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A Little More Discussion on Privilege

Latoya

So, earlier in the week, I dropped an email to Cara asking if Feministe had covered exactly what privilege is. It’s a word that is often used (to varying degrees of effectiveness) and often maligned privately in counter blog posts and such. Renee actually beat me to posting on this topic, but since her piece is more of a statement than a question, I think we can host both these discussions and not rehash the same issues.

Racialicious actually explored the idea of privilege through the lens of class a few months ago. I had initially wanted to write a post exploring race and class after I read a blog carnival. Somewhere in the course of the carnival, a writer had talked about racial issues and how they play out in America. A semi-well known author came into the comments, and essentially said “These problems aren’t about race, they’re about class.”

Now, this is a common argument, so I can’t feign surprise. But what bothered me more was the hedging involved in this kind of conversation. Class is an important issue in our society, but conversations surrounding race and class tend to come of a bit disingenuous. There is always this idea of trying to have one system replace the other (racism is dead, the real problem is class; class doesn’t matter, the real problem is race) when the two -isms work in tandem.

Then, I discovered the privilege meme making rounds on the internet, and thought it would be an interesting entry point to the discussion. (This eventually became a series.)

In “Has Class Trumped Race? – Part 1, Understanding Privilege,” we discussed the privilege meme and it’s limitations. Many of my readers mentioned that they were relatively class privileged but their racial background was not reflected in the assumption. Or that some seeming privileges aren’t really privileges at all – it depends on your region, your family, or the school system you attended. I also introduced a second set of questions, that indicated hallmarks of not having privilege.

In “Has Class Trumped Race? – Part 2, Interpreting Privilege,” we dissected more of the privilege checklist, quoted Penelope Trunk on how privilege works in society (from someone who grew up privileged) and introduced different components of privilege:

So we currently have two main components to economic privilege. The material aspect of privilege – which includes always having enough money for the utilities or having extra money for things like field trips, new clothes and AP classes – and the access aspect of privilege, which allows you to gain valuable life experiences.

Do you think that the material aspect of privilege is more important or the access aspect of privilege?

Which one has had a greater impact on your life?

But the third post on Race, Class and Privilege was my personal favorite. And not just because the author of the original meme found our blog and decided to comment.

In “Has Class Trumped Race? Part 3 – Acknowledging Privilege” I put the discussion on privilege into the concept of my personal background. I have decided to reproduce it here, as it still holds a lot of worth and value. (It also lays excellent background for this ever expanding piece on capitalism.) I wanted to excerpt my reader’s comments, but in the end there were far to many insightful ones to pick and choose. So, I am asking for two different actions – to read the piece and leave your comments here (the original ran back in February, so I highly doubt anyone is still paying attention to that conversation) and then to take a minute to review the older comments on Racialicious.

So, without further ado, here’s the piece:

Has Class Trumped Race? Part 3 – Acknowledging Privilege

by Racialicious Special Correspondent Latoya Peterson

As we have seen in the last two posts, privilege is difficult to define.

There is a material aspect to privilege. There is the issue of access to opportunities. There is also the issue of perception of privilege.

One of the main characteristics of privilege is that people generally are unaware of their privilege. Obviously, if you are not disadvantaged in an area, you generally don’t spare extra time thinking about how to fix something that isn’t broken. We tend to focus more on our personal struggles – not where we have personally benefited from someone else’s labor.

During the first two posts, I tried to refrain from making any value judgments about the examples I provided to you. I simply explained a situation. Why? Because the perception of my privilege changes.

Here’s a scenario that was not covered in the assessment:

I grew up in Montgomery County, MD. Since my parents could not afford many of the basic necessities, I was often tasked to help out with household expenses. When I was twelve years old, I watched two children after school and was paid $100 dollars a week. That was mostly taken by my mother, who needed the funds for household expenses. As I got older, school costs mounted. I worked to support myself. My mother provided me with no money for transportation, school clothes, AP assessments, SAT costs or other school expenses. So, there was a period of time in high school where I worked about 30 hours a week to pay for all the things that my friends took for granted. I never got a driver’s license because the costs to get one ($50 for the learners; $250 for driving school; time off from work to take the courses) were too high. I also passed on a lot of wonderful opportunities – like out of town trips – because I could not afford the fees.

Based on the above scenario, would you consider me privileged?

In the eyes of my friends, I was not privileged. My problems were very different from the problems that they knew. I had no expectation of a car when I turned sixteen. I often had no money on me at school, while their parents either gave them allowances or provided cash on demand. Some of my friends worked on the weekends, if at all. None of my friends ever had to contribute funds to the household. Some of my friends took the SAT four times, to maximize their best score. Their parents continued to pay for them to take and retake the test, as well as paying for schools like Kaplan. They could not fathom why I only took the test once.

In the eyes of my cousins, I was ridiculously privileged. I went to school in Montgomery County, where “everyone talks proper.” We had very good schools and free resources. Our schools never shut down because of disrepair or teacher furloughs. At the age of twelve, I was in a position to make $100 a week. I did not ever have to go without a job in school, because not only were jobs plentiful, but safe and easy for me to access. I was able to work a shift from 5:00 PM – 10:00 PM nightly and walk home without the fear of being accosted. I led an extracurricular filled life, with teachers who cared enough about my personal development to tell me about opportunities like Teen Court, Mock Trial, State SGA, Speech Team. I had friends with money and cars and access and they were able to loan me money if I was in a tight spot, or to drive me around when I needed to get somewhere.

We had gotten food from a food bank once that I can remember, but my sister and I never went hungry, like my cousins did. We never had to recycle one bowl of milk so that everyone could eat some cereal in the morning. We never had to deal with a drug addicted parent, as some of our friends did. We never had to deal with that parent inviting people in the house who wanted to sexually abuse us, like some of our friends did. My parents were young, but determined and intelligent. I never had to deal with a parent with a welfare mentality.* While I did have to deal with a depressed parent, I have never had to deal with a parent who was defeated by life.

In the eyes of my cousins – and some friends from childhood – my sister and I were privileged as fuck.

This is why Atlasien’s comment from Part 1 resonated so strongly with me:

My family took a very erratic trajectory through life. We had almost no material possessions and no housing from age 0-6, a privileged middle-class existence ages 6-15, then a sharp dive downwards after a business loss that meant I had to support myself through college.

Overall, though, my immediate family definitely had middle-class privilege. I know that other members of my family (on several completely different sides) grew up in dire poverty and experienced true desperation, hunger and even malnutrition. I’m not going to pretend my temporary hardships were close to what they went through. I had a lot more choices than they did.

Going back and forth on this kind of economic merry go round gives me this very strange, in between sense of privilege. On one hand, I can see very clearly where there were things that I lacked in life that would have helped me to get a leg up. On the other hand, I can also see how things could have been much, much worse. I lucked up in the cosmic crapshoot. I could have the exact same personality, intelligence, and tenacity that I have now, but if I was born to either of my aunts my life circumstances would have been completely different.

All told, I may have lacked in material privilege, but I was able to get access to understand what I was missing; and what I needed to succeed. I also developed one of the other parts of privilege: entitlement.

Entitlement plays a strong role in how we perceive and shape the world. This is why we see people (in the various discussions of the meme) say things like “It isn’t my fault that my parents cared about me enough to do their jobs.” Or “I earned everything I have.” We feel entitled to having “good” parents and entitled to our understanding of the world: where if you work hard and make the most of what you have, you will succeed. This kind of entitlement continues because this is what has been reinforced in our lives, that these things are true, and that if you apply effort to x task, y will happen.

Think about the Penelope Trunk example I referenced in Part 2 (emphasis mine):

But before I launch into a celebration of Sofia Coppola, I need to say that the U.S. is not a meritocracy: Rich people are better connected, so they get better jobs. And rich people who are not well connected tend to get better jobs because they have an easier time envisioning themselves in a successful career than poorer people. An example: My younger brother, now 21, did almost no homework in high school, and he recently landed a job most college graduates would covet — investment banking in Europe.

Was Trunk’s brother connected? Not really. But he could envision himself in a better position. Why? Because he felt entitled to be there – or to be there some day. Therefore, he put himself in situations where he was able to get a job which went with where he wanted to be in life. People who feel entitled are willing to make demands. People who do not feel entitled will pass up conferences, experiences, better jobs – because they do not feel like they deserve what is being offered. People take themselves out of the running because they have convinced themselves that the way they speak or how they dress or their level of education works against them – even if others think they are qualified.

That’s just one example.

We all feel entitlement in dozens of different ways every single day.

When discussing purchasing property with my boyfriend, I shoot down a lot of his recommendations. Why? Because I feel entitled to certain amenities where I live. I cannot imagine doing without a wonderful library system or a grocery store within walking distance or a nice view – even though millions of people live without these things each day. I feel entitled based on my newly acquired economic privilege and the experiences I had with these items in my life.

When walking down the street, I am occasionally moved express my love for my boyfriend. I may kiss him, I might hold his hand, I might tell him I love him. I can do all of these things, and the worst thing that may happen is someone will tell me to get a room. I can think about marriage, knowing that if we chose to wed all we need is a few hundred dollars and the address of the local courthouse. I feel entitled to these kind of feelings, entitled to express my love publicly because of my heterosexual privilege.

Last week, at three o’clock in the morning, I was pissed off. Why? The fire alarm had gone off yet again (twice in one week in the middle of the night) and I was forced to wake up, get dressed, and walk down sixteen flights of stairs to get to a safe place. I, like most of the other tenants in the building, were grumpy and tired and angry at having to go through yet another fire drill. We complained loudly about all the important things we were going to be late for in the morning. A young girl pushed her way to the front to talk to our concierge.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Is this a real fire? Because if it is, my mom is in a wheelchair and she can’t get out of the building.”

Now, I had never even heard the term “ableist” until I got to the blogosphere. And aside from a short stint volunteering at a special needs camp, I hadn’t given a thought to the lives of those who live with disabilities. But I’ll be damned if an understanding of privilege didn’t smack me in the face at 3 AM, that day. While the rest of us were annoyed, walking our way to the courtyard, that poor woman was probably terrified, wondering if someone would come to take her to safety.

My point with the three examples is that we all live with different levels of privilege. Some of these privileges are undeniable – after all, it wasn’t my hard work that gave me body with fully functioning limbs. And this body I take for granted could actually be injured to damaged at any time, robbing me of this privilege – and the feelings of entitlement that come with being able-bodied.

Still, some kinds of privilege seem to be easier to accept than others. While most of us would probably not be offended if a transsexual or gender queer person decided to bring up our cissexual privileges, some discussions of privilege tend to detonate.

So, I have three questions I’ve been turning over in my mind since planning this series:

1. How does entitlement play into the application of privilege?
2. Why do people want to deny or downplay the privileges that they have received?

And, most importantly –

3. Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?**

—-

* This is different than being on welfare. You can be in need of welfare benefits (or any of the other accompanying social programs) without developing a welfare mentality. The mentality occurs when the system defines who you are and how you steer your life.

** I am specifically not discussing male privilege here. This does not mean I have forgotten or discounted its influence, it just means I am going to wrap that discussion into another post. We already have enough to talk about.

52 thoughts on A Little More Discussion on Privilege

  1. It’s almost certainly wealth privilege for me. But my circumstances are rare: I lived overseas in a wealthy second world country (Singapore) where my mother, who started as a single working mom, took me to live with her and my new stepfather. All of the wealth that they had there gave me quite a bit of privilege.

    Class didn’t really have as much of an impact, because once you’d made it to Singapore as an expatriate, you disconnected from local class structures in the US and from other countries. Mannerisms of class didn’t restrict people as much because of the variety of backgrounds made judgments based on class harder.

    I’m not saying that all class styles were removed, but they were muted. If you didn’t speak as if you had a college education, you were at a handicap. But that’s most of the class privilege / barriers I saw.

    Race, on the other hand, was a significant barrier in getting into an overseas position as an American. There were almost no black or Latino people at all in my social group. There were obviously lots of Asians, Singapore being an Asian nation.

  2. Very brief thoughts:

    1) Entitlement is required for privlege because it protects you from learned helpelssness. It guarateeing that if opportunity knocks once, it’ll get grabbed by the throat, and not put aside because your percieved chances of taking advantage are low and you have other pressing concerns. If you know you’ll never get the job, why antogonize your boss by taking off for an interview, when you’re a paycheck away from foreclosure? If colleges don’t want your sort, why spend money on the application fee when you could spend it on a nice dinner for once?

    2) and 3) Hmm. I’d attribute it to a negative side-effect of a positive thing – the people who comment on feminist blogs recognize privlege as a bad thing, and wish to eliminate it, and therefore see having privlege as shameful. It’s harder to say how the effect applies across all groups, though. Possibly ‘privlege is shameful’ has penetrated popular understanding, when the message that would be preferred is ‘you can’t help your privlege, but you can try to help the less privleged’.

    (Disclaimer: American upper-middle-class able-bodied white speaking. Female-bodied trans, but not yet transitioned, so they add instead of multiply.)

  3. 3. Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?

    Because many white people are terribly afraid of being or appearing racist and can’t deal with white privilege without this being forced home. It took me a long time to accept my white privilege without adding “but…” and it still sometimes makes me uncomfortable knowing that someone can look at me and see my privilege right there; it’s very unsubtle.

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  5. I’ve been aware for quite some time that middle-class privilege actually has a lot less to do with how much money you have, and a lot more to do with how much you expect to have later in life, shaping your expectations of what you deserve and what you can get and what you should do.

    In grad school, I learned food hoarding habits that are still with me to this day. If I didn’t conserve food, I went hungry. Although I had a bank account, I remember one time I received a check by FedEx on a banking holiday, and I took it to a check cashing place because losing 10% of the money was a small price to pay to be able to use it to *eat* that day. I pawned my car multiple times, and sold what very little real jewelry I had. I lived on a single box of Hamburger Helper for three or four days.

    On the other hand… I *had* a car. I had a VCR, which I bought with a credit card (that I maxed out and then got stuck making payments on, which was one of the reasons for the food shortages.) I always bought my comic books, not *before* my food but directly after it, before paying my bills. I had family who would send me money to help if I admitted I needed it. My parents had bought all-new furniture for my apartment, some of which I still have. I was in *grad school*. And when I got temp work, it was at 9 dollars an hour when the minimum wage was $5.15, working at a desk in air-conditioned offices, because I knew computers.

    I never went to a food bank. I sort of vaguely knew they existed, but I wouldn’t have known how to find one, because I didn’t grow up poor. I spent money I didn’t have on stupid crap because I was sure that someday I’d have the money to pay it back (of course, people who have always been poor do this too…) My middle class privilege actually *hurt* me in some ways when I had to survive being really poor, because I couldn’t get it through my head that I couldn’t afford comic books. (Not the number of them I was buying, anyway.) And my work ethic was crap — I called in sick or unavailable to the temp agency *frequently*, because I was going to be a scientist, so why was I doing these crap computer piecework jobs? I worked only when I really needed the money, and as a result, sometimes when I really needed the money there wasn’t a job there for me.

    On the other hand, my middle class background — my education, my experience with computers — set me up so that once I entered the real working world and gave up on grad school, I *never* went without good, high-paying work for longer than three or four months except when I took four years out of the work force to have and raise two babies. And I was able to afford to do that because my circle of friends was dominated by the Internet, and I met a fellow computer professional who was poor and unemployed when I met him, and I was able to afford to support *him* and his kids for some time, so I had no problems with the notion of letting him support *me* for a few years once he was raking it in. My expectations in grad school of what I would be able to get out of life were, in the *long* run, accurate. I went hungry a few times and I didn’t get medical treatment and I ended up losing my car, but I was young and healthy and had the education and background that in the end, it didn’t matter. Now, I eat what I want and I get medical treatment when I need it and if I lost my car today I could run right out and get a new one. People of a different class background, without the privileges I had, cannot do that when they are my age.

  6. This is really well said.

    I think question #3 has to do with pride to an extent. Its hard to admit that some of your accomplishments are reliant on advantages that have nothing to do with you individually and everything to do with luck of the draw as it were. And it encourages people to quickly point out the other ways in which they were disadvantaged, because there’s greater pride to be had in overcoming obstacles.

  7. This is one of the best privilege posts I have read. I am curious about the entitlement-privilege link and hope to ask two opposite questions to help me process what you are saying:

    Can people be entitled without beig privileged, and privileged without being entitled?

    Not to sound too “chicken soup for the soul” or anything, but if the real driver of success is feeling entitled rather than privilege, then that seems like a vastly understated way of looking at it.

    When you say

    Was Trunk’s brother connected? Not really. But he could envision himself in a better position. Why? Because he felt entitled to be there – or to be there some day. Therefore, he put himself in situations where he was able to get a job which went with where he wanted to be in life. People who feel entitled are willing to make demands. People who do not feel entitled will pass up conferences, experiences, better jobs – because they do not feel like they deserve what is being offered. People take themselves out of the running because they have convinced themselves that the way they speak or how they dress or their level of education works against them – even if others think they are qualified.

    it seems like an understatement of serious proportions. it’s probably not just that he felt entitled, which (in theory) is a trait that could be acquired by anyone. it’s also, probably, that he “talked right” or “looked right”(Trunk appears to be white) or that he could afford to travel to interviews, etc. His entitlement was probably the least of it.

    I say this because I often work with people who are quite poor and yet extraordinarily motivated. While their motivation–or “entitlement”–is very helpful, they nonetheless clearly are able to do far less with it than they could if they were more privileged.

  8. @S It’s a little more than that. Your white privilege is no more visible than your able-bodied privilege, yet you aren’t bothered by admitting that you have an able-bodied privilege. Why? Admitting that you have an able-bodied privilege does not have guilt attached to it. Everyone knows that you didn’t take someone’s leg so that you can walk. You may benefit from being able-bodied, but you didn’t actively go out and hurt others to gain the privilege. Most white people are in that same situation. They benefit from a society that gives them privilege for being white, but they didn’t activly take privilege away from someone else. The difference is white privilege is manufactured. People actively took from others to gain their privilege and were able to do so by saying they don’t look like us so they aren’t one of us. A few of these people still exist. The problem is that when people look at you they can’t tell if you are someone who actively took from someone else to get the privilege or if you are someone who had the privilege bestowed upon them. There is a big difference, and you understandably don’t want to be associated with the former, thus the “but…” comes out.

  9. 3. Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?

    This reminds me of a conversation I had with my conservative (white, male wealthy) brother-in-law. He firmly believes that one of the fundamental tenets of conservatism is only believing in what one sees first-hand. Therefore, he has no empathy. He doesn’t experience real sexism, racism, etc., so in his world, they simple don’t exist.

    In his world, he can never acknowledge privilege, because he does not realize that others have it worse off. Privilege is in general, a lot more obvious to the people who don’t have it, than to the people who do. He doesn’t educate himself, or listen to the plight of others. For him, racism is solely “reverse racism” where he’s the one getting passed over by affirmative action.

  10. 3. Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?

    Because people who are rich and white don’t like being told that they didn’t fully earn that position. I say this as a rich white person who recently had a conversation about this with my even richer whiter dad. Because he is smart and hard-working, he feels everything he has is fully earned. He doesn’t get that the hard work he put in would have been much harder if he were born a black woman and would probably not have gotten him to the same place.

    That’s the same reason people want to deny their privileges. It’s a blow to the ego to think that you didn’t earn everything you have.

  11. @Josh Jasper –

    Interesting experience. Especially with this point:

    Race, on the other hand, was a significant barrier in getting into an overseas position as an American. There were almost no black or Latino people at all in my social group.

    The more I learn about this, the more I am interested in why this occurs. I have a couple third culture kids who write for my site, so I think I need to push them a bit more into developing a piece on the dynamic you described.

    @Rook –

    I like the idea of the backlash to discussions of privilege beingnegative side-effect of a positive thing. But does that get us to where we want to go?

    @ S –

    I can understand that feeling. Still though, it feels like there is something missing in the analysis. Why is it that conversations of privilege in terms of race and money detonate so quickly? I might wear my cis/het/able privileges on my sleeve as well, but there seems to be less of a negative reaction. I’ve had white people email me asking if they can give up white privilege, but I have yet to see someone ask to give up their het privilege. (Then again, I’m limited by my own experience. Considering what other bloggers mention, there may well very be an entire legion of people intent on giving up every last privilege they could even remotely possess. I just so happen to hear the race ones.)

    @Alara –

    I’ve been aware for quite some time that middle-class privilege actually has a lot less to do with how much money you have, and a lot more to do with how much you expect to have later in life, shaping your expectations of what you deserve and what you can get and what you should do.

    I do agree. I feel like part of the larger task is helping people to envision a more encompassing reality. That’s more than half of the battle. And it’s amazing the things that people hold on to even after they change classes.

    For me, for example, I haven’t been unemployed since I was seventeen, and until this year, I often worked two jobs at a time. Part of that is sheer terror at the idea that no job equals no income, and no income means I could become homeless again. Now, my situation isn’t that dire – I could downgrade, I have friends I can stay with, what have you – but I notice that my friends from middle class backgrounds have no compunctions about quitting a job without another lined up. To them, it’s just whatever. To me, there is a direct impact to me being able to provide for myself. And I do wonder how long I’ll carry that with me. Same with other habits I developed, like always having at least two bank accounts open in different financial institutions.

    @ [dave] –

    Pride is a good term for it. There is that sense of pride, where overcoming obstacles is good and having things handed to you is bad. I noticed when I started researching the privilege meme, a lot of people were very defensive while taking it, saying things like “Just because I had all this, you don’t know the life I lived!” I think there is also an element of a person not wanting to feel as though their life was charmed and that they shouldn’t have a right to complain. However, that sentiment is correct on some counts – material privilege is only one kind of privilege. It ensures some things, but not others.

    @Sailorman –

    Can people be entitled without being privileged, and privileged without being entitled?

    Oh yes. I think the former is more common than the latter though. There are lots of people with entitlement who are not privileged, and that does not necessarily translate into positive action. I can think of a lot of men I grew up with – they were entitled, but not privileged, and it kind of warped their view on how they should access what they felt entitled to. (Think theft, voluntary unemployment, street life.) One could even argue that Walter Lee Younger (character in A Raisin in the Sun) is an example of feeling entitled without being privileged, but that argument would be a dramatic oversimplification of the character. I have also met those who are privileged without the feeling of entitlement, and those folks (anecdotally speaking) seem to have been in contact with or under the influence of someone who made sure they knew how lucky they were. One of my best friends, for example, is economically privileged, but this is something I never knew about him until we became adults. However, his father went through extraordinary hardships as a child, so while he made sure his son would not want for anything, he also made sure his son knew that the world is not always so kind.

    @it seems like an understatement of serious proportions. it’s probably not just that he felt entitled, which (in theory) is a trait that could be acquired by anyone. it’s also, probably, that he “talked right” or “looked right”(Trunk appears to be white) or that he could afford to travel to interviews, etc. His entitlement was probably the least of it.

    Actually, I disagree. I mentioned that entitlement is a part of privilege, but not the sum. However, I think this is a very important part of how people obtain privilege. Things are definitely made easier if you class pass but I don’t think that’s the whole of it either. I read a lot of success stories, and it is interesting how many of the people who were able to make it did not pass with the groups and circles in which they walked. Instead, they found methods in which to compensate, often playing to their differences instead of trying to mask them.

    Often times, entitlement also leads to creative problem solving. I know I can’t do this, so I need to work on this in order for me to succeed. But still, there’s this idea that you are entitled to a better life so you’ll try to find various methods to succeed at that task.

    Motivation isn’t quite entitlement though. It’s part of the American Dream mythos where if you are motivated and you apply yourself, you will succeed. But the question that isn’t often asked by those who are motivated (but that is often asked by people who feel entitled to a better life) is how else can I get to this goal if this doesn’t work out. My father is a good example of this. He was a heavy proponent of letting your work speak for itself and always going above and beyond (and he still is) but he also found himself screwed over by the company he worked for 17 years. Motivation would have probably lead him to look for another job. Entitlement made him think “fuck this, I have skills and I know what I’m doing, whether they recognize it or not” so he tapped his networks, built an independent reputation, and eventually started his company.

  12. Brilliant post.

    “2. Why do people want to deny or downplay the privileges that they have received?”

    Self-attribution bias. People like to believe they are responsible for the good things in their lives. If I have succeeded it must be because I’m more awesome than those who have not succeeded, rather than because circumstances have aligned so that I have a million times more opportunities to succeed than those who have not.

  13. Doesn’t the very concept of privilege kind of devour itself? I mean, it can really only be used in two ways. First, it can be used by the “priviledged” themselves – to flagellate themselves. Only the privileged have time to perform such flagellation.

    Secondly, it can be used by “under privileged.” Well, ok, but what else can this be but a request to the privileged to at on the basis of their privilege to spread that privilege around?

    Both uses assume a variation of the white man’s burden, and this is the main trap of the North American Left.

    As for the class vs. race thing, isn’t about which antagonism actually hits something at the core of human social life? Assuming that antagonism is irreducible, that there will always be some sort of conflict, we need to trace out the coordinates of that conflict.

    I would insist that claiming that race is a fundamental conflict is a basically conservative move; it relies upon some kind of essentialized notion of race. Class conflict, on the other hand, is historically fluid and does not require some kind of reified prolitariate.

    We need to find a universal framework, not this constant petty bickering between endlessly proliferating “identities.” I don’t care what you “identify” as, and no one else should either; the question is, in what way are you all of us?

  14. a word about entitlement. I don’t think it’s always accurate to say that those who are less privileged don’t take an opportunity because they don’t feel they deserve it, or because they think their chances of succeeding are low. I missed out on a lot of opportunities when I was younger because I simply did not know how to recognize them as opportunities. And if someone has pointed it out, I would not have even know what to do to take the opportunity. other people’s parents had taught them to see doors where my parents had themselves only seen, and thus taught me to see, walls. we really didn’t know some things were opportunities and so couldn’t have thoughts about whether or not we deserved them or would succeed at them.

  15. Because people who are rich and white don’t like being told that they didn’t fully earn that position.

    Exactly this. And once you admit that it took a whole lot of help you didn’t even see to get all the things you ‘earned with hard work’, it’s hard to maintain the position that you deserve all those things for being a good and hardworking person, and that anyone with less must be less good or hardworking than you are.

  16. On the subject of entitlement and privilege, I often think of entitlement as a negative, and privilege as a neutral. It’s interesting to think about, because of the important ways that you describe entitlement as a good thing, rather than a bad thing.

    My brother and I went to two different Montgomery County, MD high schools, and even that difference was noticeable in terms of class privilege issues. I think class issues are hard to deal with in part because we don’t have much of a class vocabulary in the US. I don’t have words to describe how my brother’s experience was different than mine. I think it mostly had to do with being invited to go on other people’s family trips. You can get into arguments of “upper middle class” and what have you, but we don’t have a lot of words for the difference between a family making $500,000 a year and a family making $200,000 a year and a family making $90,000 a year and a family making $50,000 a year. It’s hard to discuss class when no one really knows what the perameters are. People identify as “middle class” and assume it means “like my family” without any other real definition.

  17. I really enjoy these conversations, because different types of privilege are so squishy and difficult to define.

    I think there are several reasons admitting class privilege is different (maybe even more difficult?) than admitting racial privilege:

    – There are infinite shades to class privilege. You can be raised by a blue collar tradesman who can earn upwards of 6 figures but doesn’t take you to museums. You can be raised by an adjunct professor, just starting her career, who give you access to university libraries and can always find you a tutor, but struggles to pay the bills. Each gives you different class advantages, and neither is necessarily better than the other.

    – You don’t have to be “rich” to have class privilege. Sure, everyone wants to be middle class, and it is so normalized in our culture that families earning 200k will claim it right alongside public school kids growing up in Baltimore’s housing projects. Regardless, even modest, ‘lower middle class’ life offers class advantages.

    – Experience of class is mostly comparative. When I was in public high school in an urban school district, I was probably in the top quarter of class status. Sure, my mom raised me by herself and was a nurse who worked weird hours and didn’t come home with a hefty paycheck, but I knew I had it pretty good. When I moved from there to an elite private university, my mind was blown. Most kids there weren’t on financial aid, though tuition was upwards of 50k a year. There were Roosevelts and Guggenheims in the class. Good God, I’d never felt more oppressed by my meager upbringing! But, because you can almost always find someone who is better off than you, it’s very hard to admit that you’re privileged.

    – Although it is still difficult to raise your class status, many people do. This leaves lots of people in a class they weren’t born and raised into — does someone have class privilege because they worked their way through law school and are now rich powerful? Or does she carry her poor upbringing with her? Both (which is an immensely unsatisfying answer). What about the opposite? Does someone lose their class privilege if they are cut out of a huge inheritance and live hand to mouth?

  18. Do you think that the material aspect of privilege is more important or the access aspect of privilege?

    Which one has had a greater impact on your life?

    I think the access aspect of privilege is more important. Access allows you to gain material privilege. If you have material privilege and no access privilege, you may lose your material privilege and not get it back.

    For me, access privilege has a huge impact on my life. I have a low-paying job, no car, and I rent a room in a shared house that isn’t going to get repaired. However, I have a university degree, parents that I can fall back on, free healthcare because I live in Canada, no children, no family members I have to support, and I don’t have any student loans to repay. I have a job. I’m able-bodied and still young, so taking the bus and carrying a huge load of groceries is no problem for me. (I live in a city, so I have access to public transportation.) I have a shared fridge in the shared kitchen, so I can store groceries inside that I’m not going to eat right away. I get free internet access. I’m an adult with adult rights, a Canadian citizen with Canadian rights. Access makes this all work, and gives me freedom.

    The most *consciously* valuable thing to me is my education and acculturation. I’ve been acculturated by my immigrant parents to save and not buy unnecessary things I cannot currently afford. I’m not going to rack up unpaid credit card debt. I reduce, reuse, and recycle because it’s economical as well as being good for the environment. I’ve been acculturated through my education to be aware of health hazards, which reduces my chances of becoming disabled. Because of my education, when racism and sexism are directed at me, I do not think the problem is with me, that I’m going above my station. I know my rights, and I feel entitled to reject sexual harassment and other types of adult bullying. I know that the social hierarchies, the patriarchy, the white supremacy, the kyriarchy, etc. do not reflect people’s worth.

  19. @ Murphy
    regarding your last point, I’d say, of COURSE one can lose one’s class privelege. Witness my own experience: I grew up solidly upper middle-class (well, sort of mixed class in a way – my parents divorced when I was a toddler – my mom definitely acquired an upper middle class life, whereas my dad was more small-town working/middle class). Anyway…my parents refused to help me with college and as a 33 year-old single person who makes $30K/year gross, I’d call myself lower middle class. I’ve been poor enough on my own that I’ve gone hungry, been unable to pay bills, gone into default on student loans and pretty much currently live from paycheck to paycheck.

    I have most definitely gone down in class privelege. But I have NOT lost my sense of entitlement. A friend of mine who grew up quite poor and I have discussed this several times. As someone who is currently on the lower end of the class continuum, I still have the expectation that I have a right to certain services, treatment, etc. He does not have this same sense of entitlement. I think entitlement can be the double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s irritating as hell to be on the receiving end of it (I worked retail for many years, and lord you would not believe the gross, ass-holish, entitled behavior from wealthy straight white dudes…). But on the other hand – it gets me things. It gets my friends things, when I use it. My poor friend doesn’t even think to ask for things that he needs – whereas I don’t even think twice about asking for them – of course I’ll ask.

    The thing that’s frustrating is when people like me (who grew up with class privelege and entitlement) don’t see how that effects people who DON’T grow up with it, and how it can have such a lasting impact.

  20. I’ve been trying to find some sources on how white privilege plays out in Canada, but haven’t come across much of anything. I suspect our experience is different up here – which may explain why some American discussions of race and privilege get my back up, since I read them and think ‘we don’t have that problem here, we’re Canadians, we’re NICER than that.’ When I stop being all huffy, I recognize that we likely do have our own issues up here (though not as bad as in the USA, right? Right?), but I just haven’t been exposed to them. Which is the essence if privilege.

    So, does anyone know of some good discussions of race and privilege in a Canadian context?

  22. and lord you would not believe the gross, ass-holish, entitled behavior from wealthy straight white dudes…

    I dunno, I’ve gotten that kind of behavior from just about every type of person (although I would venture a guess that they all had money)–they just assume that because you’re waiting tables or working retail that they’re better than you and can treat you like crap.

  23. Why do discussions about white privilege get ugly? Simple.

    A privilege is something to which you do not have a right. If you tell me, for example, that not facing racial discrimination is a privilege, then what you’re saying is that I do not have a right to escape racial discrimination.

    Now, if I’m a liberal middle-class white person, I am likely to think that everyone has a right to escape racial discrimination, and that only a racist would take away that right.

    You telling me that my ability to escape racial discrimination is a white privilege comes across as an attack on my rights. It makes you a racist in my eyes – after all, you are trying to take away my rights for the sole reason that I am white.

    This kind of logic, applied to things that are actually not rights, is entitlement. Effectively, “You are privileged” becomes an unjust attack. Now, when you are part of a majority, and all of society defines you as “the norm,” which is absolutely the case for white people in North America, you tend to think of a lot of your privileges as rights. Anyone who says otherwise is acting against your interests – attacking you – and everyone gets angry when attacked unjustly.

  24. I have most definitely gone down in class privelege. But I have NOT lost my sense of entitlement. A friend of mine who grew up quite poor and I have discussed this several times. As someone who is currently on the lower end of the class continuum, I still have the expectation that I have a right to certain services, treatment, etc. He does not have this same sense of entitlement.

    Demolitionwoman, I’m going through the same thing right now. Even though I’m currently in the lower-middle class bracket, it’s still hard for me to not think of myself as upper-middle class. I have a lot of class privilege issues that I’m trying to resolve with myself. (Ex: Why do I often feel the need to self-medicate with “retail therapy” when I can hardly afford to pay rent?)

  25. JPlum, take a look at the introduction to Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique (well, read the entire book!) for a look at Canadian history through the lens of black history, for an idea of how white, European privilege has blinded Canadians to the histories of non-white people in Canada. The fact that most of us make it through school without knowing that there was an honest-to-goodness slave-based economy in Canada is an example of white privilege in action.

    I don’t think it’s that our issues are not as bad as race issues in the U.S. They’re just … politer.

  26. @lauren o
    “… people who are rich and white don’t like being told that they didn’t fully earn that position… ”

    Oh contrare. My experience in the film industry is with people who are quite aware of and enjoy exercising their sense of entitlement.
    2 quotes from co-workers from my 2 most recent freelance gigs:
    “Well, he should have been born Jewish”
    and
    “My father made sure I wouldn’t ever have to (take denigrating work). I can’t help it if he’s not white.”
    My response, “So you dad worked hard so you wouldn’t have to”
    his reply, “No, he made sure I knew better than to even think of doing (a job like) that.”

  27. It would be ludicrous as the white, heterosexual, able-bodied daughter of two doctors for me to deny that I am on the receiving end of just about every privilege possible.

    I think entitlement is very important here, and a piece of that is that it’s not just what you imagine for yourself, it’s what others, parents, teachers imagine for you. There was only one person in my high school graduating class who didn’t go immediately to college. Rather than it being difficult for me to imagine how to get to college, it was practically unimaginable that I wouldn’t, to the point that several of us talked about not going as a sort of teenage rebellion. (That’s really embarrassing now.)

    2. Why do people want to deny or downplay the privileges that they have received?

    I think very few people view their lives as having gone smoothly or easily, even if, objectively they have gone more smoothly and easily than they might have because of privilege. There are things that can happen to you independent of race and class that are derailing: the death of a close friend or family member, a serious but treatable illness, a very bad breakup. When you acknowledge your privilege in a way it sounds like saying “my life has been easy,” even though it needn’t be.

    3. Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?

    Well, they do put you in bad company. After all, no one wants to think they’re Karl Rove in the liberal blogosphere. It’s a lot easier to think you’re nothing like that than to realize that while you are not responsible for the circumstances that led to your privilege (and conversely to the lack of privilege of other groups) there are concrete steps you have to take to be sure you are building your success on the backs of others just because you can.

  28. Um, that should be “not.” There are concrete steps you have to take to be sure you are NOT building your success on the backs of others just because you can.

  29. Another thing about different privileges that I’ve noticed is that if a person is lacking one of the privileges, they can more easily put themselves in another’s shoes.

    My gay guy friend will commiserate with me about male privilege; my black gal friend will mourn heterocentrism; I try my damnedest to understand my own white privilege.

    My white, male, rich boyfriend, though, who has never known need or discrimination or sexual harassment, gets all up in arms when I suggest that class privilege is one of the reasons he got his cushy job. Or that white privilege has anything to do with how easily he got his nice apartment. Or that male privilege was involved when he went to the car dealership and the associate approached him first, ignoring a woman who had walked in right before us.

    In one particularly interesting discussion, it came down to him saying, “I like my privilege. Don’t ask me to give it up.”

    As if he could.

  30. One factor I haven’t seen mentioned here that I feel comes into play a lot with disavowal of privileged status is a misconception of privilege as a zero-sum game – you’re either privileged or you’re oppressed. So I’ve seen people say that they can’t benefit from white privilege because they grew up poor, or disabled, or have some other socially disadvantaged status.

    Privilege is seen as being reserved for the elite, rather than being one of many advantages people can have. Privileges stack up or counteract each other. I’m a woman of colour which means I’ve had to deal with issues which my white and/or male friends do not. Then again, I’m solidly middle class, able-bodied and cis-gendered. There are lots of problems in the world that will never affect me directly because of that. I do feel that not accepting this is a form of privilege in itself. Not only do people not have to deal with such issues, but because of that they can deny they actually exist. It’s largely about learning to accept other’s experiences.

  31. Restructure!, that’s what I’m asking. We have a social safety net, it’s easier to be upwardly mobile, we have a public policy of multiculturalism, we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Does that make the…distance of privilege between black and white narrower? I would hope that it does. Not that it erases white privilege, but I hope that we are better at the even distribution of privilege than the US. Reading American-based commentary, it seems like the gulf between white and black is SO much bigger, as the difference between economic classes is so much bigger. I guess what I’m looking for is something on the ‘intersectionality of oppression’. I’d imagine being poor in Canada is less oppressive than in the US, because no one here is going to go bankrupt from something like medical expenses. On the other hand, we disproportionately imprison native people, the way the US imprisons blacks. All the statistics and experiences seem to be American, and I’m wondering if Canadian experiences differ.

  32. Pingback: Shae’s Place » Blog Archive » Yes, Let’s Do Talk About Privilege.

  33. Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?

    I think it has to do with the fact that race is invisible to a lot of white people. It’s the whole “I don’t see color” thing — the people why say that are ignorant jerks, but they’re also telling a grain of truth, in that they don’t see their own color. While straight folks, in my observation, very much integrate their heterosexuality into their identities, and men integrate their maleness, white people often go around totally unaware of themselves as white. It can be hard to absorb the fact that quality X gives you privilege when, despite all reality, you don’t have that deep, fundamental experience of yourself as X.

    Class is a little different. Truly rich people do, in my experience, think of themselves as rich, but middle class people, who do have to work hard and to some extent worry about money, don’t see their own class privilege, and often don’t identify as “middle class” the way they identify with their gender, sexual orientation, and other characteristics.

    I hope that makes sense. I’m absolutely not trying to justify those attitudes, and I’m sure their are other sources for them, too, including the others named in this thread.

    (I’m a white, middle class lesbian, by the way.)

  34. JPlum,
    White privilege is not the same thing as class privilege. White privilege in the United States is more than just “White Americans are on average richer than Black Americans”. The Class Privilege checklist in Latoya’s first post in the series is about class privilege. If you want the White Privilege checklist, check out Peggy McIntosh’s Daily effects of white privilege.

    Do you think those white privilege list items don’t apply in Canada?

  35. JPlum,

    Himani Bannerji’s Dark Side of the Nation would be a good starting point for learning about Canada and privilege. After reading it, I’ll never be that excited about Canadian “multiculturalism” again!

  36. I was hoping they applied less. I was hoping we’d made more progress in the distribution of privilege. But if I’m wrong, then I’m wrong.

  37. ****Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?****

    Because, I, and I suspect many others reject the concept as commonly stated. You’ve got it ass-backward. I don’t have privilege. I deserve what little I have and more. What is happening is you are getting screwed.

    You getting hosed as a class doesn’t make me privileged, it makes you hosed. When you call me privileged, you are adding a negative moral component to it, which is even more infuriating when I suspect many of the people here (lawyers & whatnot) are in a way better position in life than I am. Whenever someone in the working class or below gets told to “check your privilege”, I imagine the response in their mind is “eff you”.

    I certainly know that that is my general response when people start lobbing “privilege” at me. The only people that are privileged are those born to the upper middle class or above. Beyond that, it’s just quantifying how screwed you are.

    “privilege” is far too often used to shut down conversation. If my opinion is not worth anything because of my nonexistent privilege, why should I participate, or for that matter, even care about what is being talked about. I see that word, and I roll my eyes and move on.

    That all being said, that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do what I can to make the more screwed (poc, GLBT, etc) less screwed, but you call me privileged, I am saying eff you and walking away. Don’t you dare tell me I don’t deserve what little I have earned or my place in life just because I am white, or have any other kind of “privilege.

    As long as you use the concept of “Privilege”, you are going to get rejected by the people in the alleged Privileged classes who feel they are getting screwed everyday. Middle class isn’t privilege, it should be the baseline.

  38. Enititlement without privilege is quite common – we all know people who think the world owes them something.
    Privilege without a sense of entitlement is I think rarer, but quite likely to happen if you gained privilege slowly – if you remember growing up without it. Then you’re quite likely to feel lucky, because you feel entitled to what you had as a child, and you have an awful lot more.

    I attend a middle-class university of good reputation and between my loans and my parents I didn’t have to work this vacation. I don’t need to keep a weekly budget because I have enough coming in to cover my needs. That’s privilege.
    But my idea of ‘what I can expect’ is clothing and toys handed down through church, books from the library, and a bed to myself with enough blankets that I don’t freeze in the winter because only the front room has heating. I am privileged now, and I know it, and that stops me from being entitled.

    I think. I may just be blind to my own sense of entitlement; stranger things have happened.

  39. @demolitionwoman and @Angel H

    The points you brought up were what I was trying to say — even if you no longer have the cushion of expendable income you were used to when you had starkly identifiable class privilege, you still carry class privilege with you. Class is about more than the ability to buy things.

    @Bruce from Missouri

    When you say ‘middle class should be the baseline,’ I agree with you. Everyone deserves a middle class existence — then, why is this so hard to define? But the problem is this: white people in America are assumed to be “baseline,” but not everyone is white. “Middle class” is defined as the baseline, but a ridiculous percentage of people define themselves that way. And (this is important) many, many people are poor. Even if your middle class upbringing and adult life is hard, you have certain advantages. That doesn’t mean you don’t work hard, or aren’t talented, or haven’t invested a lot in your education or job training. It just means that there are certainly people who are just as hard-working, talented, and committed to education/training as you are who cannot get as far.

  40. Able-bodied privilege is not a level playing field, either. I live in Australia, with universal health-care – in the US I would have been in a far worse situation. I was very ill with cancer and its after-effects for several years, but my literacy, ability to deal with bureaucrats, being white, young, fluent in English, well-spoken and university-educated meant that I could cope with government bureaucracy even while ill. Accessing money (a fortnightly payment below the poverty line) was a full-time job in itself – the system was designed to exclude as many people as possible, and it took all my other privileges, and all my energy, to fend off this evil system. It was a stress I really didn’t need, but in retrospect, I’m probably one of the people best able to deal with it, though it certainly didn’t feel that way at the time.

  41. Murphy, I for the most part agree with you. But defining that as privilege is guaranteed to raise hackles because of the implicit moral judgement that I don’t deserve what I worked for. When you call it privilege, you are implying that in order to bring other people up, you must drag the “Privileged” down. The word at the very least IMPLIES a zero-sum game.

    I’m sure some better wordsmith could come up with a better way of putting it, but I stand by my statement that a more forward looking, and less offensive way to think about it is “I am not privileged, but you are getting screwed out of what is rightfully yours”. Everybody who works as hard as I do, should have at least as much as I do. If you don’t, it’s not because I didn’t earn it, it is because for one reason or another (race, LBGT, Class) you are getting screwed.

    As long as the word “Privilege” is used to other people, you are going to get tons of pushback from people who already feel screwed in their lives. If nothing else, it’s bad politics, because it offends people who are otherwise on your side.

  42. I have to agree with Muse. I have nearly every privilege imaginable, except for being entirely able-bodied. Seeing other people who didn’t work as hard as me or who weren’t as quick to grasp concepts get higher grades than me in high school because they were able to make it to class all or nearly all of the time has helped me to see my privileges over people who are just as able as me, but don’t have the benefit of an upbringing that included excellent public schools, a strong family, etc.

    As for the questions, I think that the biggest problem lies in the definition of “privilege.” The word can be used in at least two ways: it can be undeserved and unearned or deserved but unearned. The first is like giving a child a cookie for no reason; it implies that one could take away the privilege without committing an injustice. This is not the category that white-, het-, cis- etc.- privilege falls into. The second is like giving a child a nutritious meal; it implies that one could not take the privilege away. This is the definition we use, but it is not necessarily the common one. (Though “privilege” is still probably the best term, since the closest other word, “right,” typically has a much more restricted meaning.)

    People who are not as acquainted with our particular use of “privilege” (like me two years ago) assume that we mean the first definition, which would mean that one could take away their privilege, or deny it to their children, without committing injustice. This is not the case, any more than denying a town a fire station would just because another town doesn’t have one.

    My conclusion: education. But then, that’s always my conclusion. It sort of comes with the preparing-to-be-a-professor territory.

  43. Weird as this is going to sound, part of my problem with the word “privilege” is that it’s the word my parents used to describe the things they could take away from me to discipline me. I had phone privileges, but they could decide that I was grounded and not allowed to use the phone. I had car privileges, but the car belonged to my parents and the privilege could be taken away at their pleasure.

    So when I hear “privilege” I hear “temporary luxury that can be taken away from you,” and on some level I wonder when that axe is going to fall and the privilege I’ve been enjoying will be yanked away. I seriously doubt that I’m the only middle-class white person whose parents used that word, either.

    Sometimes the problem really is that words mean different things to different people.

  44. I always felt very privileged, at least from an economic standpoint, even as a child. I remember thinking that I was lucky to have enough food, clothing, shelter, and so on. We were middle class. I went to public schools with children from a wide range of incomes. Looking back I’m not sure whether my feeling grateful came from reading/watching the news or being taught that attitude by my parents. But somehow I was always very much aware that there were many people in the world who were a *lot* worse off than I was.

    Is this attitude (acknowledging privilege) unusual? Several of the comments seem to say that it’s more common for people to deny their own privilege. Maybe it’s a generational thing? I’m in my late 40s and my parents were children of the depression.

    At any rate, it was not hard, when I got older, to extend this concept to other types of privilege. It was easy to understand that while I had been aware of some of my advantages there were a lot of other advantages that I had taken for granted. I don’t remember feeling anger, guilt or denial when I learned about these other types of privilege but maybe it’s just been too long ago.

    One final comment is that I haven’t seen anyone comment on one very important privilege that I think about daily. I don’t live in fear that my city will be bombed during the night because the war is being fought “out there.” I do feel sad/guilty at times about this privilege.

  45. To tackle 2 and 3, let’s turn the question on its head. To take off on Bruce’s point, people who take an “I’m not privileged, you’re just unfairly screwed” stance are often proselytized to, even when they come in ready to work hard to right that “unfairly screwed” bit. The amount of energy spent couching it in specifically privilege terminology is definitely telling in its own right. Not to mention the number of times where I’ve seen the word used as a thinly-veiled euphemism for the appropriate -ism. It’d be interesting to compare how heated people get when called on their privileges, vs. how often they level the term at others.

    For #1, I wonder if the meaning I’m picking up and the meaning you intend are the same thing. Entitlement is tied to privilege only insofar as learned helplessness hasn’t beaten one down. An attitude of “the world owes me a pony” is distressingly common through all walks of life. Privilege can certainly make one more demanding, but simply being demanding rarely improves one’s station. A sense of entitlement/empowerment along with the right personality does open many doors, but I can’t really see personality in toto being linked that tightly with any of the privilege types mentioned here.

  46. Righteous post! I love the cousins-comparison. My cousins thought because we were in THE CITY in the NORTH (flashing lights! swimmin pools! movie stars!) we were livin large. But they were eating great food (we realize now!) that they grew and harvested themselves in their own fields. They thought eating food from dazzling TV commercials (McDonalds! Burger King!) was privilege. They were eating what we would now call gourmet organic greens!

    So, who were the privileged ones? Back then, people would unequivocally say the city people were. NOW we might say, my cousins certainly had the far healthier lifestyle–strong aerobic exercise, milking cows themselves, excellent natural food, clean air. etc. (No accident that they all lived to be ancient, while my city relatives dropped like flies.)

    We never had to recycle one bowl of milk so that everyone could eat some cereal in the morning. We never had to deal with a drug addicted parent, as some of our friends did. We never had to deal with that parent inviting people in the house who wanted to sexually abuse us, like some of our friends did. My parents were young, but determined and intelligent. I never had to deal with a parent with a welfare mentality.* While I did have to deal with a depressed parent, I have never had to deal with a parent who was defeated by life.

    And I dealt with all of that and more, yet I am white. For this reason (as I wrote recently), my father was totally obsessed with his whiteness. That was his trump card, his (literally) GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD.

    And rich people who are not well connected tend to get better jobs because they have an easier time envisioning themselves in a successful career than poorer people.

    Amen! Or, I would add, imagining themselves in ANY “career”–rather than just a job.

    This recalls some long conversations with middle-class people in which I’ve been asked, well, WHY DIDN’T YOU CHOOSE THIS CAREER, or THAT CAREER, and you think, I never knew anyone who did those things. Those careers did not go to people I grew up with, and it just never occurred to me.

    Why do people want to deny or downplay the privileges that they have received?

    Unfortunately, as in your 3am example, I don’t think we often perceive our privilege as actual privilege. As an attractive young woman, I received much positive AND NEGATIVE attention from men, and consequently would have boiled over if you had accused me of (phrases I have heard in the blogosphere): “thin privilege” or “looks privilege” .. yet now that I have neither of these, I feel the loss of these privileges ACUTELY!

    And, most importantly –

    3. Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?**

    I think poor people can feel erased by the discussion. Race is usually easy to define in our culture, but CLASS really is not. I mean, what are we even talking about? That recent class checklist that circulated online, was one of the most harrowing things I ever read. I didn’t put it on my blog, because I found I was too ashamed to admit some of those things (i.e. both parents, three step-parents, three grand-parents having been in jail)… you felt you had to explain the connections before participating, I wanted to say “Hey, they didn’t have any lawyers!” and explain that the same offense is not the same in every class (rich kids are taken home when found drunk and disorderly, poor kids taken to jail, for example). Rather than re-write Karl Marx, decided to give it a pass.

    Great post, great examples and discussion.

  47. I agree with everyone who’s said this is a thorny issue to put into concrete terms. I think that’s what might make it so complicated to discuss.
    People see ‘privilege’ in different ways. For example money wise, my sister had this friend in school who we considered quite rich (i think her family had two cars which was pretty much my childhood definition of rich, which just shows how different peoples conceptions can be), yet she considered herself quite poor. Outward appearances can mask things too, I was lucky enough to grow up in a big house in South London, the kind that would go for a stupid amount of money. However it went with my dad’s job, we didn’t own it, we couldn’t afford to heat it half the time. Yet because we had this big house and the idea in everyone’s mind is ‘big house=lots of money’ we never quite felt we fitted into that image, yet I can’t deny that that image of wealth probably helped whether or not we had any material wealth that lived up to other peoples expectations or not.

    I think it’s this flexibility of what people see as a different levels of privilege and the fact that a privilege can be outweighed by a disadvantage (tough these can depend on circumstance) . I suppose some issues that aren’t easy to fit in a check box are always going to be harder for people to grasp and understand.

  48. I grew up middle-class in Texas. We were privileged but not enough to suit my mother. Mother thought the most important thing in the world was money. That and being pretty. So I grew up hearing that mantra.

    Privilege buys isolation–you can avoid as much of the real world as you like. It also buys access–you can take as much of it as you like also. Privilege produces Paris Hilton. And, worse, It produces George Bush.

    It also produces great art—-money and a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf said.

    This has been a country of white privilege since its founding. The unprivileged or under-privileged class has grown disproportionately to the rest of the population. We can go back to the Industrial Revolution to trace some of this, but the point is now and always has been that the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. This is called Capitalism. Capitalism’s end product is privilege.

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  50. The thing that’s frustrating is when people like me (who grew up with class privelege and entitlement) don’t see how that effects people who DON’T grow up with it, and how it can have such a lasting impact.

    Had the exact opposite experience where I grew up as a latchkey kid with parents who worked 14+ hours/day 7 days/week for several years, where I worked part-time during junior-high and high school to help contribute to the household, and where money was extremely scarce, especially during my high school years.

    One of the results of this has been a willingness to make stark distinctions between what I “need” and what I “want”, a distinction I found most friends and acquaintances from middle and upper-class backgrounds were unable or unwilling to make. One example of this was a recent conversation with an older friend from an upper-middle class background who insisted he “needed” a new computer despite being buried in debt and having a computer that may be old, but still perfectly functional for his needs as a grad student. It took a while before I got him to realize that considering all of that, his “need” were really a “want” he cannot afford given his current financial state.

  51. Hi Alyssa, sorry it took so long to reply to your reply. Much of what you said is what I was meaning but not expressing.

    The reason that I don’t consider ablebodied privilege as visible as white privilege is that I have several friends who have physical difficulty getting around but are not in wheel chairs, MS sufferers for example. Because they are young they often get older people expecting them to stand up on buses and trains not realising that they have greater need to sit, and people criticising them for using lifts instead of stairs when it is actually necessary for them to do that. I am also disabled although not in terms of mobility and nobody would know by looking at me.

  52. This is from a while back byt,

    Alyssa says: “Your white privilege is no more visible than your able-bodied privilege, yet you aren’t bothered by admitting that you have an able-bodied privilege. Why? Admitting that you have an able-bodied privilege does not have guilt attached to it. Everyone knows that you didn’t take someone’s leg so that you can walk. You may benefit from being able-bodied, but you didn’t actively go out and hurt others to gain the privilege. Most white people are in that same situation. They benefit from a society that gives them privilege for being white, but they didn’t activly take privilege away from someone else. The difference is white privilege is manufactured. People actively took from others to gain their privilege and were able to do so by saying they don’t look like us so they aren’t one of us.”

    But a huge chunk of the able-bodied privilege *is* manufactured. It’s manufactured when architects design buildings with steps or narrow doors that wheelchairs can’t get through, when designers create websites that can’t be deciphered by screen-readers, never mind the regular old not-getting-the-job, not-getting-the-taxi, not-getting-the-apartment of a person being actively discriminated against!

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