

The real logic would suggest that if we have to increase the debt we can't afford the fighter or anymore for the school teachers.

 

[Seattle]

I'm also wondering what problem Biden is "fixing". It isn't the debt or Social Security, long-term known difficult problems. He isn't proposing Universal Healthcare (which I would be for). He isn't solving the homeless problem or the over-population of our prisons.

We've already increased the debt with the Covid stimulus spending (I have no problem with that). Now that the economy is starting to improve he wants to drastically increase our debt on a 10 year spending program including giving people more money who have kids.

There doesn't even seem to be rhyme or reason to the basket of spending that he wants. Let's pay for the stimulus debt by "growing" the economy and get on with a more normal life. No one really even asked for all this spending.

It's kind of like when G.W. Bush pushed though that tax cut that no one really even asked for. Politics has a motive of it's own (getting re-elected) that often has little to do with what is good for the people or what the people want. Of course if you are just handing out freebies you won't meet much resistance.

Everyone is always talking about the 50's. In the 50's there wasn't even Medicare and the budget was mainly about defence. Now defence (large though it is) isn't the largest portion of the budget.

 

[kx000]

Privilege truly has very little.

 

[Tiassa]

I'm also wondering what problem Biden is "fixing".

It might feel obscure to you, but think about when people lament that real wages stagnated, and even contracted.

The tax estimates compared to household income, this year, are going to be insane. It's hard to describe, but Biden is old-school, so he's hitting something about household income. It's not by any stretch of imagination an optimal solution to anything, but he's running a particular statist-interventionist liberal pathway that he can only follow because it's pretty much the only thing available. It's not so much that he's anchoring the cornerstones for the next socialist step, but circumstance now allows us the opportunity because it almost implicitly proposes the necessity. It's a weird thing about conservatives; we can nearly suggest their contribution to doing the right thing is leaving people no other alternative. That's kind of what happened with gay marriage. And kind of like they behaved so abysmally for so long that people couldn't fail to see, so also do conservatives appear to have broken governance so badly that the effort to stop the hemorrhaging actually kind of looks like open socialism. Forgive me, please, if I don't congratulate them. The human toll was bad enough before Covid, but, I mean, phuck.

Think of the time, maybe in our lifetimes, when we can safely clink glasses in the pub and reflect back on how antimaskers and andtivax forced the American socialist evolution, and maybe the fiddle player will pause over a freshly-poured pint to observe the unfortunate irony that the last epidemic meant they didn't live to see what they had compelled everyone else to accomplish.

Spoiler

 

[Bells]

hello ?

why is socioeconomic class not here ?(how rich people are/the wealth people are born into or adopted into or married into)
(im still reading but i have hit a brick wall of your terms of reference)

Because the privilege that Billvon is talking about has nothing to do with money.

 

[billvon]

why is socioeconomic class not here ?

It's absolutely an issue - but it's not inherent. A dirt poor white guy gets pulled over by a cop does not face the same threats as a successful black astrophysicist who gets pulled over. (Google Neil DeGrasse Tyson's experiences.)

Scalzi has a good comparison here. Dirt poor white straight males are still playing the game on its easiest setting - but compared to someone rich, they got a bad character.

the human species has to get past this DEI impasse to save the modern world as we know it
its a HUGE leap not a jump or step

I agree. A co-worker said something to the effect that "I can't wait for the day that my gender and my sexual orientation are no more important to my career than the shape of my ears - something you might notice, but nothing that will affect the course of my life." That will be a good day, and on that day we won't need to work at DEI initiatives. But we're a long way from that.

as covid takes off and the death count starts to mount into the hundreds of millions
things may change
we shall see

I don't think it will change a thing. Even now, here in the US, the usual lines in the sand are being drawn - pro-science/anti-science, rich vs poor, "why should we help them" etc. And that's happening at the end of the pandemic here. (Certainly not the end of the pandemic worldwide, but one side simply doesn't care as long as they can go back to their bars and movie theaters.)

 

[billvon]

No doubt presented here with honorable intentions, but... Meh. Just another derivation of cultural hegemony.

It's actually the opposite. For centuries, the fairly diverse culture of the US has been both dominated and directed by the privileged class described above. That's pretty much the definition of cultural hegemony. That is slowly changing, to the dismay of that ruling class. No one wants to lose their privilege.

If Westerners want to be nice and thoughtful for some other reason than to salve their guilt-trips or to opportunistically exploit the latest crusader movements for personal status, political or business careers -- then simply do it.

??? We are - and are facing a tremendous amount of opposition. That's what the post is about.

To preen about how noble and virtue-point scoring one's particular paternalist group is in a kind of "fat, pompous priest publicly praying and putting on pretentious public displays" way, like the days of the old religion.

I agree. Hopefully we can get away from a paternalistic society towards a more egalitarian one.

 

[Seattle]

It's absolutely an issue - but it's not inherent. A dirt poor white guy gets pulled over by a cop does not face the same threats as a successful black astrophysicist who gets pulled over. (Google Neil DeGrasse Tyson's experiences.)

To be clear Tyson doesn't claim that the police threatened him. He points out that, in fact, they were polite. He just questions why he was pulled over and let go times when it happened when he wasn't speeding. Sometimes he was speeding.

He speaks of being pulled over at night because he was black (is the only reason he can think of for this happening). I'm not sure that they could tell he was black until after they pulled him over but perhaps they could.

He points out that this has always gone on (historically) but that the difference is now that when a cop shoots an unarmed black man at least it is now on national news and everyone knows about it.

I agree. What is odd is that no one wonders why it's never on national news when a cop shoots an unarmed white guy. To not put that on the news only makes the shooting of a black unarmed person appear to be a racial issue whether it is or not.

One point that he makes, I agree with. He talks about most cops (supposedly) are good and a few are bad but makes the point that you never (rarely) see a bad cop stopped by another (good?) cop who has responded to whatever event is occuring. That "blue code" kind of cover-up is what has to stop.

Back to his story though. He lives in NYC (or did at least) and we don't know if he was only stopped, as a black man, when he was driving through a "bad" neighborhood. If that was the case, it's hard to just blame it on race. On the one hand there shouldn't be racial profiling but in an area where most crime in committed by a black person and just after a crime a black man roughly fitting the description drives by...it may not be right to stop him or it might be right depending on the circumstances.

I've been stopped a few times for speeding. I've also been stopped a few times and let go and they might say my license plate light was flickering and I might want to get that checked out or some other weak reasoning. They say that the most dangerous part of their job is when they have to pull a car over. If that's the case, I'd suggest not pulling someone over about a flickering license plate light. As a kid I was followed by cops a few times for no reason, it appeared, other than that I was a kid driving a car.

As I said. It's good to be sensitive to these issues but it's also possible to be too sensitive sometimes.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

No doubt presented here with honorable intentions, but... Meh. Just another derivation of cultural hegemony.

Originality has been exhausted. That's all philosophers can do nowadays to either start their careers or further them: Is to borrow from or reframe old ideas/conceptions, thought orientations, and conspiracy schemes for driving reform -- and mask them well enough so that they can appear new and glittering to the latest naive generation, or older ones whose memories have degraded.

At one time in the in past the term "privilege" would still be generic enough to not be dragging around ideologic baggage, and one might be more receptive to using it to point-out an _X_ or conceive _X_ circumstance in a certain context with a platitude or moral outrage attached. But like this symbol, it has been substantially appropriated enough since then that it has a trailing umbilical cord attached that's difficult for critical observers to ignore.

Which isn't to say that there are not many caught under these revamped vintage spells who genuinely mean well. There might be a useful cognitive discernment about society that could even be extracted from Nazi philosophy (via great effort, vaguely similar to the US and Russia borrowing tainted rocket technology). But likewise I wouldn't pamper it with warm milk and lullaby until it grows big, strong, massively self-interested, and exploitive in its own right.

If Westerners want to be nice and thoughtful for some other reason than to salve their guilt-trips or to opportunistically exploit the latest crusader movements for personal status, political or business careers -- then simply do it. Just make it part of one's everyday behavior rather than gathering under an ideological or government implemented banner, and preaching on the soapbox till the cows come home. To preen about how noble and virtue-point scoring one's particular paternalist group is in a kind of "fat, pompous priest publicly praying and putting on pretentious public displays" way, like the days of the old religion.

 

[RainbowSingularity]

Because the privilege that Billvon is talking about has nothing to do with money.

ok
i need to come back and read Tiassa post when my mind is clear to do it justice.

i see your post

so as CC mentions there are varying concepts of the ideological frame work of concepts of class that give ability
privilege being a sense of some form of greater ability to attain a greater reward than another person

when we frame that entirely inside a premise of projected reality,
then we start to get into concepts of mental positions of self in a authority, power & conceptual class sense
someone who thinks they are superior defines themself to have privilege

the privilege is defined as "un-recognised consciously and inclusive of splain concepts to feed a sense f internal guilt around concepts of material wealth of privileged position.

it gets complex

the concept to hold a sense of privilege above others
as a personal belief
of a physical condition
of an ideological narrative
(stopping there to maintain some sense of interactive concept)

we/people/some can indoctrinate people to perceive a sense of normalised privilege when they have not had any
but they may be entirely mental of a perceptual field
much like social conformity bullying and mental abuse co-dependent abusive relationships etc

where do we draw a line between culture, privilege, narcissism and generic mental illnesses inside abuse narratives ?
very very tricky

so you are saying
billvon is talking about the personal perception where actions are directed at others like bullying or abuse
where th privilege is not physical materialism but mental perception ?

tricky subject to discuss openly in public

it directly links as an off side symptomatic frame work t materialism as a sense of self identity, something babyboomers and that era of oil exploration space exploration and new territory building citys etc
it was all about materialism

babyboomers are nt in my opinion at fault as much the part of the natural condition
they must be forced to comply to abate climate change and the end of the human species
the ideological concept of "co-operation" in the babyboomer era through to modern real world leadership is that co-operation is a ponsy scam for power and money.
it is too late for "co-operation games"
compliance is required

i am not expecting you to answer anything specifically other than opening up the concept to conversation around terms of meanings and where that concept dwells or lives
heavy and complicated and soo easily side tracked off into soo many other real world influential states and conditions and concepts and ideologies...


p.s
note for clarity for some readers
"privilege"
the expected right a man has over a womens body or the lives of their children
to give or deny health care, freedom food water housing...
etc ...
not a physical material thing
no money involved
but very very real and wide spread

 

[Bells]

so you are saying
billvon is talking about the personal perception where actions are directed at others like bullying or abuse
where th privilege is not physical materialism but mental perception ?

Here is an example of the type of privilege Billvon is talking about..

I'm a white male. When I'm standing beside an indigenous man and we hear a police siren, I'm tempted to say to him, "It isn't me they're after."

Billvon is talking about society in general and one's movement through society.

He gave a pretty good example in the OP..

I had another story from my college days that I used to tell which demonstrates how unconscious that privilege was for me. During the setup for a dorm party one day, a friend and I heard someone screaming outside. We opened the door - and there, at the top of the stairs, was a couple being mugged. My friend and I took off after the thief. He threw the purse away within 100 yards, but we kept after him, because we didn't want a mugger roaming around our campus. We chased him into a copse of trees at the end of campus. He ran out the other side, with me to the side of him, still trying to pace him. That was a big mistake on his part, because the other side of the road was the jurisdiction of the Cambridge police, and they were ready for him with weapons out.

Another story of how I wasn't privileged - because privileged people don't have to chase muggers in their schools, right? They have people for that. But looking back, I thought nothing of running out of a clump of trees towards cops with their guns out. Because the mugger was black and I was white, and I knew they'd be able to tell who was the mugger. And that was a decision on a completely unconscious level, because I grew up in an environment where the police were on my side.

He didn't invent that privilege. It exists in all areas of society. He had no fear chasing someone towards the police. A person of colour would probably not feel the same.

Your post seems to be a tad all over the place, so I'm going to leave the fluff out.

But people are rarely aware of the privilege they have and were basically born with. Their experiences through life will be vastly different based on that. White men in particular, are often unaware of it. Women and people of colour are aware of it, because their experience will be vastly different. How society perceives them will be different.

https://stemeducationjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40594-020-00250-3#Sec28

Is a good study on the issue.

It is something that simply exists in every field and will affect people differently.

I view privilege like a multi-storey building. It exists on every layer. For example, feminists... The privilege exists and it's not solely attributed to white males. The most dominant discourse in feminism stems from white cisgender women. Feminists who are women of colour or trans or even disabled are often overlooked or ignored not just by society, but by white feminists - sometimes abusively so.

Privilege is multi-layered and multi-faceted.

Billvon is recognising his privilege as a white male and accepting it. Few people are willing to do that. Awareness of it is key.