Tag: Privilege

  • The privilege is the absence of barriers that exist for other people

    You may not have noticed this (I kid), but talking about privilege doesn’t always work out. If it did, we wouldn’t be hearing so much about that guy Tal Fortgang, who is so remote from having any privilege that major media are paying close attention to his lack of privilege. Mychal Denzel Smith explains in The Nation why it all goes wrong.

    When people with privilege hear that they have privilege, what they hear is not, “Our society is structured so that your life is more valued than others.” They hear, “Everything, no matter what, will be handed to you. You have done nothing to achieve what you have.” That’s not strictly true, and hardly anyone who points out another’s privilege is making that accusation. There are privileged people who work very hard. The privilege they experience is the absence of barriers that exist for other people.

    But they don’t grasp that, because they’re not aware of the barriers that exist for other people, because they’re not other people. That’s the “privilege” they have. It’s so fatally easy to translate lack of awareness of X to what you think is awareness that not-X. I know this; I catch myself doing it all the time. It’s one of the fast thinking mistakes we make. It needn’t be an accusation, it’s just reality.

  • Experiences inform

    Obama made some remarks about race and context and experience and the criminal laws today.

    Those sets of experiences inform how the African-American community interprets what happened one night in Florida, and it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear. The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws.

    That’s the “privilege” conversation. That conversation is not a reason to scream in panic and head for the hills. It’s not terrifying or disastrous to understand that people have different experiences and that sometimes your experiences result in your knowing less about a particular subject than other people’s experiences leave them. For instance, if you’re not black, your knowledge of what it’s like to experience being black is not as good as that of a person who is black. This is for some reason a very controversial thing to say, but I have a really hard time seeing why. How could your knowledge of what it’s like to experience being an X not be shaped by whether or not you are an X?

    “When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son,” Obama said at the White House on Friday. “Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.”

    That’s what I’m saying. There’s a set of experiences and a history. That makes a difference. There is nothing surprising about that.

    In fact, that’s one big reason equality is desirable, and inequality creates problems. If certain kinds of people are treated as marginal and suspect, then that becomes their experience and history, and that creates divisions. It’s not – contra the angry right wing – Obama talking about it that creates divisions, it’s the being treated as marginal and suspect that creates the divisions.

    Think Progress gives us the top 12 conservative freakouts at Obama’s remarks, via (of course) Twitter. A Fox “News” hack is exemplary:

    Obama’s comments today justify what I said on Hannity earlier this week. He truly is trying to tear our country apart.

    Or stitch it together. One of those.

     

  • One rule for thee and another for me

    Religious privilege in action.

    Some guy from something called The Christian Institute (why do I suspect its membership consists of the guy in question?) is saying he’s going to boycott Tesco, because some other guy who works for Tesco in some capacity said something on Flickr. Yes really. Mind you it’s in the Telegraph, which seems to specialize in this kind of non-story, but it’s still worth a tiny smile of disdain (because after all, how much trouble is a tiny smile of disdain).

    Nick Lansley, Tesco’s head of research and development, said he was actively taking a stand “against evil Christians” who opposed the right of same-sex couples to marry.

    In a message on his profile page on Flickr.com, he said: “I’m…campaigning against evil Christians (that’s not all Christians, just bad ones) who think that gay people should not lead happy lives and get married to their same-sex partners.”

    I suppose some intern at the Telegraph spotted that and alerted an unoccupied reporter who phoned Xian Institute guy and asked him what he thought about that, and  Xian Institute guy obligingly took the bait. It’s hard to imagine it happening any other way.

    What actually caught my eye was something the Telegraph said farther down the page.

    The row comes a month after Tesco provoked controversy by reducing its support for the charity Cancer Research’s Race for Life while deciding to sponsor Pride London, Britain’s largest gay festival.

    See it? Tesco “provoked controversy” by doing something (something benign, in my view). Typical. Typical manipulationg-by-wording. Anything you do that I don’t like is “provoking” me.

    Second item: a Methodist church in Cornwall tried to get around an employment tribunal by claiming its ministers are employed by God rather than by the church.

    Appeal Court judges have ruled the Reverend Haley Preston, of Cornwall, is employed by the Church rather than God.

    The Methodist Church had claimed that ministers were not ordinary employees but “stewards in the house of God”.

    The Appeal Court ruling opens the way for Mrs Preston, 50, of Redruth, to pursue an unfair dismissal claim against the Church.

    I suppose that one is an example of ex-privilege or attempted privilege, since it didn’t work, but still, there’s something so brazen about the attempt that it seems to earn the word. The Methodist Church was feeling very Special that day.