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

[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".