A post I wrote last week sparked a lively debate, and one strand of that debate was whether it is appropriate to use the term “privilege” (“cis privilege” in particular) to describe the phenomena I was talking about. I identified mainly two clusters of objections, but please do let me know in the comments if I have overlooked any.
- The term “privilege” is best used to describe situations where people get more than what they are entitled to, or when they get special treatment that really nobody should get (e.g. enjoy impunity or lack of accountability). Cis people, instead (but the same could be said about other axes of advantage and disadvantage) get what they deserve (respect; freedom from intrusive questioning; etc.); the problem is that trans people – or people who are read as trans, gender non conforming, etc. – do not get the fundamental respect they are entitled to. So we should speak of trans disadvantage/oppression (again, this does not only apply to people who ostensibly identify as trans, this is the last time I make this qualification) but not of cis privilege.
- The term “privilege” is best used to describe an intended feature of the system (as in the case of white privilege), whereas the phenomena I am describing are more like unintended consequences.
So, first of all, whether we call the stuff I wrote about “privilege” or something else (and this applies to other areas of political and social disadvantage, too, btw, not just to gender) is not a hill I am prepared to die on. My point was to use a term that is routinely used is contemporary progressive debates, and which some people are happy to use for other areas (male privilege, white privilege, etc.) but not for the area the post was about (there is male privilege and female oppression, but there is no such thing as cis privilege as a thing that, for instance, many cis females also allegedly enjoy”). Nothing more, nothing less. So, what I wrote is perfectly compatible with having a separate conversation about whether “privilege” really is the right antinomy for oppression or disadvantage (although it is still possible to reach the conclusion that no, ideally maybe it’s not, but it has stuck and now having a whole debate about replacing it with something else would do more harm than good).
Having said that, and having shared some of the gut discomfort with the term in the past (but never having reflected enough on why), let me try and make the case for the term here. I am still not fully persuaded it is the best term, but here are a couple of reasons which speak in favour of it.
- Yes indeed, when we say that being able to trust police officers is a form of white privilege; that being listened to without being routinely interrupted is a form of male privilege; and that not being unjustifiably pathologised for one’s sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender presentation inclinations are forms of straight and cis privilege respectively, we are not thereby saying saying that white, male, straight and cis people in these examples are enjoying special treatment to which they have no claim. Sometimes privilege of this latter kind also happens (when a confident-looking man is not asked for proof for their qualifications even if the relevant procedure requires it; or when a white person is unproblematically believed by a police officer even there is good evidence exists that maybe they should not be). But it is true that we also largely use the term in the former sense – as being able to reliable enjoy one’s rights without facing undue adversities. So yep, to the extent that “privilege” means, strictly speaking, undeserved special treatment or advantage, it is being used somewhat inappropriately in contemporary progressive discourse (I am deliberately not saying “woke,” although I really resent the fact that woke is basically a slur now….). However, there is a more charitable and interesting reading, I think. Calling being safe in the knowledge that the police will not unnecessarily and arbitrarily harass me a form of privilege reflects a distinctly non-ideal reading of reality – one where facing adversities and unfairness (in one way or another, and sometimes in multiple and multiply intersecting ways) is the default for most of us, and something which only few of us have the luck not to experience. There is a powerful and compelling punchline being delivered when we say, “Oh, you have always being treated with respect and dignity? Count yourself unbelievably lucky!”. It’s an approach which subverts what some might regard as normal expectations: injustice is the norm, having one’s rights respected is the exception.
- I am a little more puzzled by the second objection. I guess the issue is what one means by “intended feature of the system.” Ostensibly, looking at most liberal democracies, institutionalised racism is not an “intended feature.” The law in most liberal democracies advocates racial equality; repudiates racism; and in some countries remedies and compensations for historical injustices are even in place. On a more structural reading, however (and you don’t need to be a Marxist or a Foucaultian to say that), clearly a system of power is in place that maintains racial inequality in spite of the law. On the first, narrower reading, neither white privilege nor cis privilege are “intended features of the system.” On the second, broader reading…well it depends! It is a complex, largely empirical conversation. We certainly cannot simply say, nonchalantly, that in the case of cis advantages it’s obviously a case of unintended consequences. Personally, I would point to the way in which we live in a system that, via all kinds of social norms, tries to discipline gender presentations and expectations. It’s a long topic, but certainly not one I would be OK to dismiss as just a matter of unintended consequences.
These are my 5 cents.
{ 26 comments }
M Caswell 12.20.24 at 2:06 pm
on 2: You may have just pushed the question back to what a “system” is– I’d say not every aggregate of items, actions, or rules constitutes a system.
on 1: One way to test out our use of ‘privilege’: try substituting the word ‘luck’, and see what difference it makes, if any.
Gregory Sanders 12.20.24 at 3:43 pm
Thanks for sorting through the two objections.
My own take is that the general use of privilege conflates any advantage with an unentitled advantage. I think that this applies across the board when people talk about privilege and often intermix the two definitions. I think there’s great merit in pointing out that many rights are not universally held, even among those that formally hold them, but that it’s also important to distinguish between advantages that can widely scale or at least be compatible with equality and those that are incompatible with it.
I think this is ultimately baked into the term privilege in a way that’s far too late to change, but I appreciate your effort at clarity as to how you mean it.
I’d also say that the less hardline version of the gender-critical feminist argument is that testosterone comes with privileges, such as distribution of height and physical strength that is, on average, greater than that of those with less testosterone. (As ever this is a population dynamic, in my immediate circle of friends, I have cis female friend that’s certainly stronger than me, let alone the fact that most any female athlete is as well. But I’ve also benefit from the other side, because I’m tall and had long arms I could sometimes beat cis female fencers who on technique alone should have wiped the floor with me.)
These advantages are interwoven with gender privileges and can translate into unearned advantages because they make physical coercion easier. They’re also not strictly binary, and even setting aside intersex individuals can vary greatly within populations with XX or XY chromosomes that are not undergoing hormone treatments.
Honestly, I find it quite compatible with my Lutheran upbringing to feel guilty all the time as a middle class, white, cis male about both the privileges that I have that should be widely shared that aren’t and those that cannot be widely shared. So I do greatly appreciate this post, as I do think that actually usefully defining terms is an opportunity for better communication and argument.
steven t johnson 12.20.24 at 3:51 pm
Suggest replacing the term privilege with the phrase liberties, privileges and immunities, to facilitate real change by setting priorities. The rest is just explanation, no doubt tl;dr.
The liberties to speak or go where you want is often legally restricted, particularly in business owned properties. Soliciting for a unionization drive can be very problematic. Free speech zones (sic) are restrictions in my judgment. The privilege of the franchise or to sue is still subject to many legal restrictions, from widely popular such as disenfranchising felons, but the rather flexible doctrine where some have standing to sue but others don’t is I think rather widespread, however rarely noticed. Immunities such as right to privacy (or lack of for the ill-defined public figure,) or sovereign immunity aren’t common topics of discussion either, so far as I can tell.
Perhaps it’s obvious the goal of using more inclusive language is to focus on liberties, privileges and immunities enforced by law and institutions legally empowered to do so. This is implicitly a criticism of point 1 above, which tends to de-prioritize objections to such legal liberties, privileges and immunities, almost to the point of denying that laws and institutions have anything to do with liberties, privileges and immunities. The reform of manners and renovation of minds, rather than the reform of laws and institutions are emphasized. This objection can be rebutted I suppose as denying the subjectivity of the person charging privilege. My thinking is that the relative objectivity of laws and institution is a better starting point for effective reform precisely because they are more objective. Absent a window into the soul, convicting individuals of bad thinking is always going to be contested, especially when it happens on occasions and privately. Public policy should address laws and institution first, as a pragmatic priority. Changing such things may change manners more slowly than wished, but I think in the law run it’s more effective.
As to point 2, the phrase “under color of law” is I think indispensable to fruitful conversation and organization. I’m afraid I rather expect you really do have to have a somewhat Marxisant way of thinking to think the formal equality under the law—the letter observed by and large by most institutions (that may be rather optimistic?)—may nonetheless be the way by which such real, substantive inequalities in liberties, privileges and immunities are enforced. This may be very bad news in a society where individualism (not the same thing as individuality!) and marketplace contractarianism is so widespread? Or, in other words, the real engine in the long run is not the backward and inferior souls of the (other) masses, but the rules of society. (As a Marxist sympathizer, yes, I do see property and production relations behind that, and worse, real change requires changes in the way of life, not personal reformation.) It seems to me the current language of privilege always does ascribe intention to individuals’ intentions.
One example: White people tend to have better housing. One historical reason is the notorious practice of redlining (still not very well addressed even in legal reform so far as I can tell.) Reproaches to white people about their privilege in housing have cited this reprehensible practice…but charging it against white people in general, instead of bankers, seems to be the norm. Doesn’t that kind of let actual bankers off the hook?
Peter Dorman 12.20.24 at 5:31 pm
Eight years ago I wrote this:
The Problem with Privilege
Employing the word “privilege” to describe the relative advantages of being white or male or heterosexual has become a litmus test of one’s sensitivity to questions of social justice. While I suspect many feel a certain discomfort with using the word this way, overcoming such feelings is understood as a rite of passage, crossing a line that separates the unenlightened from the redeemed.
I felt the same queasiness, but my reaction was to try to think it through. Why did I have this feeling, and why was I being asked to suppress it? Here is what that led to.
There is no question that inequalities are everywhere. It seems obvious to me that, separate from other factors, being white, male, nonpoor etc. confers relative advantage.
But there are two types of advantages in society. One is differential access to opportunities, liberties or benefits that, in principle, could be enjoyed by all. Access to health care is an example. Access is unequal, and the goal should be for no one to have their health problems undiagnosed and untreated. One could go a step further and claim it as a universal right. You might or might not want to (I would), but the possibility exists.
The other type of advantage is positional, being better off by virtue of being above or ahead of someone else. Much of the benefit of gender inequality for men, historically, was due to the corresponding subordination of women. The possibility of taking sexual advantage of someone else, for instance, can hardly be universalized, since its existence for some requires its opposite for others. The Marxist theory of exploitation had this structure as well: the profit of capitalists was regarded as inseparable from the surplus value extracted from labor.
In the past, the verbal distinction between these two types of inequality was captured by the differentiation between rights and privileges. Rights were benefits that could be claimed for all. If some had them and others didn’t, the solution was to extend them to everyone. Privileges were benefits that depended on exclusivity: membership has its privileges, benefits that would evaporate if membership were opened to all. The proper goal of an egalitarian is to dissolve privileges.
Here is another example. At one time it was common for many unions (in the US) to exclude blacks, and this allowed white union members to monopolize jobs in certain industries. That was a privilege that principled people sought to abolish. Meanwhile, only some workers are unionized, and this allows them to enjoy greater pay and say on the job than those not in unions. That’s certainly an inequality, but a reasonable response would be to call for laws that make it easier for any group of workers to form or join a union if they wish. This is a position in favor of labor rights.
During recent decades it has become common for antiracist activists to apply the term “privilege” to both types of advantages. This is a clever move, because it mobilizes the guilt most of us experience (or should) in the case of unjustified, positional advantages in the battle against all advantages. For example, if it is a privilege to not be assaulted at random by the police, a domain in which whites do in general have an advantage over blacks, then whites should feel a twinge of guilt and seek to “reject” this privilege. That may well be a more powerful motivator than the sense of unfairness whites might feel in thinking that the right to personal safety they enjoy is being denied to others. I understand why activists might want to elide the distinction between these two types of differential benefit.
The reason I don’t go along with it is because I think it’s beneficial to retain a language that makes relevant distinctions. While it’s possible to distinguish between rights that should be universalized and exclusive privileges that should be dissolved by explaining the difference in a paragraph, it is much easier to think in these terms if we retain the dichotomy between rights and privileges. Also, while eliciting guilt can be a convenient strategy for activists, I believe solidarity is a firmer basis for building movements to overcome unjust differences.
https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-problem-with-privilege.html
engels 12.20.24 at 5:46 pm
Although not without its faults (and the discussion of Russell Brand in particular hasn’t aged well to put it mildly) I still think this is the sharpest critique of the 2010s’ form of left-wing identity politics to which “privilege” (not the English word but the rather vaguely defined online progressive term of art) was central and which I now believe (partly due to the the catastrophe of a second Democratic defeat to Trump as well as Elon Musk’s annexation of Twitter) may now be slowly fading into American imperial history.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/
J-D 12.21.24 at 7:56 am
If you want to use words to inspire people, you need to know which words will be inspiring to them, which may be different from the words that would be inspiring to you. If you want to use words to placate people, you need to know which words will be placating to them, which may be different from the words that would be placating to you. If you want to use words to infuriate people, you need to know which words will be infuriating to them, which may be different from the words that would be infuriating to you. If you want to use words to discourage people, you need to know which words will be discouraging to them, which may be different from the words that would be discouraging to you.
If you want to use words to express your meaning to people, you need to know which words will be most effective in expressing your meaning to them, which may be different from the words that would be most effective in expressing your meaning to yourself. It is highly likely that the word ‘privilage’ will be effective in expressing your meaning to one person but ineffective in expressing it to another; so whether it is is a good idea to use the word ‘privilege’ to express your meaning depends on what you know about the person (or persons) you are trying to communicate with.
marcel proust 12.21.24 at 5:19 pm
On the first, narrower reading, neither white privilege nor cis privilege are “intended features of the system.” On the second, broader reading…well it depends!
A smart alec might respond by channeling a a caricatured representation of former contributor/front page poster of this blog and saying POSIWID or more specifically
I think you have to start the analysis by saying “POSIWID” – the Purpose of a System Is What It Does.
engels 12.21.24 at 5:52 pm
Other objections…. I think “privilege” is used to assert that a statistical disparity between two demographic groups is unjust and something for which individual members of the better off group are morally responsible. (But only in certain cases. Eg no one calls the fact women live longer than men “female privilege” or the fact ethnic minority students get better GCSEs “brown privilege” afaik.) So it focusses politics on unfairness between demographic groups that cross class boundaries at the expense of building solidarity among workers, which is very much to the advantage of elite members of those groups, and bypassing the causal and normative arguments that imo ought to be made to establish that unfairness: politically and intellectually corrosive.
rjk 12.21.24 at 6:40 pm
I think the way “privilege” is used in progressive circles is meant to be somewhat disturbing to the people to whom it is applied. It’s meant to shock you, as a privileged person, into noticing that things that you take for granted are things that society is affording you, which it is not affording others. That one might feel uncomfortable about this is part of the point.
The problem is that this doesn’t entirely jibe with the notion that privilege is just a neutral term of art in progressive academia. It doesn’t seem entirely right to use a term which owes at least some of its popularity to its shock value, and then say that we’re just looking for some dispassionate analysis of whether some particular group has relative advantage over another. Obviously one can do this, and I’ve seen it done plenty of times in the last 15 years, but it often ends up with a debate about the meaning of the word, rather than achieving the nominal purpose of consensus about the social reality it refers to.
wetzel-rhymes-with 12.21.24 at 7:28 pm
Defining privilege as “to be able to reliable enjoy one’s rights without facing undue adversities” introduces a probabilistic or inferential nature of reliability which is in dissonance to the categorical or deductive manner privilege is assigned here based on group identity, the property “to be able” as an existential property of “whiteness”. This produces tremendous resentment, obviously, but not only because of white privilege denying itself under the religion of capitalism, where what wins is always right, but also the human privilege to be free of the socially constructionist and totalitarian approach to identity.
I believe the use of the term “white privilege” is ultimately nihilistic, philosophically, in the sense of how totalitarian philosophy is inimical to human existential dignity. After the Georgia Dept. of Corrections turned my white copper thieving friend into a master mason at the age of twenty five, he learned how to build cinder block walls for the prison system, and he could not get released on parole for ten years! Was it his white privilege to be selected to become a master mason? His older sister pushed him out of a moving car when he was twelve. His stripper drug-addicted mom didn’t protect him, and his whole extended family were basically Clayton County, GA Snopes. His sister would wrap a pet python around her brother’s neck to terrify him. There is a special kind of screwed-up that was the exclusive domain of crazy Southern white kids in the 1980’s where a sociopathic sister, stripper mom, and Dixie Mafia ex-wrestler Hell’s Angels dad could converge with a pet python.
Ideas of social construction are applied like ontological structures of existence. People should not worship history because society did not create the world. Leftists like Marx or Lenin, or right-wingers like Ivan Ilyin or these new Caesar weirdos at Claremont College, or the weirdos at Evergreen, want to drag you into their scape-goating mechanisms and provide a mythological avatar to be responsible for the sins of history, but neo-Marxists and neo-Fascists are often just nihilists within any Ultimate Idea. God is supposedly dead, but still they will tell you they believe they know you.
The problem I have is that describing white privilege as a structure that is inherent in any possible world, and cannot be delimited in a way susceptible to factual knowledge, is not analytically consistent with the inferential truth that white people are more likely to be able to enjoy their rights, because those are claims within different criteria of meaningfulness and actually does communicate an enthymeme with the unspoken premise that the rights of white people are not being routinely violated.
MisterMr 12.22.24 at 8:12 am
What about “rights”?
Like in: “transgender people have the right to express their own perceived gender”.
The problem is the sentence: “Transgender people have the right to be treated according to their perceived gender”, that not everyone agrees with (I in general agree with it but would put some limits).
It seems to me that what we are really speaking about are rights, but the term used is “privilege” because it is ambiguous and doesn’t have the clear limits the term “rights” does, so substitutes a general moral deprecation to a more explicit discussion about what we should treat as a right and what not.
Peter Dorman 12.22.24 at 7:59 pm
My earlier post (@4) was mostly written eight years ago — in response to being a direct observer of political developments at Evergreen State College, incidentally. Today I would add this one practical/programmatic bit: Privilege, being positional, is zero-sum or nearly. You can go after it equally by trying to removing the sources of privilege for those on top or enhancing opportunities for those on the bottom. In practice, these approaches can even become intermingled to the point of convergence. If the problem is a denial of rights to some portion of the community, however, attacking the existing provision of rights to the favored group is likely to be perverse.
This thought was going through my mind as I witnessed exhortations from diversity trainers and some of my colleagues to reject as oppressive many of the rights I had (to some extent) and wanted everyone to have.
Here I can be specific. One of the rights/privilege conflations concerned speaking in public. Now, it is true that if a bunch of people are gathered into a room and only a limited amount of time is available for speaking, to speak can be a privilege. Sometimes people who are used to speaking too much need to step back so others can step forward. As I teacher I dealt with this all the time and without political regrets. (Yes, I sometimes used a progressive stack.) But much speech is nonrival, especially in the online realm, and many speech settings are underutilized. Often my struggle as a supportive progressive faculty member was to encourage students to speak a lot more, to take advantage of a public sphere that was nearly unoccupied. Unfortunately, the conflation of rights and privileges ignored that distinction, and whites/men/etc. were often instructed to shut up in situations where there was ample speech opportunity for everyone, as if less expression by some automatically generated more by others. (And yes, I know that domineering or demeaning speech can be silencing, but that’s about the character of speech and not its exercise as such.)
Alex SL 12.23.24 at 1:02 am
I didn’t engage with the previous post because it seems obviously correct to me that, in the sense as most people use the word, there is cis privilege; there is privilege of every flavour of ‘being in the presumed default group’.
Now one could say that, technically, we have all been using the word privilege wrong, because originally it means that some laws or rules officially recognise certain classes of people to have more rights than others (e.g., only the nobles are allowed to hunt, or dukes do not have to pay taxes). But that isn’t how the word is used today, and that’s that.
Regarding the discussion in this thread of replies, privilege is certainly off-putting to the right-wing. The question is, will any alternative term not become a target of derision and culture war by the right-wing? Certainly, the alternative cannot be to stop pointing out that there are systemic disparities in policing, hiring, promotion, access to credit and housing, and so on. The word privilege is well-established as way of expressing when somebody is unaware that minority members would have faced problems in situations where they have just breezed through without challenge, even if they do not like that word because it is uncomfortable to realise that one has it easy and others unfairly don’t, that one’s achievements may not all be based on being superior and virtuous but may indeed be based on winning at the genetic lottery.
J-D 12.23.24 at 1:44 am
So if, on your own account, you are doing something of which you yourself have a negative opinion, that suggests two related questions (or one question in two parts): if you have a negative opinion of it, why are you doing it; but also, is your negative opinion of it justified? In this instance, more specifically, why would somebody who has a negative opinion of guilt-tripping choose to engage in guilt-tripping but also, is there actually something wrong about guilt-tripping?
If you say something which is true and then some people disagree, the disagreement might be a problem but that doesn’t have to mean that telling the truth is a problem.
Both terms have more than one meaning, as can readily be confirmed by spending a little time consulting dictionaries.
engels 12.23.24 at 6:19 pm
Btw there’s a rather priceless opinion column in the Guardian this week discussing the popular support for Luigi Mangione in terms of white male privilege.
basil 12.24.24 at 7:33 am
It hasn’t been mentioned explicitly but several prior comments have alluded to the core question of the categories themselves, and how coherent they are as objects of description and analysis. Even should you shift from ‘privilege’, the question endures – whether your new term worked would depend on its applicability to the class of persons it defined.
Perhaps readers should consider queering the categories themselves…….. and thus eradicating them ……. or, the point of feminism or anti-racism etc is to emancipate from the categories of gender and race themselves, to understand them as technologies that only have meaning because they are at once factories of prejudice and repositories of advantage/disadvantage. Their function is to explain and justify that which they engender.
The labour of undoing these categories is difficult as they are first, taken for granted by almost everyone as inhering essential truths about who we are and what we’ve experienced, and secondly – are the foundation for making claims and distributing reparation.
Still, even moored to the conservative and legalistic terrain of intersectionality and HR, one could imagine a DEI analysis that found a pale-skinned, penis-bearer person from say West Virginia or rural New York’s north country, or some place in Moldova, first-generation to college, fleeing a landscape of prisons, ecological and medical toxification, and multi-generational poverty was relatively more disadvantaged than other applicants, right?
We need new names
wetzel-rhymes-with 12.24.24 at 2:26 pm
@basil
You wrote “. . . the point of feminism or anti-racism etc is to emancipate from the categories of gender and race themselves, to understand them as technologies that only have meaning because they are at once factories of prejudice and repositories of advantage/disadvantage. Their function is to explain and justify that which they engender . . .”
I have a pipe-dream world where I’m out in my city as a country music singer-songwriter, and I have a lot of musical friends. My town is going to take the capital of country music from them some day, because our definition is broader. There is some of the free-stylers I know where I will never match the phrasing and musicality which has a deeper grammar. Though I can flow with them and learn and my own songs, there is a uniqueness relating somehow to the way black people in the American South are an issue to themselves, and is an authentic source of beauty, the difference, so a sociological group, I believe, can be an “issue to themselves”. A city can think of itself that way and create a myth of itself as a “City on the Hill”, so I am not so sure the “function” of race or gender is exactly to serve as power-positions exclusively, and life isn’t a non-cooperative game. It isn’t a game at all. I think a social group may envision it has existential properties but these are just myths or a kind of unique evanescence in existence that doesn’t exclude or privilege. Like Elvis Presley sang,
Well, that’s all right, mama
That’s all right for you
That’s all right, mama, just anyway you do
There’s a reason America rocks. Elvis was a white man who hit it hard, being open to learning from black people, and he’s singing to a woman he’s not going to judge, or put himself over, because she’s a woman and they’re just beautiful and different.
MisterMr 12.24.24 at 11:51 pm
@J-D 14
I do not have a negative opinion on guilt tripping people who are guilty, that is to say who are doing something wrong.
The way the world “privilege” is used is to guilt trip people who didn’t do anything wrong, like people who are comfortable in their bodies or who are not harassed at random by the police.
This is something I’m against, for the reasons I already explained previously.
Aardvark Cheeselog 12.26.24 at 9:25 pm
Wow that is a lot of thread!
As the person who was basically quoted on objection 2, let me start off by saying it’s not a hill I would want to die on from my side either. Yet I find Peter Dorman @4 has pinned my feeling about the question to the dissection tray and exposed its anatomy perhaps better than I could.
Language is one of those things that can become a preoccupation to the point of distracting from the underlying reality. There are limits to the precision with which it can measure things and we might be hitting on one here. Maybe the right thing to say about “privilege” is that, like “obscenity,” you know it when you see it.
And for “intentionality” of some kinds of inequality, it is definitely like what marcel proust @7 says: the purpose of the system is what it does. For this reason I have no difficulty with the notion of “white privilege” in the context of US life. Maybe there is a kind of “nascent” cis privilege, privilege being built as we watch, by people who have fastened on the existence of trans people as a place to try to create hatred.
TF79 12.28.24 at 10:17 pm
It seems like much of the back-and-forth of the term privilege hinges on the model one has in mind.
Consider Model A:
X is privilege if E[outcome(X) | S] > E[outcome_just_world | S]
e.g someone for whom X = “born into extreme wealth” is reasonably described as privileged (conditional on holding other factors S constant)
Consider Model B:
X is privilege if E[outcome(X) | S] > E[outcome(Y) | S]
e.g. someone for whom X = “white” is privileged (in, say, the US) in comparison to someone for whom Y = “black”, holding S constant.
Model A seems closer to the “traditional” sense of the word, while Model B feels like the more recent “playing life on easy mode” sense. For this particular example, I think:
E[outcome_just_world| S] = E[outcome(cis) | S] > E[outcome(trans) | S]
which is consistent with Model B but not Model A, which seems to be the crux of the argument in this and the previous post (apologies also if this is just restating Peter Dorman’s point @4)
J-D 01.01.25 at 1:16 am
Recently I listened to a podcast in which the host asked the guest about their childhood, and two words the guest used to describe their childhood were ‘comfortable’ and ‘privileged’. Describing their childhood as ‘privileged’ was not in any way a confession of guilt or a self-accusation. If I describe myself as ‘privileged’, I am not suggesting that I am in any way guilty of anything. If somebody else describes me as ‘privileged’, I don’t feel as if I’m being accused of anything. But if somebody describes MisterMr as ‘privileged’, then MisterMr does feel as if that’s some sort of accusation. If the two of us react differently to the same event, that must be evidence of some kind of difference between us. But what kind of difference? Well, I can think of two kinds of explanation, anyway. One kind is unflattering to me: maybe I’m imperceptive, incurious, unobservant, slow on the uptake, naïve, something of an ignoramus or a dullard. The other kind of explanation is unflattering to MisterMr, so I won’t go into details. But which kind of explanation might be closer to the truth? The answer to that question is something I suspect people would assess differently.
engels 01.01.25 at 2:04 am
“Privilege” literally means “private law”—ie. one rule for them, another for us—and it’s striking how much of what the “privilege” people want could be described as… privilege. Eg “believe all women” is a claim on behalf of women to a special epistemic authority. Another example is the right-thinking approach to ethnic slurs: the minority they apply to can say them while others can’t (even in inverted commas). Then there’s all the stuff about “cultural appropriation”—only minority X interpreters should be allowed to perform minority X culture/roles that obviously and rightly doesn’t apply to Beethoven, Hamlet, etc…
C-S 01.02.25 at 11:05 pm
I think what we mostly see is that there is no phrase (and likely no statement) which cannot be misrepresented, taken out of context, or misunderstood by people willing to invest time and energy into avoiding understanding things; particularly when they wish to pantomime outrage rather than actually addressing the actual material conditions. Communication is important, of course, but spending time trying to accomodate people whose objections are actually rooted in opposition to what you wish to achieve strikes me as not a particularly useful endevour.
noone1 01.03.25 at 9:42 am
23: “Communication is important, of course, but spending time trying to accomodate people whose objections are actually rooted in opposition to what you wish to achieve strikes me as not a particularly useful endevour.”
Yes, if you’re in a something like religious sect. That’s how they, the sects, usually operate (or so I’ve heard), isolating their members from the rest of society, including their families.
J, not that one 01.03.25 at 4:36 pm
@24 Many religious sects, to the contrary, praise listening to and accommodating others. But in practice, what they value is — in fact — those with less power accommodating those with more.
Most secular people approve of listening to others but don’t assume everyone has a moral obligation to take on every belief held by every other person. They understand there are conflicts of interest. Also, they understand that every consideration can’t necessarily be taken fully into account RIGHT THIS MINUTE NO QUESTIONS ASKED.
Pretending all political and social questions reduce to “listening to others” prevents us from considering what’s really going on and what really needs to be done.
C-S 01.04.25 at 9:00 am
Note: I’m writing another response as the previous one has not gone through – please do not publish both though, thank you.
@ 24: “isolating their members from the rest of society, including their families.”
And where, exactly, did I suggest people should isolate themselves from the rest of society? Of course, I didn’t – making this a somewhat irrelevant (and frankly speaking seemingly disingenuous) response.
So, thank you for proving my point – namely “there is no phrase (and likely no statement) which cannot be misrepresented, taken out of context, or misunderstood by people willing to invest time and energy into avoiding understanding things; particularly when they wish to pantomime outrage rather than actually addressing the actual material conditions.”
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