Recently I was talking to a friend (not a Harpy, actually) about the feminist blogosphere generally and she said, “You know, sometimes I just get to a point where I’m all Jan Brady and I think to myself, ‘Privilege privilege privilege!’ ”
Now, I gave my friend the benefit of the doubt, as it is often easier to do in person with people one knows than with blog commenters. I know anyway from the rest of the conversation that my friend did not so much have an issue with the concept of privilege as she did with its being a sort of conversational bottleneck; you have to get through it to get to the good stuff, but more often than not one stops right there. Even when all participants are in good faith.
I actually, myself, tend to think of privilege as a strategy for opening conversations rather than closing them. I realize not everyone wields the concept in the same way, and I fully agree that some people get a little self-masturbatory about the exercise of recognizing privilege, writing entire navel-gazing, self-flagellating essays that certainly accomplish little for the affected.
But let’s back up a bit and try to set this out in more general terms. There is a certain feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I know I am about to have a hard conversation with someone. Some people would call it fear; others would call it guilt. It might be something of both of those, and it probably depends on what position I’m in in the conversation. Am I the one informing someone of their mistake, or are they going to tell me how I’ve failed them?
I’m often reading TNC’s blog when this kind of feeling hits me lately. Obviously there I am generally in the position of being informed – and not just because I find TNC, himself, informative. No, it’s because every once in awhile, he’ll say something like this. After observing that there is, among certain black people, “absurd illusion of WhiteLand–this mythical place where there are no problems, because white people don’t actually have problems” he qualifies:
I am not one to talk about avoiding categoricals, and you should really read the entire post of which this is only a very small part. In any event I quote it for you out of context because I don’t worry about our readers having a huge problem with it, although perhaps I am incorrect in that assumption. But I think I’m right to say that it does inspire a certain amount of defensiveness, and I can intellectualize that defensiveness: liberation movements need to aspire beyond the whole zero-sum power game we currently exist in, white supremacy tells these people there are only so many cookies, blah blah blah.
None of that obscures the fact that I’d rather know what TNC tells me here than not know it. I think there is a second order question here that isn’t about whether Cosby – or any other black person – is “right” or “wrong” to feel this way. I think that question is: do we want to live in a world where there is only one acceptable way of articulating what it is to be human? I kind of feel like we tried that out for a long, long time, and it got us into the ruddy mess we now find ourselves in. I am troubled by attempts to discount experiences that aren’t your own. I am actually not much for relativism, but I don’t think my rejection of it means that I must consider myself to be an equal authority on absolutely everything.
And that, really, to come back to privilege, is all that the concept does for me: remind me that I am not judge and jury, and that I have limits. I do not think, by the by, that the boundaries of my experience are hard and fast. At the end of the day, at the end of all of it, I think one irretrievable aspect of being human is that we have the capacity to understand the things we do not experience. But in order to understand, we first have to listen. And that’s where privilege steps in to perform a valuable function. I always come back to that Solnit essay, and her line about how Men Who Explain Things are telling women that this is not their world. Thinking about privilege should, by all counts, enable us to avoid telling anyone in a marginalized position that it isn’t theirs, either.
All of that said I often wield the concept in strange ways. Funnily enough I tend not to challenge my male friends on this; feminist or no, it’s too exhausting to take the average white male through this, and most of my male friends are white. They have been brought up to occupy the objective position, to think of themselves as being able to analyze everything. Because they were told from birth that this was their world. I don’t agree with them, of course, but I don’t bother saying so except to women, in confidence, when we are alone. Or, hell, anonymous on the internet.
No, it’s usually, as you have perhaps seen here, the Not-American thing that can get me frustrated and just tired of letting Americans win. I’m not sure it’s quite a privilege, of course – I too come from developed country, and one which is hardly all that different from this one. But American myopia is transparent to me in a way that it doesn’t seem to be to most Americans. In the world I challenge it by making American jokes that seem reductive and awful, by telling them that no, for example, I don’t think the Constitution was received on Mount Sinai engraved in stone tablets. I saw someone claim, a New York Times writer on MSNBC no less, that Moses is in fact arguably the founder of American values. The breathtaking arrogance of the gesture – nevermind its tenuous basis in fact and the whole, you know, separation of Church and State problems – makes me froth at the mouth. Is it that Americans think that the rest of the world is simply too stupid or illiterate to adopt their system of government, or not?
The reason I bring this analogy up, anyway, is to point out that just because someone gets to shout the loudest, expend the most ink, marshal the vast majority of the airwaves: this rule of the majority does not, necessarily mean that it should get the “right” way of seeing the world. Particularly not when a quick survey reveals the obvious dominance of a certain kind of person in that conversation. There are whole other realms of talking and thinking about the world that don’t get equal airtime for reasons that I just can’t get behind.
And all of that is why I will, forever, continue to think about privilege, not as a logical block, but as an impulse to open my eyes a little wider, think a little harder, read a little more. Because the more I know, the better I am able to speak. And the more I can do, in some small way.
“Is it that Americans think that the rest of the world is simply too stupid or illiterate to adopt their system of government, or not?”
Uhh… I think I’m going to answer that question with a no, but even as the USA might make misguided forays into the affairs of other countries, I think we can agree that people are generally not a fan of dictatorships, for example? The representative republic system really is quite popular, I believe they even do something quite similar in Canada.
A bit of a jump there, is all I’m saying.
It was sort of a rhetorical flourish to point out the arrogance involved in the maneuver rather than a real hypothese, DangerMouse, though point taken. But I am contractually obligated to inform you that Canada is nothing like a republic; in fact, it is a constitutional monarchy, a model of representative democracy that somewhat (oversimplifying yes) predates the “American system.”
Also, I do hear lots of other people (even Canadians! but mostly Europeans) go on about how great their own governments are, so I worry that perhaps you have a bit of a biased sample, given that you are in the USA. Yeah, world’s policeman arrogance etc., but I think if you’re anywhere, there’s a native bias that must be taken into account. There’s also a lot of self-justification/defensiveness out there, but again, that’s probably everyone. Also, the more attacked one feels, the more one gets defensive, so such conversations can go in quite the cycle.
Are you still trying to stay in the US though? It doesn’t quite all fit together.
Blargh, DangerMouse, this is just my point, though. My pointing out that my not being from here gives me a different perspective on “America” feels pretty fruitless when all it incites in anyone is an assertion that “everyone’s defensive, everyone’s arrogant.” Many people are, about many things, sure, everywhere. But I do think, from an outside perspective, that there is a particular argument to be made about the way in which Americans talk about their country as making a bit too much of a claim for all humankind. Not to make a huge example out of you, but I think I’m the only ex-pat ’round these parts, but y’all have continually tried to tell me my experience and observations on that score can’t possibly be right.
I’m not going to get into my feelings about being in the U.S. or anything here – you have other ways to reach me. But this post wasn’t, as usual, intended to be another opportunity for the commentariat to inform me that I am being unfair to America.
The concept of privilege (if not the experience of it, being a white, well-educated, financially comfortable American)is relatively new to me. I’ve found it a valuable way of questioning my own assumptions when I’m the privileged one and understanding the dynamics of others, when they’re the ones who have it.
A a Jew, I think I’m in a somewhat ambiguous position in regard to privilege. We tend to be better educated and richer than the norm, but that’s hardly true across the board, nor is that privilege a result of our religion in and of itself. Still, those of us who fit those descriptions are privileged in those ways. But we are not privileged in terms of our religion. It might seem that we are, since we are constantly told that we live in a “Judeo-Christian society”. But that’s not true-there’s no such thing. It’s a phrase made up by Christians to acknowledge that they use the Hebrew bible, but as we interpret it differently, that’s all it means.
So the remarks you cite from Cosby and from TNC ring very true to me. As a minority, you can never catch up. You can never get all the respect you want, and you can never compensate for past hurts. Equality means that the majority treats you as if you were just like them, which really isn’t satisfactory. It may seem that this group or that has “caught up”, but we know that a damaging remark or action can come from anywhere, any day, out of the blue, and so we never give up our defensive stances. That’s where the “but you’re equal, so what’s the problem?” attitude from the majority originates. They don’t see the lurking dangers, but we do, and we can’t forget.
About that Moses remark: I didn’t hear the whole thing, but isn’t it possible that the speaker didn’t mean to suggest that the US is the only country that uses the Mosaic (well, actually the divine) law to mold its own laws? You don’t have to be committed to Judaism-or Christianity-to do that, nor does it mean that you’ve violated the First Amendment. Being influenced isn’t the same as marching in lockstep. And really, the Commandments have nothing to do with the structure of government. It’s the people who insist on dragging explicitly denominational rituals into the public square who are the problem, it seems to me.
@dangermouse and PS: Two things are true. Actions and beliefs coming from a superpower are different in terms of the consequences they have in the world than those same beliefs and actions coming from a less powerful country. So in that sense you’re both right.
I also think there’s some real truth to PS’s feelings about the way the US relates to the rest of the world. We have always seen ourselves as special by virtue of being the world’s first self-created democracy. Until WWI, that didn’t matter much since we pretty much (but not always) stayed off the world stage. After that, though, our involvement as peacekeeper came with the perception that we were, in fact, superior since it wasn’t us who was starting all the trouble. Then, once the Cold War started, the Fight Against Communism took on the shape of a holy war. And even though the Cold War is long over, we never lost that attitude, so it was ready to be applied on September 12, 2001. It doesn’t do us any good and I wish we’d get rid of it.
Ah, no, I didn’t mean it in that sort of way, but as someone who has been an ex-pat somewhere else, I’ve seen people from other countries do something quite similar, although probably not to the same extent that Americans do. I have been the listening ear during plenty of “my country is better than yours” discussions. I’m not saying you’re not right or that it’s not worse here or something, just that nobody is particularly innocent of it.
Ugh. The crappy internet means of communication.
MM, I agree. (Didn’t see your comment until after.)
Don’t worry, DangerMouse, I figured. Obvs my observations too are made in the context of being a Canadian (read: we’re not really sure what we are EXCEPT not-American) in America. And the whole not-coming-from-a-global-superpower-that-is-in-charge-of-most-english-language-news-and-entertainment… well, that helps too in giving me this idea that America is particular in this regard.
MM, I have never heard the term “Judeo-Christian” objected to in that way. You are undoubtedly correct, just the argument is new to me. I had always thought of it as a way of acknowledging that the Christian worldview didn’t emerge from nowhere.
But being Jewish is a really excellent flashpoint for the privilege conversation too, I think, because when I think about not having privilege, I think about being outside the dominant modes of reference. Which Jews clearly are; I hear references to Jesus all day long both here and in Canada. Which is interesting because in a way that view of privilege makes it a gift – the gift of being able to see what others cannot.
Unfortch most times all that extra viewpoint will get you is anger. People don’t want their frames of reference rattled.
ETA: I think what I mean when I say it’s a gift is sort of like the concept of boxing lefty in this post by TNC (yes I have a bookmark folder, I love him) and it certainly doesn’t obviate the downside of being, as he puts it, “on the vanquished end of the great American narrative.”
Oh as for the Moses thing I did not hear a clear thesis. If I did hear one it was promptly eradicated by the blinding flash of anger I felt when the anchor then nodded sagely and said, “You could argue that Moses was a secular figure, and that that’s why it would make sense to display the Ten Commandments.” And he agreed. I emailed the Harpies – “the stupid burns” – and Becks immediately pointed out that the first commandment is “I am the Lord your God and you shall have no other Gods before me.”
Jesu Christo. I’m still mad at the stupid.
Man, talking head fail! Moses was especially chosen by God to bring the message of monotheism to Pharaoh and the polytheistic cultures of the mideast. You can use the commandments in a secular legal system, but that doesn’t mean that they were anything but a God-based moral code.
Calling Moses a secular leader is just another way to strip the Jewishness out of the Hebrew bible. There’s a world of difference between “the Bible” and “the Old Testament”.
And yeah, PS, being an outsider in any way is a great gift that all too many of us Jews squander in our haste to win the victim wars.
I don’t specialize in this, but plenty of my classmates do, and a similar complaint is being lodged against the term “Abrahamic religions.” In interfaith circles, the term is supposed to be inclusive but really what it does is make Judaism (in the case of Judeo-Christian and Abrahamic) and Islam (in the Abrahamic example) seem more Christian than they are, rather than emphasizing the commonalities between all.
And the thing about being an expat, PS, is that you can leave. I don’t mean to sound so my way or the highway, but I don’t think the expat/privilege thing holds up. You of course see things in a different way, and I think especially in internet feminist circles there are plenty of people willing to admit that the US isn’t perfect. Cable news is a whole different story. But the fact remains that you can leave. You can’t leave being queer, or being a woman, or being a person of color, or being disabled, or whatever. I think that’s a crucial part of privilege–that not having it is inescapable. But you can escape being an expat fairly easily. I’m not saying you should, or that Americans shouldn’t temper their nationalistic tendencies, but, well, it is true. There are nationalists everywhere, and that’s going to be jarring to an expat anywhere.
Wouldn’t you know that I’d delurk to make a theological point. Moses was not sent to bring the message of “monotheism” to Pharaoh or anyone else. The Egyptians can believe whatever the hell they want as long as they leave the Israelites alone. Exodus says the Israelite god is more powerful than the Egyptian gods, not that they don’t exist. This is consistent with the belief system espoused in most of the Bible, with the exceptions coming very late in the prophetic narratives. Moses’ father in law was a priest of Midian,
Sorry about the cut-off there! Anyhow, Moses married into a family of non-Jews twice, was my point. There a lot pluralism going on in the HB.
Which doesn’t at all negate any of the points being made about Judaism as a useful vantage point for issues of privilege.
Oh I agree kithkin. Just using it because it is a pretty obvious example of being out of one’s element, and seeing different things as a result.
Although I would say technically I can’t look at Canada the same way either. Don’t want to morph this into a thread about ex-pats, but the only reason y’all don’t hear me rag on Canada is that it’s no fun to do with people who know very little about it.
@Fat Louie: I agree up to a point. The Moses/Pharaoh battle was intended not only to obtain the release of the Hebrews, but to show the Egyptians that their gods were impotent compared to the One God. Anyone who wanted to leave Egypt with the Hebrews and take up their ways was invited to do so, and according to the rabbis, some did.
And yes, the family of Moses was quite a patchwork. But both Yitro (Jethro, in poorly-transliterated English) and Tzipporah adopted the credo of the Hebrews, even if they didn’t explicitly convert. Torah itself says that anyone who follows the Noahide laws is obeying the word of the One God. There’s no requirement that everyone become a Jew, just that they obey those laws-one of which is accepting that there is only one God.
Nothing like a little thread-jacking. Sorry about that, PS. To get back to the point, I think that anyone who is aware of what’s going on in their own country is going to object to some degree to the self-promotional rhetoric that political entities are prone to. Being on the scene allows you to see all the weaknesses and hypocrisies very intimately. The US and its citizens are no different, just louder and with a bigger echo.
The thing that’s always irked me about America’s arrogance, as opposed to other (European, cuz that’s what I’m familiar with) countries’ arrogance, is the way that Americans see their everything as better, and then want to make the rest of the world like them. Other countries are just like, ‘Oh yeah well we’re obviously better we made the Magna Carta bitches!” or “Well the Romans invented roads so Italy’s basically the best” or whatever. American arrogance is not about American culture; its about American government, money, economics, values, religion, and culture. And America has a proselytizing tendency that most other cultures don’t (anymore–let’s be honest, Britain, you started the whole imperialism to an absurd degree thing in the modern world).
Anyway, I’m an American and frequently say that I hate America. Which is ridiculous. As ridiculous as saying that one loves America. Because what the hell does that mean, anyway? I love all Americans, like all the citizens? Because clearly that’s not true for anyone. I love the government? Like, the system? Or the politicians or the civil servants of the constitution or what? Because I think most politicians are corrupt assholes, the system is designed to maintain a status quo that I abhor, and the constitution as well as maintaining that status quo is also hypocritical and obtuse, and was written with the idea of freedom as defined by slave-owning rapist assholes. Our history? Like, how we were real helpful in WWII? What about how the government committed genocide against Native Americans? That’s not something I love.
The concept of “countries” or something that one can have affection for, outside of, like, Risk or something, is just an utterly empty signifier for whatever the speaker decides it means. My father’s idea of “America” is specific to him, and is therefore useless in language because it has a meaning that is unique to him. Unlike the rest of the language, which has specific meanings for specific words.
and, re: mischiefmanager, “Equality means that the majority treats you as if you were just like them, which really isn’t satisfactory”
I love this. It’s so true. Except, based on my experience as a woman, I’d say that equality means the majority treats you as if you were just like them, but somehow simultaneously treats you like something totally alien and foreign and Other. It’s impressively contradictory, and also makes progress or conversation with any member of the majority infuriatingly circuitous.
Well, this isn’t going in the directions I thought it might but I like it anyway! threadjack away.
You know Cimorene, your point re countries being empty signifiers used to mean something greater to me before I left Canada. Now I do think there’s something to it, though it’s still hard for me to put my finger on. There is something inherently combative about the way Americans interact that is not familiar to me, for example. I have learned to deal with it a little bit, but I’m still sort of shocked at the vociferousness with which one puts forth views here. And yes there are quiet people and quiet things in America too, and I hate to borrow from Michael Moore, but watching the evening news here – on any channel, on any subject – is a consistently surreal experience for me and the Canadians I know. Just the raised voices are really… different. And frankly, kind of scary for me. In Canada calmness is the primary public virtue; that’s why Obama is enormously popular there, I suspect, in terms of grand narrative explanations. Yes, Question Period in parliament is a little raucous, and in certain ways we have identical kinds of social problems. But we just aren’t such a crazy teeming mass of a country.
Funnily enough even within the context of the Canadians I know I am the loud, brash, America defender, and I actually come from what I perceive (though my friends and I argue about this) as a lower socioeconomic class than most of the Canadian ex-pats I know (i.e. they went to private school, had parents who both had college degrees, lived very comfortable upper middle class lives), and I wonder sometimes if that lends itself to my liking America more, because the civic virtues of Canadians – quiet, calm public debate and a strange focus on public intellectualism – feel set up to exclude certain kinds of voices.
OK, off to brunch.
Oh, man! I wish I could have participated in this discussion earlier.
I’m going to visit my family and friends in the US soon, and I just know that the identity clusterfuck of being Israeli is going to kick my ass while I’m there.
When I lived in the US, being Israeli was the most confusing and frustrating thing ever! Israeliness is so confusing because it conflates a position of extreme power/militarism with extreme victimhood. It’s the worst of both worlds!
You suck ’cause you’re Jewish and you suck ’cause you’re an “evil” military power. It’s like being an anti-Semite’s wet dream.
I hate it!
As an uber-liberal Israeli, I’m going to have to defend myself to everyone and their mom for living in Israel despite its fucked-upness, and gosh, it’s going to suck.
I wish I could be from somewhere less… high profile. Like Canada! (Hehe…)
Re: mischiefmanager, “Equality means that the majority treats you as if you were just like them, which really isn’t satisfactory”
and Cimorene: “but somehow simultaneously treats you like something totally alien and foreign and Other.”
As a Jewish woman, I am totally feeling you on this, but after I read your comments, I started to wonder — what would make me satisfied? For me, moving back to NYC after living in the south certainly helped with the Jewish=other feeling, but is that enough? I don’t know. Are minorities just doomed to have to strive for disatisfied equality?
Sorry this totally went in a wacky direction. I’m interested in seeing what people think about privilege as a conversation *starter,* which was a great insight from the OP. Is it possible to use discussions of privilege in such a way and not trigger impossible defensiveness among the participants?
@MM, thanks for your important clarifications, but I’m not sold on your read because I still think it retrojects quite a bit. I also don’t want to further contribute to threadjack so that’s
my piece
Cimorene said: “The thing that’s always irked me about America’s arrogance, as opposed to other (European, cuz that’s what I’m familiar with) countries’ arrogance, is the way that Americans see their everything as better, and then want to make the rest of the world like them.”
This! Every country I’ve spent time in, or whose citizens I’ve spent time with, seems to share the same “we’re better because of X” arrogance. Ticos think they’re the best, friendliest, most environmental people. Nicaraguans think they’re the best, and like to brag about how they could and did beat Uncle Sam’s rear end any old day. Pakistan, and the Middle East in general, is better because of their ancient culture, development of mathematics, etc. Scotland is better because of their socialist government, not to mention castles and beer. And so on – you get the idea.
But whereas we (=US) want to go out and make everyone else be just like us (forcibly if necessary), people from other countries are just happy to be where they are and let others coexist in their (lesser) countries. I agree that it’s our proselytizing that makes our arrogance different and worse.
@Cimorene – I find this sort of thinking really interesting, and you’re not the first fellow American I’ve heard it from. This idea that America is somehow the worst ever or arrogant in a way that is unusual or has never been seen before (to this magnitude) or what have you seems, itself, to be a kind of American exceptionalism. But to have this much power and proselytize/colonize with it is far from unusual — off the top of my head, I know that England, Spain, France, Germany, Russia/the USSR, the Netherlands, Italy, China in centuries past and now again, even going as far back as Rome and Greece acted in similar ways. I don’t think it’s useful to talk about American arrogance as if we’re a historical aberration as opposed to a part of a clear historical pattern. I’m not saying this absolves America of responsibility for acting in ways that are imperialist, arrogant, etc., but it seems to me that the much better way to fix our problems is to recognize that we are not unique in acting this way and that it’s a matter not of “the American character” per se but of nationalism combined with power and a disregard for others.
In my experience, I’ve found rhetoric about “government, money, economics, values, religion, and culture” being the best in other countries as well — just because it’s not directed at us doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anywhere else right now. In particular, I’ve seen this from the French regarding their Islamic immigrant population, and have had it personally directed at me as a Jew from a Pole.
Again, I’m not trying to say that actually, America has no problems and everyone should love us — just that conceptualizing America as “the worst” is just as unhelpful, to my mind, as conceptualizing us as “the best”.
PSoul, I been rereading your post, and trying to formulate a response, because something in there reminded me of the struggle of living my own personal politics.
The one bit of it that resonated the most was the conclusion, and it said to me that regardless of where we sit in the world, that in order to recognise and engage with the world being humble and honest at where we are, especially those that hold the markers of privilege, are likely to take us further.
This doesn’t mean that there is ONE system/thing/process that will bring ALL the answers. There needs to be, in my mind, a continual process of self and community reflection, because we as individuals and community members, and the world are not static.
In some ways, I like the ideal of Habermas’ procedural democracy. The idea that as community members and as individuals we are able to sit together and have discussions about how our community should work, recognising that with every decision there are likely to be those are privileged and those who are not. Humbleness and honesty come to the fore in these discussions, because as a community member, if you benefit or not as the case may be, you are invited to let the community know this, and guide the decision-making process.
I realise that Habermas’ procedural democracy has its flaws (the biggest one being how do the groups in society who do not have privilege be enabled to speak up about this).
I have had a small amount of success explaining privilege in this way:
Privilege allows us to act out a social script which leaves us feeling good about ourselves. While in situations where we lack privilege we are forced to act out social scripts which leaves us feeling poorly about ourselves.