I’m not exactly sure what causes people to flip when they see the word privilege, though.
Some time ago [Popular Blog] was asked whether they considered themselves privileged. It was a perfectly polite ask that was quite clearly not meant to ignite animosity or taunt or shame or make [Popular Blog] lose authority and status in front of its followers. It was quite clearly simply prompted by the fact that [Popular Blog] does not seem to fall under any of the major axes of oppression discussed around here, and seems to live a perfectly cosy life. [Popular Blog] flipped anyway and termed the word privilege inherently offensive.
That was an extremely bizarre moment of internet wtfery to me.
I cannot shake off the idea that if the question had instead been, “would you say that life has treated you kindly so far?” the answer would have been completely different, even though the question is, at heart, the same minus the word privilege.
If that anecdote is an accurate model of the instinctive reaction people have to that word, it seems to me that the word itself (though not necessarily the concept) has at this point outlived its usefulness. If your gut reaction is to flinch away from it, you cannot think about it critically. You cannot imagine ever thinking even of yourself in those terms, which I thought was supposed to be the whole aim of Tumblr discourse.
(And if the aim isn’t encouraging people to think, “wait, does this apply to me? Do I in fact wield some power over the people around me and what can I do with it to make life easier for those who find themselves in a worse position than mine?” then, in fact, what even is it?)
Because if the idea of someone being in a worse position than you makes you instinctively defensive — either because you’re losing oppression points or because you feel that the amount of hard work you’ve put into achieving your current position in society is being dismissed, mocked or invalidated — then the whole terminology used to describe privilege cannot possibly be helpful or useful any longer in any practical sense. It means we’ve reached the point where we’re unconsciously equating “privileged” with “inherently evil.” And that is not the best strategy to encourage either self-analysis or understanding (let alone decency) towards other people.
I think there are two separate problems with “privilege”. The first, which is the bigger of the two, is that it’s a shibboleth. It identifies the user as belonging to a particular social tribe and something like 75% of peoples’ reaction to it, positive and negative, can be explained by how they feel about members of that tribe. That’s a hard problem to overcome if you want to talk about the specific concept. Any word used predominantly by one group will undergo this process naturally, so you’re caught between a euphemism treadmill and trying to alter the meaning of a shared word to capture the specific nuances you’re interested in (as has been done with “racism”).
The other problem, which is subtler, is that “being privileged” is a shared concept and it has quite a different meaning from “privilege” in the social justice sense. “Being privileged” doesn’t just mean that you have privileges, it means you’re upper-crust, some kind of sweater-wearing trust-fund type. Outside the circles where “privilege” is widely discussed this meaning tends to shade into discussions of privilege generally, and it’s particularly bad if people say “privileged” rather than “having privilege”, which isn’t a distinction that people are trained to avoid in the context of social justice privilege. This does suggest that another word, carefully chosen, might be an improvement, but in the case you mention it sounds like it’s the former problem predominates.
As it looks to me, a *major* problem with the social justice version of the “privilege” concept is that it has picked up a strong use/connotation of being a dismissal device rather than just a pure analytical device - where people’s lived experiences get dismissed out of hand because they are deemed to belong to some “privileged” group. There is a certain kind of conversation I’ve seen a few times that goes roughly as follows:
College-educated rich white person A: “You possess white privilege!”
Poor white person B: “Huh? What does that even mean? My life has generally been shit …?”
A: “It means that you’re less likely than people of color to have experienced ___” [long list of bad things that A has never experienced but that A is sort-of-aware happens to people of color quite a bit]
B: “but .. I *have* experienced most of those things. [long essay about major hardships that B has experienced in their life]”
A: “you still have it better than PoC that experience those things, and you need to acknowledge your white privilege” (with a tone indicating that this point is more important than the experiences that B just listed.)
B: “… this is bullshit. go fuck yourself”
where it doesn’t even occur to A that the experiences of B indicate that A obviously possesses some form of unrecognized privilege that B very much doesn’t possess, and where B recognizes the discussion as basically A using the “privilege” concept as a justification/excuse to dismiss B’s concerns and experiences out of hand.
A related phenomenon sometimes arises when people pose questions like “do trans men possess privilege?” which has sometimes resulted in debates/flamewars where people have treated it as basically a life-or-death issue. Which is absurd when considering “privilege” as an analytical device, but makes sense when treating privilege as a dismissal device; declaring the trans men as possessing privilege comes very close to saying that they don’t deserve help and support with any social issues that arise from their situation, which can be quite threatening indeed.
As such, with a really strong “privileged”=“can be dismissed” connotation in place, a question like “do you consider yourself privileged?” is likely to be interpreted -
- not as a benign “do you consider yourself lucky with your life situation?” kind of thing that one would expect from viewing privilege as an analytical concept -
- but more like a double-bind type rhetorical trap, kind of similar to the so-called “Kafkatrap”, where you can either - admit to being privileged and thereby imply that your life experiences shouldn’t matter and can and should be dismissed - or reject the notion that you’re privileged, which makes you look like you’re being aggressively unaware of people whose life situation is legitimately worse than your own - or you can try the kind of unpacking that I’m trying to do here, which is likely to come across as “trying to dodge the question” or something like that if you try it as a direct response to the question as posed. Either way, you lose. Which I think is why people interpret this kind of question as an attack rather than as just a benign query.
“Flipping out” in various forms seems to be a somewhat common response to this kind of rhetorical trap - seemingly-unreasonable responses to things that look innocuous is an indication that there might be a trap like this present, that people are reacting to.
