Basically, the tag of "privilege" is used to describe someone who enjoys all the advantages of societal biases as their norm (e.g. being able-bodied, being middle-class, being straight, being Caucasian, being male, etc).
A few days ago, Adam Kotsko conjectured in a post:
For me, though, the biggest problem is that little word “privilege.” Why should precisely that be the key term?...the term “privilege” plays into the rhetoric of austerity. We’ve all seen the dynamic at work, for instance when people talk about how teachers have summers off and a good retirement plan, etc. The response is always to say, “That’s unfair, that should be taken away” — never “my job should be like that too!” Deprivation is taken as the baseline assumption, and anything above that is an unfair imposition.
This led to an avalanche of comments, which Kotsko noticed were mostly from "white dudes":
I’m alarmed by the fact that the discussion has been so dominated by white dudes who are sick of privilege discourse... My problem is not that it makes white dudes feel defensive — that will happen literally no matter what, because white dude identity is founded on prickly defensiveness....The problem, it seems to me, is thatprivilege discoursethe word “privilege” conflates at least three types of realities...
Check out the latest post and discussion here. If "privilege" is something that yanks your crank, then get into it!
I think Adam's point about austerity is probably quite an important one in the US; like, trying to get people involved in claiming rights to basic services (like health care etc.), rather than focusing on moral indictments of people who already have them. Especially because US political culture has been able to "manifest" diversity in so many leadership positions that accusations of individual privilege quickly lead to dead-ends (the Republicans are not all "white dudes" etc.). I'm not sure how well the discussion in that blog translates in Australia; we could probably do with a little *more* moral outrage, or at least rhetorical flair in naming hypocrisy. Still, given that we could be heading towards a situation where a great number of privileged *and* under-privileged will be voting for Tony Abbott, I'm not sure I have much time for crude correlations between personal biographies and political outlooks. Is the word "privilege" useful? Well, perhaps in a pragmatic sense: you've got to be able to name privilege, recognise its effects in a conversation with other people, before pushing to an analysis where maybe, down the line, the concept can be replaced by one with better explanatory power. So the denial of privilege is a problem, but the naming of privilege is only a brief solution.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Tim, both on the very different US context and also the difficulty of clearly defining types of privilege as targets given the complicated political landscape. I think of Bess Price or Marcia Langton, for example, for whom the accusation of privilege will probably lead to a ruinous (pardon the pun) "price war" whereby everyone just undercuts everyone else.
DeleteOn the other hand, any self-respecting political analysis in Australia would surely acknowledge, at the basic level (though not necessarily always explicitly), the privilege of being the inheritors of other ppl's suffering (via dispossession)
Yes, good points both. I am reminded of John Frow's critique of Bourdieu, where he distinguishes between class and 'privilege' as critical concepts. (B ends up, in Distinction, elaborating something more like an account of privilege - with less analytic and critical purchase than class, according to Frow).
ReplyDeleteI suspect that the reason privilege has such currency is that so much of contemporary middle-class experience in places like the US is of social spaces where the zero-sum game is presupposed, where 'there is no such thing as a free lunch' is the only type of scene where middle-class people can stage their desires day in and day out. What are the structuring conditions of any particular critical judgment? What are the structuring conditions of any particular act of resistance? These are not only questions about whether judgment or resistance might be possible (and obviously they still are) but what sorts of judgments and resistances are widely available (and to whom). The term privilege does not just play into the rhetoric of austerity - its currency is a product of a class-inflected experience of austerity in everyday encounters with institutions etc.