| May. 16th, 2012 @ 10:46 am Relative and absolute levels of privelege |
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I recently read another essay looking for a way of explaining that "Straight white males on average acquire more/better opportunities than non-straight non-white non-males in similar situations" without raising the defensiveness many people experience when talking about privilege.
It used the metaphor of "Some people are playing life on 'hard' difficulty and some on 'easy', but we didn't get the choose the difficulty level". Link:
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
However, I was reminded of another of Scalzi's essays that I found very moving, on being poor. I found it very effective, and it also seemed to attract much much less defensiveness. It was a list of things that people experience, starting something like:
"Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV"
"Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away"
Etc, etc
But I wondered, would it have been better if it had started by saying:
"Not being poor is not panicing when your kids for ask for all the crap they see on TV"
"Not being poor is being able to go to the dentist when you have toothache"
Etc, etc
I think that would make people MORE defensive.
It seems like most explanations of privilege start out by telling people "you can get on a train without wondering if you'll be groped/harassed by police/unable to get up the steps" and leave it implied that other people can't, but I think it's perhaps the second half that needs to be emphasised. Most men already KNOW they can get on a tube train without worrying about being groped -- the relevant piece of information they're missing is that half of the human population can't. And yes, everyone SHOULD know, so it's fair to vent that some people just don't get it. But if I'm genuinely trying to get someone to "get it", might it be advantageous to put the thing they're missing up front in every paragraph, in big letters, spelled out in words of one syllable?
It seems to me "privilege" can be absolute or relative. You can say "people whose parents are landed gentry are privileged" or "people who live in the UK are privileged compared to many other people". So saying someone is privileged because they're white is implicitly making two assertions:
(a) that they have some opportunities that would be harder or impossible if they weren't
(b) that people who don't have those priveleges are the correct "baseline" to measure privilege against.
Now, people assuming that straight white males are the "baseline" default sort of person and everyone else falls short is indeed a systematic problem in society. But if you're trying to get someone who isn't familiar with the ideas to "get it", it seems like presenting them with the fairly objective facts about (a), as in the "Being Poor" essay, and inviting their humanity to empathise, is likely to be more effective than saying "OK, humans have a natural tendency to think of themselves as 'baseline' but that tendency is WRONG WRONG WRONG and you should think of someone without any 'privileges' as the baseline for comparison", even if that makes sense.
I notice that the same problem can occur even between two people who DO know the terms. If person from non-straight-white-male-group-A is talking to person from non-straight-white-male-group-B and avers to something that B has easier than A, people instinctively take that as saying that B has it easier in general (and get very cross if that's obviously not true). Even thought according to the literal definition of the concept of privilege, it's just as correct to say there is a (quite small) amount of "Black Privilege" of things black people can do that white people find a lot harder, even if "White Privilege" is thousands of times bigger.
Conclusions
My questions are, is the distinction between "you are privileged" making me defensive and "you are privileged compared to most people" making my empathetic one that only applicable to me, or am I right that most people react the same way?
Secondly, do you think it would work if more "what it's like to have white/straight/male privilege" essays instead focused on telling people what it would be like if they didn't? Do you think it's harmful if postponse the question of the baseline and just start by establishing the large relative difference?
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