When I created this blog, I did so with the intention of being witty, light-hearted, and humourous. So, naturally, my first post will be a serious one. Typical.
I've been reading, watching, and hearing many different things, from many different people, on many different topics. During that time, I've noticed a word that keeps coming up, insidiously inserting itself into our lexicon, and I don't like it. It's an ugly word, a dirty word, a marginalizing word. Worse, it seems as though no one even recognizes what a terrible word it is. The word of the day: "privilege."
Before I start ranting, a little context. I am a young, cis-gendered, straight white male. I do not hold any "unusual" religious or spiritual beliefs. I hold a university degree, in a "serious" field, and I live a first-world country. I hail from a middle- to upper-middle class family, I grew up in the suburbs, and I had an uninteresting, non-traumatic childhood (my parents are still together). I don't have any disabilities; no serious medical issues. I am the very definition of "privilege."
As a student of "hard science," I was never particularly interested in the humanities; the dearth of conclusive data on any subject, the (in my view, inappropriate) emotional investment people put into issues, the ideological biases inherent in most research, action, and policy - all these factors drove me away. The epithet "soft science" seemed well-deserved to me. However, many of my friends are keenly interested in these subjects, and I've been doing a fair amount of casual reading/watching on
various social issues lately (feminism, nationalism, psychology and
mental health, etc.), so I've been more and more exposed to these topics lately. And a word that comes up, again and again, is "privilege."
What is privilege? I'll skip the hackneyed dictionary reference and roll with a layman's definition: it's a special set of benefits or rules that only some people get to enjoy. Most commonly, people talk about group privileges that are awarded arbitrarily, rather than earned, and that unfairly place other groups at a disadvantage. White privilege, male privilege, heterosexual privilege, rich privilege. In the context of groups, it's a useful term - it helps us analyze what norms, expectations, and laws might give one subset of the population an unfair advantage over the rest at the collective level.
What seems to be creeping into our discourse, however, is the use of "privilege" as a negative epithet to describe individuals. Question or criticize the wrong person's opinion on minority rights, and they'll dismiss you as "a privileged male," or "a privileged white guy." Worse, few people will even bat an eye at this use of the word. This needs to change.
First, dismissing someone's opinions because that person is "privileged" is a logical fallacy, plain and simple. It's an ad hominem attack that does nothing to address the arguments themselves. Unfortunately, problems like discrimination, rape, and mental health issues are hard to understand for those who haven't experienced them, and even harder to quantify. As a man, I have never felt the same way as a woman who has to walk home alone, and scientific data about fear, expectation, and likelihood of sexual assault are next to impossible to find or interpret for the average person. As a result, my arguments may be rooted in ignorance or a lack of shared experiences. If that is the case, though, then the right approach is to attempt to explain the issues at hand more fully, and point out how my ignorance invalidates my arguments. Your point is made clearly and convincingly, and I learn more about the topic. To dismiss me out of hand as an "outsider" whose arguments and opinions are wrong by default is intellectually lazy and does little to help the cause ostensibly campaigned for.
Second, and much more concerning, is the way the word "privileged" is being used to marginalize a specific group of people. A recurring theme among social justice campaigns is the struggle to eliminate terms used to exclude or silence minority groups. When a woman is called a bitch, what's understood is that she is unreasonable and emotionally volatile as a result of her sex, and is therefore untrustworthy and not worth associating with. When you label someone a fag, you're implying that he's unmanly and weak because of his sexual orientation, and is therefore inferior in thought and action to "manlier" men. In both of these cases, a whole individual is reduced to a set of supposed faults arising from what they are, and these caricatures are easily dismissed. In progressive societies, we strive to treat each person as an individual, whose actions, opinions, and behaviour are judged based on their merits. Why, then, should it be acceptable to pigeonhole people based on their advantages (especially if they were acquired by some accident of birth)?
Moving from the political to the personal, I've recently started to hear my friends and acquaintances dismiss the problems and concerns of their peers based on their "privilege." "So much privilege, so much drama!" A quick clarification - I am not referring to the critique of Western materialism and ingratitude typified by the "1st world problems" meme. Rather, I am talking about the dismissal of very human problems based on the sufferer's supposed advantages. From what I sometimes hear, anyone who enjoys any sort of socioeconomic advantage is prohibited from experiencing any kind of negative emotion (or expressing that negative emotion).
However, as we said above, "privilege" is a relative term used to describe groups - Caucasians generally have better job prospects than non-Caucasians, for example. Does this mean that every white person has an easy time finding a job? Of course not. It's easier for more Caucasians in comparison to blacks, for example. Moreover, an individual Caucasian may have a very hard time finding gainful employment - the advantages of his group may not apply to him (I should write a post about statistics and the meaning of averages at some point...). Just because life is generally easier for some members of a group doesn't necessarily make one individual's life easy. Would you tell a homeless man not to be sad, because he benefits in our society from being a white male?
Furthermore, privilege usually applies to very specific areas of one's life. Men may be better paid than women on average, but this has little to do with socialization, for example. A person may be very privileged in some ways, and disadvantaged in other ways. The monolithically privileged are an unbelievably small group, if they exist at all. Everyone gets treated unfairly for some reason or another, and no advantage can compensate for that.
Perhaps most importantly, privilege often has to do with material advantages, while the problems that truly wound us are personal ones - problems of the human condition, if you'll permit me the expression. Loneliness, hopelessness, poor self esteem, anxiety - all the material advantages in the world can't buy solutions to these issues. They're not objective, and they're not relative, just as positive emotions aren't. When an orphan opens a Christmas gift for the first time, do we sneer at him or her, and tell them they shouldn't be happy, that they can't possibly be happy? Do their relative disadvantages (oh God, pun not intended, I swear!) invalidate their positive emotions? If not, then why do we dismiss the negative feelings of those in positive situations? No one should ever feel like they're "not allowed" to feel bad, because emotions are never invalid, never insignificant, never wrong.
Anyway, I don't know where this rant came from, but next time you want to throw the word "privileged" out there, think for a second and replace it with something else - "black" "disabled" "poor" "female" "gay". "These female people - so much drama!" - sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
