A textbook example from a Reddit thread: in a conversation about college, one poster lamented the existence of women's and minority groups (like the Society of Women Engineers or the National Society of Black Engineers) that exclude white males. A second poster pointed out that those organizations don't exclude white males, and in some cases white males are actively courted. The third poster responded to the effect of "sure, they let white males join, but I attended a NSBE meeting one and I was the only white guy in the room. As the only white guy I was extremely uncomfortable and that discomfort was basically the same as not welcoming white guys."
I don't think this poster was a racist or a bad guy, just someone that didn't realize how his privilege colored his perceptions, or how the privilege (or lack thereof) of others can affect their perceptions.
I'm glad I read this. As a white boy who grew up in poverty like he did, his explanation of how wealthy people simply don't understand the priveledge they have, and connecting that to race really hit home.
I can only begin to understand the perks I get by being white and belonging to the mainstream, white collar culture. Growing up, people knew I lived in a trailer, and was therefore "white trash." The fact that I spoke in the dialect of my family (a thick, Appalachian accent which is itself a relic of heavy Ulster Scots settlement of the region) marked me as an outsider when I arrived at college courtesy of a wealth coal-man's scholarship and heapings of Pell Grants. I am now able to shed this accent, this marker of "inferiority" at will. My brothers and sisters of color are unable to shed the markers which make them stand out as outsiders.
There is one thankful trend I have observed: I have seen prejudiced people become less numerous, and less likely to hold positions of power than they used to, but it is a slow process. The minions which often guard the doors to the hiring process are often samll minded, petty bigots, unbeknownst to their leadership. They see "Tyrone" on a job application, and it gets moved to the "no" pile. I'm glad my father didn't name me "Jethro." Perhaps I would have been marked out as inferior by proxy of my "hillbilly" name.
There's hope, though: every time a link like this is posted, a few of the folks who haven't had their "ah-ha!" moments yet may get nudged in that direction (just as the commenter he quotes did). Those nudges do have an effect, and they do add up. Or at least, they did for me.
I just wish there was a way to make it happen faster.
John Scalzi is an award-winning author with a considerable fanbase. Last time I was in Times Square, his latest book was being projected on the largest screen there.
I humbly suggest that among his immense readership are people who either disapprove of his politics, or who are not quite as aware of their privilege as he is and would benefit from having a smart, eloquent person point it out publicly.
Possibly, but irrelevant. I think he is addressing male and female feminists - women who don't think their voices are heard and men who've already had some sort of come-to-Jesus moment regarding "privilege".
To me - not exactly anti-feminist but certainly anti-a lot of people who call themselves feminists, it comes across as a load of smarmy, self-congratulatory, intolerant not-even-wrong rhetoric and I suspect that I it was his intention to convince others like me, he would have written in a different register.
It's also possible that your perspective on feminist issues is distorted enough that while you're interpreting this as smarmy and self-congratulatory, it is in fact reasonable and well-argued. Right? That sort of argument by its nature swings both ways.
Clearly a lot of people here find something worthwhile in how Scalzi writes about this, and some of the literally hundreds of commenters on that blog post are at least finding it worth discussing. Perhaps you'll get something out of them, if not out of Mr. Scalzi's post itself. I do hope so, because from where I'm sitting you're the one being intolerant and not even wrong, and I'd love if this could at least make you pause and reconsider your perspective.
>It's also possible that your perspective on feminist issues is distorted enough that while you're interpreting this as smarmy and self-congratulatory, it is in fact reasonable and well-argued. Right?
It's always possible, but that's precisely the problem with false-consciousness arguments presented without substantiation: it's always possible.
For example some people might see the habitual accusation of distorted perspective as the nervous thought stopper of an ideologue faced with contrary experience.
> Perhaps you'll get something out of them, if not out of Mr. Scalzi's post itself. I do hope so, because from where I'm sitting you're the one being intolerant and not even wrong,
Do you really think that or is it just a thematically convenient inversion?
> I'd love if this could at least make you pause and reconsider your perspective.
I hereby coin the term 'fem-splaining' to label this sort of concerned exhortation towards self-reflection so honest you'll realise you were wrong all along. It's not bad advice in general but in the context of an argument on the internet, difficult to accept as good faith (I'm not accusing you of acting in bad faith here)
I think that the biggest privilege one can have, at least when it comes to matters of career and finance is being born to middle-class or better parents and having an above average IQ.
I would imagine a lesbian black woman with an Ivy league education has much greater odds of success than a straight white guy from the trailer park/slum who struggles with reading/writing skills.
I find it interesting that it is generally considered correct and fair that somebody has better income and quality of life because of high intelligence when this is a factor as much outside your control as race or gender.
But the point is, you're just imagining those things, which is what causes you to set up this neat little world where a black lesbian has an Ivy League education just because she's smart, ignoring all of the extra obstacles that would be in her way compared to someone with more social privilege.
You're able to do this by comparing different kinds of circumstances — the person born with white and male privilege but little money or academic skill (and indeed, these are handicaps!), and the person born into the world with similar handicaps, who has already overcome them, preventing us from actually comparing their circumstances.
When oppressed people reach recognizable pinnacles of success, like an Ivy League education, it's because they worked harder than lots of other people might have had to, despite other advantages they might have had.
When oppressed people reach recognizable pinnacles of success, like an Ivy League education, it's because they worked harder than lots of other people might have had to, despite other advantages they might have had.
That would be better than the world we have.
Until I moved to the USA and observed the process first hand at an Ivy League school, I would never have credited the claim that there are people whose whole lives are based on having won the affirmative action lottery, and then playing the race card. This ticks me off, because having known such people I can no longer discount the possibility that any FUTURE minority person that I meet with the trappings of success is one of them. Most aren't. Most got there on their own merits, against all odds. But the nature of business is that a bad hire frequently costs much more than the opportunity cost of waiting to make the right hire. And that pushes you to not give the benefit of the doubt.
In particular I witnessed watching a black woman who had played the race card her whole life getting kicked out with a masters in math despite objectively knowing less math than I expected from undergrads. At the same time a much more competent white man who had a block in ONE subject area (and enormous success in many others) would have been kicked out with no degree at all if I had not taken a month of my personal time out to teach him all of topology. And a third person, an undergraduate black from England who had never received any preference, took an extra quarter to finish a well-earned masters on top of his BSc.
All three frustrate me in different ways. I hated seeing the ridiculously easy qual she was given compared to the rest of us, in written take home format yet, with a blind eye turned towards the fact that she was begging other grad students to do it for her. At the same time a student who had worked much harder and done much more got no breaks at all from the system. And in parallel I saw a truly deserving minority student, and know that for the rest of his life upon first meeting someone like him, I'll need to unfairly suspect his deserved accomplishments until I know him better.
Yes, I recognize the historical injustice. Yes, I recognize the barriers. But our current affirmative action policies give some a lottery ticket at the cost of perpetuating the problems into future generations. That's not what we need to do.
That problem does exist, but happens to fewer people. And in my experience, those legacy kids tend to be quite well prepared, and from what I saw were judged to the same standards as other people. (They did, of course, have the option of choosing easier courses if they didn't want to work hard. But so did everyone else...)
Furthermore it matters less in the work place. Because if your parents can donate buildings to get you into a school, your parents generally can arrange to help you get employed. Hence I as a random software developer am unlikely to be in a position of deciding whether a random rich kid should be hired as my peer.
Unlikely, but not impossible. Several jobs back I worked fairly closely with a couple of "legacy" kids. They worked twice as hard as anyone else because they were afraid that they would be seen as just spoiled rich kids. Anecdotal, but it did not leave me dreading working with legacies in the future.
Is there really a problem in the US with a huge number of people donating buildings to schools to get their kids in? I did not realize this happens on a large enough scale to make that an actual issue.
It seems that your frustration is that some people now have a privilege they previously didn't have. This makes sense, but the very first statement you said in light of it suggests that you are turning a blind eye to other privileges. To say that the way things work with some people getting privileges and others not - therefore having to work harder - is ideal, then complaining that some people have to work harder and others not (but in different categories) is somewhat hypocritical.
Basically - your response to a post about how certain unprivileged groups have to work harder is ideal. Then you rand about how different unprivileged groups have to work harder, and how horrible it is.
Whether or not it is your intent, it comes off as defending a status quo based on you not liking the membership conditions (or don't qualify for them) of other privilege.
I have no problem in accepting the existence of privileges. Some are rich, some are tall, some are smart, etc.
My objection is that specific accomplishments should mean specific things. The meaning of what you need to accomplish to get a specific degree should not change because you're black and threaten a lawsuit. If you don't know how to invert a 3x3 matrix, you shouldn't be getting a masters in math.
The ultra-PC crowd seems to want it both ways. They want minorities to be given degrees more easily than privileged white kids. And then they want the degrees handed out to minorities to be treated as having the same meaning as degrees handed out to those privileged white kids. But there is a fundamental contradiction here. If an advanced math degree means something different about your qualifications based on who you are, then people will learn that and won't treat that degree equally.
But, how would I solve the problem? Quite simply - I'd tackle it like our military does. To achieve a given credential you have to perform to the same level on the same test no matter who you are. If you are someone whose background did not prepare you, extra assistance will be made available to help you catch up. Make the credential mean the same, and people will learn that it does and will learn to treat it the same. You are then laying the foundation for people to treat minorities equally in the future - not because someone tells them to - but because it makes sense for them to do so.
(I keep resisting writing a blog post about how unequal high schools make it so that the legally safe way to hire for basic literacy is to require a college degree - which actually discriminates more strongly by race than the legally unsafe approach of being willing to hire high school kids that can demonstrate basic literacy. It is really sad and silly, but true.)
All forms of what is called "privilege" are unearned advantages you get by being, in some way that you didn't choose, part of the dominant group in society. European cultural dominance is also, in a sense, work that was done "on my behalf" by my ancestors, whether I wanted that or not.
My point is to say it's multi-dimensional. A black lesbian attempting to get an Ivy League education, even if her parents can essentially purchase it, is still going to face significant obstacles to success.
There are a plethora of white male role models to look to for inspiration in nearly any professional field (even basketball!). Is the same true for black lesbians? What about fitting in at this theoretical Ivy League school once she gets there — is it going to be full of people like her, who she can relate to and learn from, or is it going to be alienating? And how will that affect her likelihood to finish school?
Lots of people with money and good educational pedigrees have to face the accusation their education was simply purchased by their parents, they they didn't get in "on merit". Our protagonist has to face not only that accusation, but the additional, much more common accusation that "affirmative action" got her a spot in this Ivy League institution.
So when and if she graduates, she will have worked harder and persevered through more than a white guy with the same wealth and IQ. And the point of talking about all this isn't to make you feel bad, or to say that one group is better than another — it's just to create understanding.
There are a plethora of white male role models to look to for inspiration in nearly any professional field (even basketball!). Is the same true for black lesbians?
Black lesbians are as free to look up to white male role models as anybody else, just as I'm free to not care about someone's race, gender, or sexuality when I look to them as a role model. (Or religion, ethnicity, etc.)
Lots of people with money and good educational pedigrees have to face the accusation their education was simply purchased by their parents
You wouldn't say that poor people are privileged though, would you? This is where the concept gets shaky, because one person's challenge does not always equate to another person's advantage.
And the point of talking about all this isn't to make you feel bad, or to say that one group is better than another — it's just to create understanding.
You might reconsider what kind of understanding is created when you accuse people of not working as hard or persevering through as much as other people. Nothing is more alienating to hard-working non-bigots (of which there are many among the privileged) than to be accused of secretly being lazy bigots.
Just because you have privilege doesn't mean you're a bad person. It's not your fault. You shouldn't really feel guilty. It's just luck a lot of the time. Luck can take away privilege as well. One unluck car accident can make you paralyzed. There goes your able bodies privilege then.
And not everyone has the same obstacles (that's the point of privilege), so you can't say for sure that your white ancestors had the same struggles (say) to get university educated as a current black female person today.
No one has argued in this thread that you and I are bad peeple because we're priviledged. What they're saying is that if we are not aware of that priviledge you are living in ignorance and should not be surprised when less priviledged people don't take us seriously.
Take Rosseau's famous example of priviledged ignorance: "If the peasants have no bread, let them eat cake." If we are not aware of our priviledge we appear just as ridiculous as that French princess.
Also, I'm pretty sure my white ancestors never turned on the tv and saw a state governor standing at the door of a university trying to block white people from getting in.
> I find it interesting that it is generally considered correct and fair that somebody has better income and quality of life because of high intelligence when this is a factor as much outside your control as race or gender.
I don't think it is generally considered correct and fair, which is why so many people are critical of libertarians and Objectivism. Class struggle is a major issue, and post-industrial capitalism is itself often criticized for creating these inherent imbalances.
None of that, however, has to do with this particular issue, which is absolutely worth discussing. If you submit a story about the unfairness of upper- versus lower-class opportunities, I'll certainly upvote it.
Others have responded to parts of this already, so I won't repeat their points. But one issue that I haven't seen anyone comment on is that race and sex are very overt traits, while family wealth and IQ are a good bit less obvious at a glance.
Being born in a poor family makes life much harder, no question, but (e.g.) if a straight white man from a trailer park does get into a good college then the people around him won't immediately guess his background (and judge him for it). A lot of them will make the high-probability assumption that his family is similar to their own, and that implicit sense of kinship will go a long way toward making him a welcome part of the community.
A person who's black or female in that same environment could hardly expect to have the same experience: those traits are in most cases obvious at a glance. If a teacher or a peer has a prejudice against both "blacks" and "people from trailer parks" (consciously or unconsciously), the black student will definitely suffer from it while the poor white student may luck out. And there's little chance that privileged white guys will unthinkingly assume that a black student is actually white or that a woman is actually a man and thus feel that implicit sense of kinship.
Only if he advertises his "trailer park" background. The point is, he can "pass" for not being from a trailer park with no difficulty (just get setting appropriate clothes and don't say "I'm from a trailer park" all the time).
The discrimination will come in the form of standardized examination. If you aren't born with the intellectual ability to pass exams you can't go to harvard.
It's not always easy to pass for upper class when you are not, this is especially true in the UK where you will be judged on your accent.
What? Being born in a trailer park now means being born stupid? This is goalpost moving.
I didn't say pass for being "upper class". I was discussing passing for being "not from the trailer park". Lots of people at Harvard are not wealthy, just have good grades and SAT scores.
Sure. Sometimes. It can be an exclusionary factor too.
The point of privilege discussions tho isn't to eliminate all privileges. It is to recognize them, and work towards eliminating the implicit ones, by making them explicit. And to further decide which ones make sense and which ones don't.
Assuming that someone is respectable based on skin color or iq or gender or whatever is a privilege that doesn't make sense. Assuming that someone is qualified to gain the benefit of an institution of learning based on a shown track record of learning well does - IMO.
Recognizing that I have opportunities because I was unfairly given a pass by the cops when I was holding drugs, even though my buddy who wasn't was searched, is not self-flagellation. It is a simple fact of what happened. Recognizing privilege isn't an act of self hate. Using my privilege to influence the reduction of privileges that make no sense isn't self-hate either, it is an attempt to reduce the absurd. It's recognition that things are fucked up, and trying to correct it.
I would imagine a lesbian black woman with an Ivy league education has much greater odds of success
Sure. The lesbian black woman has class privilege (and/or wealth privilege). But just imagine this, the straight white cis male who lives next door to the black lesbian and goes to the same school etc. has an added advantage.
In many 'social justice' spaces, being "classist" is also frowned upon (just like being sexism, racist, etc.)
I disagree. I think the biggest privilege one can have is a fair start. Being able to live as you'd like without picking up hundreds of years of stigma and injustices or having to work extremely hard to distinguish yourself as someone that can be trusted.
> I would imagine a lesbian black woman with an Ivy league education has much greater odds of success than a straight white guy from the trailer park/slum who struggles with reading/writing skills.
Privilege isn't about odds of success, it's about proportional work to become successful. When someone doesn't trust you or has something against you because of your ethnicity or gender, you have to work two or three times as hard for the same success someone else has. That's the problem.
> I find it interesting that it is generally considered correct and fair that somebody has better income and quality of life because of high intelligence when this is a factor as much outside your control as race or gender.
This is just the American Dream blown out of proportion, as usual.
If you have a low IQ, the amount of extra work you have to put in in order to successful in a well paying career will be far higher than someone of high intelligence.
Being black or homosexual will work against you if you want to work in industries with strong institutionalised stigmas, being dumb will work against you in any industry.
Yes, which is why plenty of people think that capitalism is inherently flawed. A system which rewards production over anything is a system in which those who can't produce as effectively will be punished. Unless you truly believe that production is the end-all be-all of human existence, that's not a fair system. (There's also the problem of capitalism being really bad at properly valuing things but that's neither here nor there.)
But what you're missing, Mr. Jiggy, is that the biases we're talking about extend way beyond "industry". They infiltrate every part of our culture. Politics, media representation, religious attitudes, the values we teach our children, on and on and on.
This incident with Adria is happening the same week that a number of news organizations were criticized for reporting on a rape trial and sympathizing with the rapists. CNN, NPR, Fox News all ran stories about how much it sucks to have your life ruined for raping somebody. Some even disclosed the name of the 16-year-old victim, so that people could email her rape threats the same way they've been writing Adria. And this wasn't an ambiguous case of "did they rape this girl" – the people shot video of the rape and posted it to YouTube with the tags "rape" and "offensive". Still we had people asking if the raped girl "was asking for it", and writing hatefully that she's just a "slut who ruined two good boys' lives".
I get that you feel there are other imbalances at play in society, and believe you me there are! But please don't make this about which particular imbalance is the outright worst one. Ours is a hugely misogynistic culture, and this unfortunate incident is triggering not only a huge bout of anti-feminist sentiment, but also convincing a lot of people that feminists are just assholes who need attention at the expense of innocent men. Which is about the opposite of true.
Again, if you want to start a thread to discuss other flaws in the system, be my guest! Hacker News doesn't see nearly enough of that conversation, in my opinion. But that's not really what this post is about.
It's not that various forms of discrimination don't exist. It's that some forms are considered more "just" than others.
If you are born with a low IQ, people will certainly judge you for it.
You will also be punished for it, for example by scam artists who will take advantage of you. Then people will respond with stuff like "well, if your dumb enough to fall for that you deserve what you get".
So I think boiling down equality to a few pet issues as various movements want to do is a gross simplification.
As an example, poor areas in the UK are often considered some of the most racist.
I think this is partly because people with low education and poor outlook will see an educated black lady complaining about equality on TV and think "wtf is she complaining for, I bet she earns more in a week than I do in a year!".
You... are aware that there's a huge movement against treating people with low IQs like they're subhuman, right? There's a thread currently on the front page in which people are arguing about whether or not the word "retarded" should be used as a casual insult.
I don't understand what your end goal is here. Either we talk about imbalances or we don't. And if we do, we have to talk about specific imbalances, or else they don't get fixed. This is a specific imbalance that's engendering (ahem) a lot of discussion recently, and it's about time that that discussion's being had. I'll say again that if you want to post about the disadvantages of having a low IQ, I'll gladly upvote it, but it seems like you're saying that because other types of discrimination exist, we should stop talking about this one. Which is absurd.
People will speak about discrimination against those who low IQ enough to be considered mentally handicapped, but there is a great class of people with IQ of say 80-100.
My peeve really is the "straight white guy" meme which seems to suggest "hey, you are straight and white you have it easy" which is necessarily going to alienate huge numbers of people from the debate.
I think the intelligence example is especially important because intelligence is such an amazing tool for overcoming over disadvantages.
> My peeve really is the "straight white guy" meme which seems to suggest "hey, you are straight and white you have it easy" which is necessarily going to alienate huge numbers of people from the debate.
Yeah but nobody says that. They say "if you're straight you don't have to think about what gay people go through", and "if you're white you don't have to think about what black people go through", and "if you're a man you don't have to think about what women go through", and this is all true. And I would wager that the shit your average woman or minority or gay person has to go through in their lifetime is overwhelmingly more severe than what your average person with an IQ of 100 has to face.
If you really want to get into this derail, I suggest you look at people talking about biases in education and education access, specifically at the conversations which deal with how lack of access to certain kinds of education make it vastly harder to deal with modern life. This is a conversation that people do have, and they have it often. But it is still not what this conversation is about.
> "Being black or homosexual will work against you if you want to work in industries with strong institutionalised stigmas"
Racial and sexual discrimination goes much, much further than industries with strong, institutionalized stigmas.
The problem with discrimination is that sometimes it's so casual and so subtle. You do not, for example, have to hate black people to contribute to discrimination.
The struggle for being black or homosexual isn't so much being kicked out of a store, or barred from membership in an organization, or being actively hated in an environment - it's the subtle, everyday, casual things that stack up quickly. It's the furtive look, the different way people treat you, that little flicker of fear when they see you, etc etc.
This is the problem with explaining privilege - there are very few big, ugly examples you can point at (say, a cross burning on your lawn), but instead there is an avalanche of little things, each one of which is insignificant by itself. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
Privilege isn't just your job. It can refer to where you live and shop and hang out. You might work in an industry that has no stigma against gay people. But if your local town does, then you're disadvantaged.
Great, another guilt ridden diatribe against John Scalzi from John Scalzi. I've never read someone who is more obsessed about being a "privileged white male" than he is. I wish he would take his own advice or at least the first part of it. I'm not going bother arguing with him because really what's the point, this self-flagellation obviously gets him off and as usual it's all about him. Is "self-hating narcissist" a thing?
Self-flagellation? I went back to make sure I didn't miss anything but it looks like a post about understanding your privilege and how your success relates to it. It's a post about understanding the depth of experience that other people live with, experiences he has not had because of that privilege.
It seems that a trend is developing of labeling earnest introspection as "self-flagellation." See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5375270 for an identical situation on a different subject. I don't want to make assumptions, but are people really that hostile to the idea of openly questioning oneself?
(I'm speaking specifically of the HN community, obviously the answer for the general public is a resounding "yes")
Acknowledging that you were born with certain advantages, and that said advantages make you blind to the difficulties that people who are not like you face, is a weird thing to call "self-flagellation". Or narcissism for that matter. Like it is literally the opposite of narcissism.
I forget which awesome person said it, but the correct response to realizing you have privilege is not to feel guilty or self-hating. It's to feel responsible. You've been given immense advantages; you should use them to help others who have been less fortunate. So no, I doubt John Scalzi hates himself very much.
There's nothing self-flagellating about Scalzi's post. And I say this as somebody who is not particularly fond of the language of privilege. But also, if you've never read anyone more obsessed with privilege than Scalzi, you've managed to live in a pretty politics-free bubble.
the example of walking through a dark parking lot to demonstrated 'straight white privilege' is pretty shitty. in fact it's probably the worst example you could choose.
his 'privilege' of not worrying about being assaulted comes from the fact that he is 6' 280 pounds, not because he's white or male or straight. a big gay black man (or woman, for that matter) of the same stature probably doesn't feel that twinge of fear his petite asian female colleage felt walking through a dark parking lot.
smaller/shorter straight white guys still have to worry about getting beaten up or bullied or robbed. in fact bullying it's kind of a wide spread problem these days affecting everyone.
in my experience most straight white guys have no problem understanding their privilege in society, i work with a lot of them and they joke around about how being a "white dude" is awesome. it certainly doesn't suck. lots of these guys grew up in diverse neighborhoods or went to school with people from different backgrounds so they have heard stories or seen first hand how people different from themselves go about life. anyone with average IQ and
however, there are some that just don't get it and no amount of reading blog posts is going to help them understand, it just takes time (age) and personal experience. or they're just a couple of IQ points below the threshold it takes to think about these things in an abstract manner (beyond "my life is all that exists in this world.")
I am a 5'6" white guy weighing 120lb. I don't feel fear walking through dark parking lots. The shortest path between my house and the closest grocery is through a large, poorly lit lot. The better lit street route would add, oh, about a minute to the walk.
I would absolutely not walk through there if I was a woman. I don't really mind the small chance of being robbed -- a small chance of being raped is a completely different thing.
do it in a bad neighborhood at the wrong time/place and this turns into "large chance of being cornered, beaten for being white/outsider/unknown, robbed, and if you put up any resistance, killed."
all your anecdote tells me is you don't venture far from your own safety zones.
my point is a bank, board room, police station, or any number of other places is a MUCH BETTER place to illustrate the "white, straight, male" privilege that exists.
Sure, but when relating a personal story about it, you have to go with what you got.
For the record here's mine:
I was the white employee at a hip hop club. The owner was black, as were my co workers. The clientele of the club was mostly black. I was a manager, but the owner was there most nights too - making me not the senior person. The cops were there a lot waiting outside to harass people leaving. I saw an awful lot of cops fucking with people for minor things, that the same cops didn't even glance at in other parts of town [1]. Incidents like fights were met with forceful reactions by the police - full out "lay on the ground and get cuffed" responses to small brawls, but worse fights at the other bar, the response was "hey break it up, go home, and don't come back tonight". This gave me an inkling to privilege.
Then one night some hoodlums were causing a lot of mischief in the street out front and the cops initiated a full on riot response. Woah - tear gas, arrests everywhere, 40+ cops. Again, the last time I saw something on the same scale of disturbance on campus, it was 5 cops, a couple of arrests, and a "disperse and go home" on loop on the PA. During the riot response, I was standing in the entryway with my boss, the club owner. The cops came up and tried to usher me to safety and arrest my boss for loitering. It took a lot of effort on my part to find a cop who would listen to the fact that the guy wasn't loitering, he was standing on his property for sane business reasons. That was privilege right there.
The other thing I constantly encountered was that delivery people, job applicants and so on, always assumed I was in charge, no matter if I was sweeping or counting money, and no matter if the boss was sweeping or counting money. In well over 75% of cases, it was just assumed I was the boss. Again, privilege. (I mean seriously, I dressed like a bum, and the bos had style. It was absurd).
[1] All my cop behavior comparisons are based on the job i had before that working at a college bar in the same town, closer to campus, where the clientele was mostly white college kids.
Ah, sorry -- I somehow misread your initial post. I was speaking specifically about male privilege.
But to be fair, so was whoever used that example. It is talking about a particular type of privilege, and how we might not even notice when we have it. It wasn't supposed to indicate all types of straight white privilege.
This is silly. Just because Scalzi has problems with listening to what people are saying, does not mean that everyone else has. Also, just because it's good to listen, emphatize and understand where people are coming from, it's not good for anyone to just stand there and take abuse. Nip it in the bud. Don't feed the trolls. Respect people who respect you. If people are silent and don't share their feelings and opinions, ask them questions, get them engaged into the conversation. Be a builder, feed constructive, respectful discussion.
Assuming that everybody has something worth listening to makes a huge, fallacious assumption that simply causes you undue suffering. People use words to inform. People also use words to manipulate and gain power over someone. Recognize the difference. You will feel much better and be a much more effective communicator.
Just because the only way you understand discussion is in order to share information and discuss things logically, someone else may just use words to try and twist your mind, use whatever dirty tactic to gain an advantage over you, or over a group. They don't care about logic, they don't care about information, they don't care about fairness. Only thing in their mind is power. Recognize.
Privilege is a heavily loaded word that is difficult to use in context of contructive discussion. You are by default swallowing the feminist bait and playing by their rules. Making it impossible to gain any ground because of fallacious, circular logic.
I'm not denying that privilege exist at all. I'm just saying that how it's understood and used is heavily biased and politicized. It would be much more productive to discuss about topics without resorting to feminist dogma.
FWIW, I found Scalzi's post to be much more constructive (not to mention well-written) than whatever agenda you're pushing here, which is coming across as fairly toxic...
It seems pretty clear that people's obliviousness to their own privilege is a much bigger problem than too many people "swallowing the feminist bait."
Dogma is the official system of belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It serves as part of the primary basis of an ideology or belief system, and it cannot be changed or discarded without affecting the very system's paradigm, or the ideology itself.
I think some feminist thought has good ideas worth listening to. Gender feminism and feminism projected through the lens of most modern women does not.
Individual women have a lot to tell. Individual women are very much worth listening to.
Here's one interesting comment from the Pinker article:
Forwarded this article and got the answer, paraphrased, from a liberal 'it isn't that liberals disagree, it is the moral hazard of agreeing; there's nothing to stop the lower orders from returning to all of the horrors of the past.' And, there you have it. The Left has no faith in traditional religions to counteract the evil impulses of the past so a proxy religion becomes necessary even if not entirely believed by its adherents. And, then the sacraments of that religion come to control us all and to be used as a cludgel against all competitor religions.
> Nip it in the bud. Don't feed the trolls. Respect people who respect you.
I would agree with you entirely. The problem is that a lot of people in this current PyCon discussion are assuming that certain other people are trolling and disrespectful when, in fact, they're trying to talk about a serious issue that deserves attention.
Yes, jumping to conclusions, arguing with pure conjecture, having no patience nor empathy. Those are things that I often bump into when discussing about various things in the internet. It's hardly new.
Claiming that someone is a troll requires evidence. Simply because someone disgrees with you does not make them a troll.
Recognizing when someone is being disingenuous is an art, I think. Human beings have evolved complex mechanism for it through body language and facial gestures, which all are missing from internet discussions.
The concept of privilege only makes sense on a statistical basis. Whats the obsession with constantly applying it to single persons? That speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding.
If being white is correlated with being high-earning, that doesn't mean every white is high-earning. That is just not the implication.
Sure, and not every person in a high risk group will get cancer, that's statistics. Yet we still check those people in high risk groups more carefully.
It is the same with privilege. You may not have every single benefit associated with you're statistical peers' privilege group, that doesn't mean you don't have privileges. Just by being in a statistically privileged group, you get some privileges. People assume you qualify, and therefore you get opportunity that isn't extended to those who don't. You get the benefit of the doubt,.
There's no easy way to tell who the outliers are, so it's common to apply an unfortunate heuristic. Especially if you find yourself low in the local spectrum.
I guess I'm the only person that has had the "privilege" of being physically assaulted, several times... in separate states, and harassed and threatened for no other reason than being white. Yay privileged white me! Or maybe the only one that was denied financial aid because my father (not me... my father... single father even) was about $1K over the cut off. Damn him for working that second job and getting a few extra hours of overtime. If only he'd not been such a hard worker, he would have made just a tiny bit less and I could have qualified for assistance. However, this was my dad's money they were counting... not mine. I didn't have money. It would have been nice if my totally (not) rich dad had been able to help me with college. Yay privileged white me! And then there was a whole set of grants I could not even apply for because I was white. Yay privileged white me! And then there is the law about making sure that all groups were proportionally represented in schools and jobs, regardless of qualifications. Yay privileged white me!
Not everyone in this perceived "privileged" class gets dealt aces. Not that it has to be some competition about who has the harder life (sure... you win that prize)... but some of us actually do get the shaft plenty and have to power through it like everyone else. But you can choose to use it as an excuse or you can choose to use it as inspiration. I chose inspiration! I don't complain about it [except in cases like this. ;)] or use it to dismiss the plights of others. I studied and earned an academic scholarship to partially fund my schooling. I worked nights and weekends to pay rent like everyone else. I worked hard to get where I am. And sure, people will just dismiss that and point a link to that "White Male: Lowest Difficulty Level in Life" article. Those people are hypocrites. If your whole argument is "You don't know what it's like" and "Don't judge me until you've walked a mile in my shoes" then you are not allowed to judge me until you've walked in my shoes either. I shut up and listen plenty and mostly what I hear is "Oh poor me and the tough hand I was dealt... I need to tell everyone else to shut up and listen to me because they can't possibly know the hardships I've seen." My "privileged" ass will shut up now. But shutting up and listening is not reserved only for "privileged whites." We'll gladly share that with anyone willing.
I think the OP was discussing more privilege in general, and using the stereotypical straight white male as an example. I agree with you that this is obviously a stereotype, but I don't think the OP used it as anything but just that. Your example speaks volumes about shutting up and listening, both by people of all backgrounds, and to people of all backgrounds.
Sure, I get that. But just like many other things, talking about stereotypes is generally looked upon as racist (or genderist, etc)... unless it is a white stereotype and then it's just fine because apparently we deserve it. Somehow along the way (probably due to the sins of our fathers) we've been shackled with some gross double standards that make it really difficult to take it all seriously. Hypocrisy is rampant.
Rather than thinking of different perspectives (which the author mentions in the last paragraph), I like to think of the list of facts I know as divided into two categories:
"the things which I think are actually true, based on data I've obtained from lots of first hand witnesses and, perhaps, first hand"
"the things which I dreamed up in my head, which allow me to tell a narrative about a phenomenon, but about which there are other people who actually know the real answer if I can only find and listen to them."
This is mostly so I can fit an anti-relativist empiricist worldview into one where I have to listen to other people (especially when they're talking about interesting things) - i.e. while the universe (and morality) are deterministic, I have not measured everything about them yet (and I will never finish this task).
Also my chronic fear of embarrassment in unfamiliar social groups is helpful in making me shut up and listen for a while, and generally stops me contributing where I would "show my ass" as the OP says (although, as a white, straight, cis-male with too many qualifications, I tend to speak up and make a fool of myself depressingly often in spite of this.)
Looking for a 'solution' is the wrong angle to take. There is no easy answer to any question that involves privilege. You can't make a decision about how it can be fixed and just fix it. It's an ongoing process and a living conversation.
That's why he says that it's not just about shutting up when you're called out on your privilege, it's also about listening. Accept that there are things in the world, and positions people are in, that you can't just argue out of existence.
People are all privileged in different ways and in different circumstances. I think this idea is what tends to get swept under the rug when pointing to some overarching Privilege.
One thing that I've learned as I've become familiar with the concept of privilege is that if you think something is getting swept under the rug, it's usually just that you haven't found the huge pile of analysis and discussion of it.
"People are all privileged in different ways and in different circumstances" is pretty closely tied to the concept of intersectionality.
And yes, there are specific situations where generally unprivileged groups have privilege over generally privileged groups. But there are two main reasons nobody wants to focus on those situations:
1. Those situations are typically so minor and so rare that addressing them just isn't a priority,
2. The same prejudice that causes those situations is generally far more problematic in the opposite direction.
You might want to read this, if you haven't: http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/what-about-the-me... . It's aimed at a male audience that is basically unfamiliar with privilege, so anyone who's well read on the subject is likely to cringe at some of their oversimplifications. What's interesting about it is that it uses the point that men are hurt by sexism as a call for more men to get involved with feminism.
Sure, you can downvote me but any married man will tell you that it's always best to have the wife ask for something from someone else because women are perceived as being "nicer" and usually get such favors. When men ask, it's either intimidating to a woman or invokes a power trip with another man.
People who talk a lot about "patriarchy" will point out that a society in which men are made out to be strong and aggressive and dominant doesn't just hurt women. It hurts all the men who would rather be reasonable and mild-mannered and effeminate too.
That's not evidence against there being a systemic imbalance. It's further proof of it.
>>>That's not evidence against there being a systemic imbalance.
I never said nor intended to imply there wasn't. But there's imbalance in every system too. Which now makes it sound like I'm saying "Just shut up," which is really why I tend to avoid discussions like this because they become No Win. For everyone. Gah.
Haha, indeed. Nobody here feels victorious. It's a lot of trekking through mud all around.
Anyway, I think that the fact that systems have imbalance is why we need to talk frequently about what imbalance exists, and how we might fix it. It's also why we should stop this irritating habit of turning everything into a system of processes and functions that don't allow for human error. Plenty of people in the tech community think that a series of rules is the end-all be-all cure to every problem, and refuse to admit that rules often cause as many problems as they solve. Learning to listen and empathize with other people is a more valuable trait than ever, because there are more ways than ever to get away with not doing it.
(a) You may think you don't treat anyone differently, but you may actually do it. Everyone makes mistakes.
(b) If you don't, then speak up when you see other people do it. Tell people that unacceptable actions are, well, unacceptible. Silence is often taken for tacit approval.
You are not obligated to do anything. If, however, you believe groups that use 100% of the available sapients will always outcompete groups that use 50% of them you will probably, of your own conscience, gravitate towards those groups that do not tacitly exclude those 50% and avoid those that do. When one side tacitly approves of rape threats and murder threats for people who speak out they make it pretty darn easy for me to choose.
"you don't personally treat anyone differently based on attributes outside their control"
If you subscribe to the quoted as well as what you said and try to only surround yourself with people that act in a similar manner, then isn't that going to happen automatically?
"When one side tacitly approves of rape threats and murder threats for people who speak out they make it pretty darn easy for me to choose."
I don't think there's two black & white sides here that neatly contain everyone, and I don't think by shunning those who call for violence you have to implicitly endorse whatever the target of that call to violence is advocating.
When our brains encounter certain issues (politics, religion, racial issues, favorite editor) it automatically goes on the defensive and start filtering out everything and starts immediately thinking how to come up with bullet points to deflect the arguments. That prevents us from listening.
With respect to those kind of topics there are very few if any who can approach it with a clean slate. So it takes considerable effort to try to ignore all that baggage and listen.
Yeah, and lots of people think it's only The Other Side that does it. But most of us are wired to be tribal. Our Side does it, too. In fact, each of us ourselves likely does it.
It's good to have friends with a wide variety of political beliefs.
The older I get, the more I realize two very fundamental facts:
People are remarkably different.
Like Clementine in the referenced comment, I'm continually astonished at how different the experience of being someone else is from mine even in an ostensibly identical environment. Just walking in a room can be a remarkably different experience for someone beautiful, ugly, female, disabled, etc.
People are remarkably similar.
I see people do stuff that seems patently dumb are totally counter to how I would do things or how I feel. But as I learn more about the person, I invariably realize what they're doing makes much more sense in context than I originally realized. Much of the difference amounts to differing priorities or background. Much of the core human psychology leading to the behavior is the same.
I'm still trying to figure out how to reconcile these two observations, but the big one for me is to try harder to learn where someone is coming from, what their experiences and background are.
Well, that's the literal answer. I guess my question is more of a rhetorical one - why does he take this rude, scolding, authoritative tone with his readers?
I enjoy this weird HN approach of taking ordinary life, applying weirdass labels to everything, and then trying to somehow "optimize" all of the various little categories.
This is about treating other people like their grievances are legitimate, and accepting that your own perspective on the world is not the only one that exists. "Social Engineering"? really?
There's something ironic about a cynic, in the classic sense of "question everything and undermine assertions", protesting the corruption of his own self-declared title. ;-)
I don't think this poster was a racist or a bad guy, just someone that didn't realize how his privilege colored his perceptions, or how the privilege (or lack thereof) of others can affect their perceptions.