Privilege checking

[liv]

So infamous former Conservative MP Louise Mensch wrote a reasonably ignorant article against asking people to check their privilege. The left-leaning internet, lead by Laurie Penny, got very impatient with Mensch. I don't particularly care about Mensch versus Penny; Penny unquestionably has the sharper mind and is far more politically astute and media-savvy, but that's like pointing out that Bach was a better musician than Justin Bieber. I'm more interested in the essence of the debate, about whether the idea of privilege and checking one's privilege is useful to feminism.

Five years ago (woah, where did all that time go?) I made a first stab at expressing my opinion about privilege. I have moved on a lot since then, but I still stand by a lot of what I wrote there. I still think McIntosh's Invisible Knapsack thing is badly flawed, partly because it's displaying the exact problem that it complains about, where a white woman gets lauded and quoted all over the place for trying to explain the experiences of people of colour to other white people. I still think that "privilege" is rhetorically very distracting; people just hate being told they have unearned advantages, and as Scalzi painfully learned, changing the word doesn't help, it's the concept of unearned advantage, whatever you call it, that puts people's backs up.

I mean, you can say it doesn't matter if people get annoyed, because the only ones who do respond that way are the ones who are entitled and not really likely to be helpful to activist causes anyway. But I think it's a real problem, because honestly, everybody has troubles, and people's griefs and hardships are extremely real to them even when other people are worse off. Penny points out, correctly, that society is not, in fact, a game of top trumps, but the problem with talking about "privilege" is that it kind of makes the issue seem that way. Penny is also completely comfortable with the idea of intersectionality, that people can have privilege on one axis and lack it on another, but the fact is that those intersections often seem to get in the way of having any kind of useful, productive discussion.

It's not that I don't believe in the concept that some people have systematic advantages and others face systematic barriers, in ways that go beyond individual circumstances. Though I suppose part of why I feel a bit uncomfortable with the whole "privilege" frame is that I am much more inclined to think about and notice individuals than systematic stuff. Acknowledging that bias, though, I'm not sure that the frame of privilege is the best way to talk about, let alone deal with, that reality.

What about the specific request to check your privilege? It's very much mocked, and in some ways it's an easy target. Partly because a lot of zealous and not very worldly people make that request of their peers, but probably more importantly because the very people who are most challenged by privilege checks stand to gain a lot from mocking the concept. But I do want to address one of the objections to it, which is that it's seen as a way of shutting people up, and that that's unfair. pw201, for example, refers to the concept of logical rudeness; saying to someone who disagrees with you, check your privilege is an unanswerable "argument", there is simply nothing they can say in rebuttal that puts them in the right.

The thing is, though, this is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't believe that the ultimate goal in life is to have rational, evidence-based and logically rigorous discussions about everything. I mean, I love rational, evidence-based, logically rigorous arguments, I think they're great. But some things really ought not to be up for debate, or at least not up for constant rehashing of the same tired old bigotry-rooted basics. It should be possible for, say, women to express opinions without constantly having to provide a clear, evidenced case that women are equally entitled to opinions as men are. Sometimes the best response to what is essentially an attack on one's legitimacy as a participant in the discussion is not to rigorously prove that one is in fact legitimate, it's to shut the attacker up.

However, telling people to shut up makes you look like the bad guy, the person who's being unreasonable. To give an example: from time to time it's happened to me that I have mentioned some anti-semitic incident, and I've had comments that what I'm reporting can't possibly have happened. So I'll rebut that by linking to a relevant news article, and get the comment that the article isn't good evidence because it's well known that most news media is controlled by Zionist interests who will always interpret any possible criticism of Jews or Israel as anti-semitism. Now, I could provide a rigorous, evidence-based argument that there is not in fact a world-wide Jewish conspiracy running all the media, but frankly I might not want to. Even assuming that kind of comment comes from good-faith ignorance, which I do believe it sometimes does, it's going to take a long time to prove that there is no conspiracy. And I have it a lot less bad than a lot of people from other minority backgrounds in terms of how often I have to deal with that kind of thing.

The thing is, if you only value having logical arguments, the onus is always on me to rebut this kind of thing, time and time again and never be able to actually talk about what I want to talk about. If I say I don't want to have that debate, I'm being at best unreasonable, or quite possibly even mean and bullying and censoring and all the other accusations that get thrown around in this kind of discussion, especially when it's happening in a fragmented way all over the internet. I think "check your privilege" was kind of invented as a way to get round that double bind, it is intentionally a way to tell someone to shut up which comes with a moral justification. But of course, that doesn't work, because instead of people being horribly offended that anyone would dare to reject the terms of the discussion they want to have, you get people being horribly offended at being "accused" of having privilege.

There may not be any way to fix this, I know. But I am not yet convinced that the privilege framing has enough benefits to outweigh this downside, even though I don't really have any better suggestions.

Comments

[siderea]

One of my favorite sayings is, "The truth shall set you free, but first it shall piss you off."

I am deeply okay with the fact that the frame of privilege horribly offends people who want to believe falsities about their standing in the world. That kind of latent racism/sexism/anti-semitism/etc is like land mines: I don't know any scalable way of removing them from the landscape, but to set them off.

When people get emotionally invested in things that are factually incorrect, they get upset to have that pointed out to them. That upsetness often initially comes out as anger. There really isn't any way of letting people down that's sufficiently gentle that finding out that the world doesn't work as they always thought isn't going to be a huge shock, and quite ego threatening. It calls into question their very ability to know the world. Consider how angry people get when they find out they've been tricked or conned -- or that they think someone might be playing them. To find out that the game you thought you were winning was rigged in your favor all along, that's finding out you were lied to. Even more scarily, it may have been you lying to yourself. This doesn't go down easy.

[liv]

This and your other comment are really great challenges to the view I'm flirting with here, thank you.

I am not so convinced that privilege, the domain in which we might or might not use the term "privilege", can usefully be reduced to questions of fact, of truth and falsehood. A person's standing in the world is the sort of thing that seems subjective and context-dependent to me. And whether you call that privilege or not is very much a matter of opinion, no matter how the facts stand.

That said, I do very much buy your explanation of why people are emotionally resistant to being told that they are privileged. I think that makes a lot more sense than the sort of conspiracy theory that people reject having their privilege called out because they're trying to defend that privilege. It's a real challenge to people's worldview, that makes a lot of sense.

[siderea]

A person's "standing in the world" is the sort of thing that seems subjective and context-dependent to me.

Every single one of those items listed in the Invisible Knapsack article you quibble with is an assertion of objective, testable fact. In fact, many of them have been checked, whether in full on scientific research, or investigative reporting.

So, no, we're not discussing something that is subjective or a matter of opinion.

That's why it's so upsetting. You can be minding your own business, believing whatever self-serving nonsense about self-sufficiency or fair shakes or whatever, and WHAM: facts.

[siderea]

P.S.

One of the reasons people freak out at the concept of privilege is because what it implies is freaking terrifying.

If one experiences one's self as a not particularly advantaged person in your society, if one is just scraping by, there's a sort of reassurance in the thought that you are "down on your luck", and that normal is actually a more comfortable existence that you have: it provides hope that you can make it back into the great mass of normal some day, and enjoy the advantages imagined to belong to normal people.

Finding out that, actually, the meagre, hard-scrabble existence one knows is actually about as good as it gets for most people, that doing better is a lottery win, and that the only reason you have it as good as you do is things outside your control like your sex or race?

What just changed with that reframe is one's entire sense of how good life is, on average, for people in your society: the bottom just fell out. Suddenly your society went from one you could think of as, "well, okay bad things sometimes happen, but it's mostly a safe place and mostly a good place for the people in it" to something much closer to a dystopian novel.

If the thought that, e.g., the only reason you can afford your housing is that some huge slice of your society's earning capacity is systematically hampered, or they're actually forbidden from buying most housing stock, thereby artificially depressing housing prices-- if that thought doesn't scare you shitless, you're not paying attention. Systems of privilege have huge economic consequences, and learning about them can be like discovering that the company you bought isn't solvent after all.

[lotesse]

This is beautifully, beautifully put. I experience a lot of this sort of thing; I teach a freshman intro writing course in a red state, and keep stubbornly trying to address social issues. I think this issue of fear is key to consciousness-raising. In some ways, prejudice seems random and crazy, but if you stop and think it's almost always rational in some thought system; it's the nature of those thought-systems that horrifies us, so that we don't want to look at their logic with bare eyes. We're so used to the capitalist equation of winning with being good that the idea of oppression being in fact in the oppressor's best interests causes us to blow a lobe. My students almost always default to the "crazy" model of prejudice because it shields them from the truth.

[liv]

Ooh, really interesting example, thank you. I think it's really important to acknowledge the prejudices give actual benefits to the people at the top of the heap. I can easily see why people find the "random crazy" interpretation more comforting. And it may well be that talking about privilege is one way to get past that defence, yes.

[liv]

I very much recognize the emotional experience that you're describing here, suddenly encountering facts that break a previously held belief that okay bad things sometimes happen, but it's mostly a safe place and mostly a good place for the people in it. And yes, it is terrifying. I had a very good friend who sat with me while I worked through being terrified and found a way to face that fuller but less comforting picture of reality.

Acknowledging that everything in this comment is accurate, I suppose my question is, and then what? The privilege frame seems to me to be confronting someone who feels like a not particularly advantaged person in your society, if one is just scraping by, someone enduring a meagre, hard-scrabble existence, and responding, essentially, well, who cares about your trivial little problems, most people on this planet are much worse off! I don't really want to do that, if there's some straight, white, culturally Protestant man who feels unloved and alienated and threatened and his economic situation is uncertain and all the other myriad problems he has, I want to establish a sense of solidarity and say, this society is rotten because you are one of the luckiest people in it and yet your life is still more scary and miserable than it is happy. And yes, I need him to understand that people from gender, sexual, religious, ethnic etc minorities have all the same problems of alienation and economic threat and so on, plus some other problems due to systematic discrimination, historical and current. I don't think that's best communicated by emphasizing that unhappy, scared SWM are privileged, though.

The housing example is a powerful and pertinent one, yes. I've been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on housing discrimination against African-Americans and it's blowing my mind with just how pervasive and how deliberate that was. And a good example of literal privilege, I bet there's loads of white Americans who have no idea how much their families benefit from this deliberately skewed and racist housing market. I'm fairly sure that this country is heading rapidly for a huge crisis of housing policy too, though hopefully it's not quite so overtly racialized.

[siderea]

The privilege frame seems to me to be confronting someone who feels like "a not particularly advantaged person in your society, if one is just scraping by", someone enduring a "meagre, hard-scrabble existence", and responding, essentially, well, who cares about your trivial little problems, most people on this planet are much worse off!

It sounds like you're struggling with your own feelings of being marginalized, and thinking that Because Of Privilege My Problems Are Invalidated And I Have No Right To Complain About Them.

Which is White Guilt, yes?

I don't really want to do that, if there's some straight, white, culturally Protestant man who feels unloved and alienated and threatened and his economic situation is uncertain and all the other myriad problems he has, I want to establish a sense of solidarity and say, this society is rotten because you are one of the luckiest people in it and yet your life is still more scary and miserable than it is happy.

Yes, that's what one does.

And yes, I need him to understand that people from gender, sexual, religious, ethnic etc minorities have all the same problems of alienation and economic threat and so on, plus some other problems due to systematic discrimination, historical and current. I don't think that's best communicated by emphasizing that unhappy, scared SWM are privileged, though.

Sorry, it's not optional. What's going to happen when you express that "need" for him to "understand" problems he doesn't share, is that he's going to reflexively dismiss them. They don't exist. He's certainly never seen them.

And you'll be right back to, "Actually the reason is these things are invisible to you, because of... oh damn."

This is why the Knapsack is "Invisible". It is about things hard to impossible to see for yourself, if you're not in the disadvantaged group.

Look, if you come up with something better, we'll all be delighted to know. But there's a reason why we've recently gotten to the bedrock of privilege now.

[jack]

If the thought that, e.g., the only reason you can afford your housing is that some huge slice of your society's earning capacity is systematically hampered, or they're actually forbidden from buying most housing stock, thereby artificially depressing housing prices-- if that thought doesn't scare you shitless, you're not paying attention

:( That's a really good (and scary) example, thank you for making it!

[siderea]

Oh, just wait till you hear what I have to say about sexism and the world economy. :/

[lilacsigil]

While I agree that the concept of privilege is greatly misused in argument, I think that this is only possible because it is such a powerful and scary idea. Everything you've said in this post makes me more convinced that the privilege framing is important and relevant - my dad gets all cranky when I tell him to stop saying racist things, for example, but it doesn't mean he should go around saying them or that his family should have to listen.

[liv]

Hm, I didn't exactly mean to convey, talking about privilege makes people angry, so we should avoid using the term / concept. I mean, absolutely, if people say racist things, they're in the wrong, not the people who tell them to stop being racist, and the latter group don't have an obligation to tell the racists to stop in a polite, ego-protecting way.

I think there is a continuum between people who are thoughtlessly privileged and people who are out-and-out racist (or whatever other bigotry we happen to be talking about). People who are more towards the actively racist end of the spectrum are very unlikely to respond to being told "check your privilege". I'm sort of thinking about people who start from the basic assumption that all people are equal, but don't really have much clue about what life is like for people with less privilege than them in whatever respect. In an ideal world, telling those well-meaning but clueless people to check their privilege would get them to listen more, in reality that seems not to be effective.

[nameandnature]

Suber's paper where he invents the term "logical rudeness" gets into what kind of fault it might be. He ends up concluding that outside of a court of law, there can't really be duty to rebut all comers: "philosophical inquiry may be crippled by logical rudeness, but the legalistic remedy of a burden of going forward would cripple philosophical inquiry even more. Rudeness cripples inquiry by obstructing cooperation, not by silencing contenders for truth or by deceiving inquirers. Rudeness, like a boulder in a stream, makes inquiry pass around it. If inquiry proceeds without debate, something is lost. But because falsehood cannot be inferred from rudeness, much more would be lost if we dismissed rude proponents, as if in error, for violating some imported rules of procedure."

get the comment that the article isn't good evidence because it's well known that most news media is controlled by Zionist interests who will always interpret any possible criticism of Jews or Israel as anti-semitism.

To my list of possible meanings for "CYP!" I must then add "Eh? You're bonkers!" (in the strictly non-ableist sense of the word, obviously).

Perhaps CYP! can probably be replaced by its actual meaning in any given case (either "you wouldn't know about that, you're not gay" or "you're an idiot" or "boo to MRAs" or whatever). This increases clarity and avoids turning into a sort of SJW self-parody.

[naath]

I think things like "well, the experience of a lot of women is this; so maybe you'd like to go away and think about that for a bit" are probably more *informative* and helpful. Especially if the error-having person is just being clueless rather than actively annoying. But maybe that's too much like effort?

Also I think "CYP" is more informative than "You're stupid, kindly fuck off" because it does contain *some* information about the (accused) stupidity at hand.

[liv]

I think in an ideal world simply pointing out the facts of why the ignorant person is in fact ignorant would be sufficient to get them to reconsider. But in practice I find that what happens is that the clueless person gets just as defensive if you make a carefully phrased, polite request as if you say "CYP" or indeed "fuck off". You end up having an argument about whether people who aren't part of the minority in question have a right to an opinion, or indeed whether you're even suggesting that they might not have such a right, and it doesn't really help.

[liv]

Yes, I don't entirely reject Suber's ideas about logical rudeness. But I also think he cares too much about truth-seeking at the expense of all other values one might care about.

I also think sometimes what's going on is that the truth has already been established by rigorous enquiry, only some people haven't got the memo, and they're still going, but what if, just as a thought-experiment, it turned out that black people are actually less intelligent than white people? If you have to keep rehashing the debate about whether this is a valid presupposition, you can never move forward. Quite apart from the fact that it's extremely painful to the black people involved in the discussion to have to keep encountering the assumption that they're less intelligent than their white peers unless they can provide clear evidence to the contrary. Logical rudeness here is equivalent to scientists saying, I'm simply not going to debate climate change or evolution with denialists, the evidence is clear, I'm going to move on and discuss more interesting stuff.

You might think "Zionists control the media" is evidently bonkers. I move in leftier circles than you do and you'd be amazed how many basically well-meaning people genuinely believe that. I'm parodying by calling this belief a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, but I have frequently had to deal with people who argue a position that boils down to that. Like, you know, there's this powerful Jewish lobby in the US that puts pressure on Obama's government to take a colonialist position on Middle East politics, and that's why we have torture and killer drones and Guantanamo, and it always gets reported in a biased way because the lobby have controlling financial interests in most mainstream media.

I don't think I would say "check your privilege" to people making that kind of argument, but if I did, I would mean something more like your example of you wouldn't know about that, you're not [Jewish], rather than "you're obviously an idiot". I am not sure that avoiding the word "privilege" really helps here either. People really object to being told, you don't know what you're talking about, you haven't had the relevant life-experience, whatever words you use. Like, Mensch thinks that people are telling her: only those with personal experience of something should comment, or that if a person is making an argument, they should immediately give way if their view is contradicted by somebody with a different life story; I don't think avoiding the specific phrase "check your privilege" would prevent people like her coming to that interpretation of a request to let the people who've actually experienced discrimination be heard.

[naath]

I think the main point of saying CYP is... well, it's to remind people *just how easy* it is not simply not notice bad things happening to people who you don't know. I don't really feel that people are saying "only people with experience of $foo can talk about it"; but rather than it's important to take into account the fact that no one person can experience all things, so you having not had personal experience of a thing doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

[liv]

Yes, I agree, that's supposed to be the point of CYP. I did like pw201's example of challenging him if he, as a straight man, made the claim that there's no homophobia in Cambridge. But it nearly always gets heard as "only people with direct personal experience can talk" and that just doesn't go over well.

[nameandnature]

Logical rudeness here is equivalent to scientists saying, I'm simply not going to debate climate change or evolution with denialists, the evidence is clear, I'm going to move on and discuss more interesting stuff.

Sure, and I agree with Suber's point that there can't be a general duty to engage in debate with everyone. But in that case, CYP becomes just "you're so wrong that I'm not going to waste time engaging with you" and may as well be phrased that way rather than using a term which is generally heard as "my suffering has made me holier than you" or (as you say to naath) "only those with personal experience of this can talk".

People really object to being told, you don't know what you're talking about, you haven't had the relevant life-experience, whatever words you use.

This seems pretty odd to me, because what ptc24 calls the epistemic version is the least objectionable one to me. Mensch's conception isn't just the epistemic version, though: she's noticed that in practice, what happens is that gets shaded into the moral version "I know more (epistemic), and therefore I win, if you don't think so, you are a bad person (moral, rude)". Penny thinks that's not supposed to be what it's about but the term is defined by its usage, not by Penny. What you've actually got is a sort of social justice internet fandom (the intelligent end on feminist blogs and the stupid end on Tumblr) where CYP is in use as a sort of argument settler. regardless of what it originally meant to academic sociologists, say.

[ptc24]

I think "you haven't had the relevant experience" is a fairly benign form of the epistemic version. I think there might be more pernicious versions which are similar to the old defences of Marxism and Freudianism; "you're only saying that because class interests/repressed sexual desires are controlling your mind".

[siderea]

Like, Mensch thinks that people are telling her: "only those with personal experience of something should comment, or that if a person is making an argument, they should immediately give way if their view is contradicted by somebody with a different life story"

More to the point, Mensch thinks there's something wrong with that. Let us be clear, the breathtakingly ironically named Mensch believes that being expected to concede a point in the face of greater experience, expertise, or authority is some sort of curtailment of her liberties; where as I, I think that conceding a point in the face of information from someone better informed is called "not being an ass".

[ptc24]

outside of a court of law

This is a bit of a side-track, but while we're on framing: I'm not sure how it is for others, but for me, "social justice" strongly evokes a judicial frame, and I compare things to how things are (meant to be) done in a court of law.

Of course, in a law court, there are various pragmatic concerns that affect things. There's the usual problem of there being a finite amount of everyone's time. There are also odd things to do with the admissibility of evidence etc.

[naath]

I think it's possible to go 'round in circles all day trying to find some way of describing the problem; but I'm not sure you can reach a conclusion which isn't going to annoy people, especially the people who are currently avoiding noticing the problem to their benefit.

(I don't like the word privilege; mostly because I can't spell it. But I accept that that's the way the language went).

[liv]

Yes, fair enough. I am quite clear in my mind that if I am going to move away from privilege I want a different frame, a different metaphor altogether, not a different word. Calling it advantage or easy setting or good fortune or squrple isn't going to help with the fundamental communication issue. And yes, part of the problem is that the nature of privilege is that it's in people's interests, both material and psychological, not to notice that they have it.

[jack]

Come to think of it, Scalzi's way of putting it is the perfect metaphor for a point I've tried to think about before but not quite had the words for.

He compared "straight white male" to "the easy difficulty setting". But I wonder, would the reactions have been different if he's suggested "straight white male" was "normal difficulty" and everything else was "hard difficulty" or "unbelievable difficulty"?

I'm not sure to what extent this is just me, or whether it's something that generalises, but it seems "check your privilege" conveys two messages. Firstly, that a lot of people have it a lot more difficult than you, and maybe you don't really know about that and should listen to the experience of someone who's experienced it. And secondly, that the second is more "normal" and you're exceptional, and are wrong for not knowing that already. And I don't know, but it seems like even though both are important and controversial, maybe the first is more important and the second is more controversial? And people shouldn't be under an obligation to make concepts accessible to people who don't want to listen, but when people like Scalzi claim to genuinely be trying to get people to understand, I wonder if it would be worth starting with the more accessible message and working up to the one people don't want to hear, even if emphasising "you're wrong" represents more justice for the people who are actually marginalised?

[jack]

Wrt to the concept of privilege in general, I think it is a very useful concept to have a quick way to sum up "you haven't had these experiences and are accidentally pontificating without knowing what you're talking about".

But there does seem to be a problem with the way it's often used, even between people who supposedly both are very familiar with the concept, and I'm not quite sure what or how.

[liv]

That's an interesting thought. Yes, maybe you need to tell people, your life is normal and everybody else has these disadvantages you're not aware of, rather than, your life is great and what's actually "normal" is pretty sucky. I think that does tie in to what siderea is suggesting about how people get really upset at the idea that the world doesn't function as well as they imagine it does.

[ptc24]

There seem to be two notions here, which I might call the "epistemic" and "moralizing" notions. The epistemic notion is "I know what I'm talking about and you don't"; in particular there's the idea that people lacking some privilege often know more about both sides of the fence than the people with it. The moralizing notion is "I've suffered more, so my concerns have right of way here" or more subtly "My concerns have been pushed out of the way more, so now it's my turn to do the pushing" (I notice that this more subtle version is starting to creep into epistemic territory).

On the epistemic notion: the thing that interests me here is the amount of tosh that I hear about Oxbridge from many non-Oxbridge people, in particular with regards to admissions.

Scalzi in particular: sometimes I get the impression that there's some quite subtle notion of privilege that some people are using, that's close/a form of the "epistemic" notion I was mentioning, and that they thought that if they clarified this enough then people would find it all acceptable. Then there's Scalzi, who seems very much to be pushing the "moralizing" variant.

I think changing the name might work for the epistemic notion, but has failed for the moralizing variant. Having two different names for the different concepts would be good. By "be good" I mean "aid clarity" rather than "help push agenda X" or "help people pushing agenda X feel good about themselves".

[liv]

That is really interesting! I kind of have a mixture of two responses to that. On the one hand, yes, separating out "people with low privilege know best what it's like, so people with more privilege should listen to them" from "people with low privilege have enhanced moral status because of how much they have suffered", I can definitely buy that that might lead to clarity. But on the other hand, you really can't separate out epistemic considerations from moral ones like that, the key moral question here is whose ways of knowing are dominant, whose knowledge is acceptable / valid, whose perspective is ignored because of systematic factors.

I do think you're right that Scalzi is much more interested in moral than epistemic questions. I also suspect there is simply never going to be a good way to put forward the idea that privilege-lacking people have enhanced moral status. Really what you want to do is to counter the prevailing assumption that they have reduced moral status, but no privileged person is ever going to accept the idea that they have less right to an opinion than they think they do. And yeah, changing the name is in no way going to help with that.

[ptc24]

you really can't separate out epistemic considerations from moral ones like that

I just have!

whose ways of knowing are dominant, whose knowledge is acceptable / valid, whose perspective is ignored because of systematic factors.

Now you're sounding like a postmodernist. One interesting thing here is "knowledge"; I'm used to senses of "knowledge" whereby apparent knowledge is only knowledge if the things being "known" are actually true.

I remain curious as to how "systematic" is being used here; partly I'm curious about my own experiences and to see which things in my life have counted as systematic or not.

[shreena]

I found this article really interesting on this subject:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100219631/check-your-privilege-top-trumps-actually-laurie-penny-it-is-all-about-me/

I think what it brings out is that a lot of people like Laurie will say things like "it's not a game of top trumps" but actually the way that they respond when it happens is exactly like a game of top trumps.

I do think that people have the right to opinions about experiences that they haven't had. Not least because what happens when two black people disagree about racism or two women disagree about feminism if we've gone for this approach where your experience makes you automatically win the argument. I take your point that not everything is about winning the logical argument but it seems to me that that is, in fact, usually the way that CYP is used.

I think it's definitely helpful to reflect upon the advantages in life that you may have had and the different perspectives that others have and the different ways in which people are treated but I'm not sure that I've ever seen the term "privilege" or the instruction to check it really help with those reflections and conversations.

[liv]

I agree, the "privilege" concept does end up being used in a Top Trumps sort of way, that's part of why I have a problem with it, even though thoughtful, educated people do in fact use it in a much more nuanced way. I don't feel Hodges reads Penny very well, I don't think she is remotely automatically caving in to people who disagree with her just because they happen to be black and she's white! But because they specifically have more direct, relevant experience of the issue at hand than she does, so it makes sense that their view of how to deal with racism carries more weight than hers.

I truly don't think it's a case of your experience makes you automatically win the argument. I think it's more like, the default situation is that the privileged people in the discussion have a better chance of being listened to, simply because people are more inclined to listen to people with high status. But the default should really be that the less privileged people in the discussion should at least be taken equally seriously, if not in fact allowing the discussion to be weighted slightly towards their perspective because of direct first-hand experience. That's not the same as saying that eg white people don't have the right to opinions about experiences that they haven't had.

The problem is that it's all too easy to interpret anything along the lines of CYP in that way, as I think both Hodges and Mensch do. I don't know if there's a better way to achieve the end, which is for people with direct first-hand experience of discrimination to be allowed to shape the debate, even though the discriminatory attitudes also effect how the debate takes place to start with. I would like to think there is a better way, but I don't know what it is.

And yes, I agree that the privilege frame really helps with the kind of positive reflection you mention. Again, I don't know how to come up with a frame that would achieve that aim better, though.

[shreena]

To be honest, though I know and like Laurie, I don't think I read her very well either - I tend to feel that a lot of her articles read like an intelligent undergraduate left it to the last minute to write an essay and thus produced something which is way below their potential and often incoherent.

I agree with "because they specifically have more direct, relevant experience of the issue at hand than she does, so it makes sense that their view of how to deal with racism carries more weight than hers" but I don't see any particular evidence that Laurie does, I think she is much closer to "your experience means you've won the argument." Or to put it another way, I cannot imagine her saying "I've reflected upon my privilege but I conclude that my initial view was still correct for these reasons..." in any context.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I just don't find discussions where people say things like "check your privilege" very enlightening which probably isn't a reflection on the concept intrinsically, more on how people tend to use it (in my experience), but I also don't really have an alternative.

[liv]

Heh, lots of my friends are friends with LP, but I haven't managed to meet her yet, so I can only judge by her internet persona. I think you're right, she's intelligent but often rushed and not as thoughtful as she could be.

And yes, maybe you're right that starting from CYP rules out the possibility of anyone ever reflecting on other perspectives and deciding that they're still correct after all. Or even if they do, people are going to come back to them with the accusation that they haven't checked their privilege enough, which is just another variation on "if you really understood the issue you'd agree with me."

[ptc24]

maybe you're right that starting from CYP rules out the possibility of anyone ever reflecting on other perspectives and deciding that they're still correct after all.

This.

[jack]

I tend to feel that a lot of her articles read like an intelligent undergraduate left it to the last minute to write an essay and thus produced something which is way below their potential and often incoherent.

I think this is a common risk with writing a newspaper column, because ideally you write something interesting to a wide variety of people, which can't always be something _new_. And sometimes that's really useful eg. hammering away reminding people not familiar with your ideas that they continue to exist. And sometimes it's really awful eg. some people who are just always gratuitously offensive deliberately not thinking through what they're saying. So even if the author is quite good, the column often feels a bit regurgitated.

[shreena]

I can see what you're saying but it's a very competitive field so many of the columnists who win through that do navigate these difficulties really well. There are a number who produce really strong work week in, week out. I'd highlight Hadley Freeman and Zoe Williams especially as managing reliably to produce thought provoking articles that are nevertheless clearly and accessibly written. I just don't find Laurie's work anything like as good - though, of course, there's still plenty of time for her to gain experience and improve.

[jack]

Good point. Even if I'm not surprised that many articles feel regurgitated, many manage to be both informative and well-written, and I'd definitely prefer that.

[shreena]

Funnily enough, as if by magic, there's a piece by Hadley Freemam weighing in on this whole issue up this morning - http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jun/05/check-your-privilege-means

As usual, I find myself agreeing with her. It's also, I think, a useful introduction to the whole issue.