Is privilege like gendered souls?
Content notes aren’t automatically a bad thing [see previous post] but they do have to be…you know, accurate. Truthy. Andrew Doyle continues:
But it’s not simply a matter of race; books aimed at toddlers which advance the idea that they each have a gendered soul are also being promoted by activist teachers and authors. For instance, Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide To Gender Identity by Brook Pessin-Whedbee is marketed for children as young as three, and introduces them to identity categories well beyond the comprehension of most adults, including “genderqueer, non-binary, bigender and two-spirit”.
If there’s anything the world doesn’t need it’s a children’s guide to gender bullshit. It’s all made up, by excited delusional adults, and should never be forced on children.
And yet it would be wrongheaded to call for such books to be censored or banned. The vast majority of educators understand how ridiculous it is to teach infants that they have a gendered soul, or that they are guilty of white privilege.
Bzzzzzz! Two different things there.
Call me crazy but I do think there’s such a thing as white privilege (in the US and UK). I don’t think people are “guilty” of it, I just think we have it. Hierarchies exist, and privilege is woven into them – how could it not be? There are also, at least sometimes, responsibilities along with the privilege. “Nobility” came about, as I understand it, as the price of protection from violence in lawless societies – we’ll keep the baddies off your little patch of land and you’ll treat us as superior and pay us a hefty percentage in exchange. In a lawless society it may be the only alternative to being flattened, but once there are laws and enforcement of them…the nobles don’t go away and they don’t lose all their privileges. White people continue to have privilege in societies that haven’t magically become non-hierarchical over the past generation or two.
That said, teaching about it, and writing textbooks about it, can be done well or badly.
Gendered souls on the other hand are bullshit all the way down.
There is a new independent publishing company, set up to publish Rachel Rooney’s “My Body Is Me”, hence the domain name mybodyisme.com. They have a new book out, Sex and Gender: An Introductory Guide, by Phoebe Rose; it is aimed at children, and it looks excellent. It talks about sex, gender, sexual orientation, and gender stereotypes, without promoting gender identity nonsense. I am eager for it to obtain a US distributor to make it easier for me to get copies. The title is eerily similar to the problematic book discussed in the OP. Rachel Rooney’s book is wonderful, and says nothing whatsoever about trans issues, yet she has come under fire from trans activists, perhaps for not worshiping the trans idol enough, and perhaps for daring to have her book originally published by Transgender Trend. I look forward to this new addition to the literature.
I don’t think ‘privilege’ is a useful way to frame the issue.
The things that are described as privileges are mainly descriptions of how everyone should be treated – the legal system should treat you fairly and impartially, jobs should go to the best qualified applicant, schools should go to great lengths to avoid excluding children. When black people aren’t treated like that, they’re being denied their rights. The whole ‘privilege’ framing creates the impression that the issue is instead that white people are receiving an undue benefit if (for instance) they never worry that they’ll be hassled by the police, when in fact the problem is that the police shouldn’t be harassing anyone.
I, too, am not crazy about the term “privilege”, but I don’t think “how everyone should be treated” captures the concept very well, either. It is perhaps easier to think it terms of “class privilege” rather than race: well-off people can afford tutors, and can give their kids time to study and to engage in outside activities rather than do chores or earn money for the household, and so those students have advantages in getting into colleges (to pick one example). Some of what gets described as “white privilege” are instances of class privilege that disproportionately attach to white people because of wealth and income disparity. Also, people will sometimes assume a white person is of a higher economic class and a black person is of a lower one, so this “privilege” is based both on class and on assumptions based on skin color. Adjusting for various aspects of “class privilege” requires far more than treating people equally; class must be taken into account, rather than ignored.
I think something similar can be said regarding “male privilege”, that it doesn’t get alleviated by treating people equally. Men and women have significant differences in their lives, bodies, and circumstances, and explicit structural changes are needed in order to be appropriately fair to women. “Sex blind” will not do it.
Perhaps it’s our age, Djolaman. When I was growing up, the word ‘privileged’ was reserved for the upper classes and those with vast amounts of money; anyone getting what we considered to be more than their fair share. The word used for the poor and otherwise deprived was ‘underprivileged’. It was supposed that the great masses of people between those extremes were getting our fair share in most respects. Not that we were ‘privileged’ above those who weren’t, but that they were underprivileged for not getting the same benefits from society we were enjoying as our due.
I had another thought – when I was young, politics was still very much based in class consciousness. These days, the emphasis has changed, it seems to me, to be very much on the individual and her/his place in a much more complex hierarchy. The working class cannot come together to fight the greedy bosses when half of it is too busy tweaking their scores in the Oppression Olympics to pay much, if any, attention to what the other half actually needs.
Sorry, Sackbut – I didn’t see your comment when I was making mine. I think that we’re in agreement here.
Sackbut: I’m not saying “all we need to do is treat everyone the same” as if we can just ignore that fact that some people are systemically disadvantaged. To pick up your point about class privilege in education, it’s a good thing to try to close that gap with assistance (in tutoring for example) targeted specifically at poorer students.
To widen that point out a bit though, I don’t think it’s helpful to conceptualise a child who is able to devote themselves to their studies because they have a loving, supportive home environment and enough to eat as being privileged relative to a child who lives in an atmosphere of neglect and comes to school hungry. Child A is being treated as all children should be, while Child B is being denied their rights. You can’t rectify that situation by then treating them in exactly the same way, but the issue isn’t A’s access to regular meals, and I think talking about privileges rather than rights obscures that.
Tigger: I’m only in my 30s, but yes, to me ‘privileged’ suggests someone who’s had a very easy life, usually due to being born very wealthy. The way I see things, a privilege is something that can legitimately be withdrawn. You might tell a child you’ll take them to a theme park for their birthday. That’s a privilege, since you can withdraw the offer if it turns out they’ve been bullying a classmate. What you can’t do is stop feeding them or lock them in cupboard, as those are violations of their rights. Thinking about the systemic ways that life is easier for white people as being privileges seems yo me to have things backwards, as what we should be trying to do is widen the circle of people who are able to participate in society without having all sorts of obstacles thrown in their way.
If there was upvoting in this comment system I would upvote Djolaman’s comment
“Privileged” has different connotations though. This is a matter of usage rather than dictionaries, I think – the new(ish) way of talking about white privilege is far broader than the small class of rich people with yachts and diamond tiaras. Most white people are not “privileged” in that sense, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have white privilege. It’s just (if I understand it correctly) a shorthand for escaping various barriers and threats that other kinds of people don’t get to escape.
One problem with the newish way of talking about it though is that no one I know outside of academia uses it that way. Most people still think of privilege in the more standard, traditional way. So when some poor schmuck who can find a job says something and someone tells him to check his privilege, or says that’s a sign of privilege, he isn’t reading it that way.
We need a new way of talking about the lack of (racist, sexist) obstacles in a way that everyone can be on the same page. And we do need to remember that there are obstacles other than race or sex, and some people simply cannot hurdle those obstacles, and when told to check their privilege, will just behave even more in a racist, sexist way because they believe that BIPOC and women have pushed them down further.
@inklast, #10.
Here in the Dutch talking world, Joris Luyendijk wrote a book about that theme: “De zeven vinkjes” [The seven checkmarks”]. It is about how the high end jobs overwelmingly go to people that can check these marks:
Male, white, heterosexual, higher end class, native, “good schooling” on secondary and higher levels. He doesn’t claim this is an exhaustive list, but it allows us to bring these men into the picture.
Ah, I see I should have read this post before commenting on the last.
Yes, that’s the sort of thing I meant.