Tag: privilege

So someone said, “Check your privilege”

people arguing
From the cover of Wayne Booth’s _Modern Dogma-

It seems to me that white males get more upset about being told to “check your privilege” than do women or POC. (And, yes, POC do sometimes get told to check their privilege because privilege is complicated—Ijeoma Oluo has a nice chapter on checking her own privilege.) “Check your privilege” is upsetting, I’ve been told, because they understand themselves to have been told that their opinion is irrelevant purely because of who they are.

And I think women and POC have had that–being told our opinion is worthless because of who we are–happen so often that it’s nothing new. If anything, being told that my opinion is invalid because I’m speaking from such a place of privilege that my view is distorted is a much more valid reason than many others I’ve been given over the years. (My favorites remains the time that a man shouted at me that, because I’m a woman I couldn’t possibly understand logic.) After all, there are ways in which my coming from a place of privilege does make my opinion worth less (and sometimes worthless).

For instance, when I went to graduate school, it wasn’t possible—let alone necessary—to buy a personal computer, tuition was low, and housing close to campus was available and affordable. Therefore, although the stipend was low, it was possible to make it through the program with very little debt. Since I came from the kind of family that paid for my undergraduate education, I started graduate school with no debt at all. That I was so privileged means that any advice I might now give to students considering graduate school is worth less than the advice of someone closer to them in experience.

I give a lot of advice about writing, and, although I try to incorporate advice that others with different experiences have given, ultimately, what I say is going to be from my perspective. And my perspective is shaped by the advantages I have and I’ve had (such as low or nonexistent debt) And therefore it won’t be good advice for some people. They should ignore my advice.

If you tell me to check my privilege, you’re telling me that you think I’ve forgotten my epistemic limitations. You think my privilege means that my advice or judgment isn’t valid, or, at least, much more limited than I seem to realize.

What people who get defensive when told to check our privilege don’t understand is that your saying “Check your privilege” to me isn’t changing our relationship. You’re just naming it. It’s just a verbalized eyeroll. If you hadn’t said it, you would still have thought it.

So, the best response is to ask for clarification. In the days before people said, “Check your privilege,” there were other ways of making the same point: “You’re just saying that because you’re….” “I think you’re forgetting about…” “From my perspective…” “Someone from [this background] would look at it really differently…” and so on. And I think we’ve all had someone point out that our advice or judgment really was seriously limited by not having thought about it from another perspective. And it was useful.

It’s particularly hard to see how our perspective is limited by privilege because power comes into play. When I had people from prestigious and well-funded institutions give me career advice that was seriously limited by their privilege, it was hard for me to say, “Yeah, that won’t work for me” because they were powerful, and I needed their support. I didn’t say anything. But neither did I try to follow their advice because it didn’t make any sense—I didn’t have a TA to do my grading, a research assistant to help with clerical work, an administrative assistant to help with program administration. They hadn’t thought through how their advice was coming from a place of privilege, and was useless for someone like me.

This isn’t to say that someone who says, “Check your privilege” is always right. Sometimes people have a lot less privilege than it might appear, sometimes we’ve misunderstood how power works in a particular setting, sometimes people misunderstand what privilege means. Sometimes when people say, “Check your privilege” they want to talk about it, and they’re willing to explain in more detail. But sometimes they don’t want to, and that’s fine too. Almost always, it will take some time to think about whether and how privilege may have affected our judgment and what we should do about it.

Privilege, ableism, and the just world model

stairs at university of texas

In a footnote on another post, I mentioned that the just world model is ableist. Someone asked that I explain.

Here’s the explanation.

The “just world model” says that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It provides a kind of security: you can keep bad things from happening to you. The just world model says that: someone who was assaulted shouldn’t have had an open window (or gotten drunk, or worn that dress), the Black driver should have been more polite, the person who died of a heart attack shouldn’t have been such an over-achiever, the person who got cancer doubted God.

The just world model is a world in which individuals are in perfect and complete control of our lives. It’s a really comforting narrative. It’s magical thinking. It says that if you do this thing and don’t do that thing, you will be protected from disaster.

I have a crank theory that people look at a homeless person and respond in one of two ways: 1) I would never let that happen to me, and that person should just suck it up and get a job; or 2) There but for the grace of God go I.

My crank theory is that acknowledging our common humanity with a homeless person, that something like a TBI could put us in that situation, is terrifying for some people. Some people find the notion that individuals do not have perfect agency unimaginably threatening. Republicanism has embraced the just world model, especially in its attachment to neoliberalism (which is pure just world model), but also in its commitment to the Strict Father Model (if you exert complete control over your children you will raise them to be good).

Various non-partisan ideologies similarly say that, if a bad thing happened to you, you did something to deserve it (anti-vax, a lot of “healthy lifestyle” rhetoric, the idea that people who get cancer or have heart attacks had personality flaws that brought those conditions on). Thus, what might have its origin in an irrational desire to feel more comfortable about how much control we have in our own life ends up enabling a kind of political hardheartedness regardless of Dem v. GOP affiliation.

Regardless of whatever psychological needs the just world model soothes, the consequence of attachment to it is that it drops a sociopathic curtain between us and victims. One of the ways it does so is by closing off any possibility of talking about systemic discrimination.

I work on a campus much of which was built when the assumption was that anyone in a wheelchair shouldn’t be in public. There are steps everywhere. There are steps that aren’t necessary from an engineering perspective, but are there for aesthetic reasons. The way the campus is built means that there is an extra burden on someone who has even the slightest mobility issue—it’s harder for them to be a successful student, staff, or faculty member.

At this campus, being able-bodied gives a person a fair amount of privilege—it’s possible to schedule classes back to back that are in distant buildings, it’s easy to get to office hours regardless of where they are, there’s always a bathroom nearby you can use, you don’t show up to class or meeting already exhausted from negotiating the trip there. The just world model says that you earned that privilege by choosing not to have a disability—the people who are encumbered by the building design brought it on themselves. Since they could simply choose not to be encumbered, it isn’t necessary to do the expensive work of ensuring the buildings are accessible. There isn’t a systemic problem—there are just individuals, all of whom are getting what they deserve. So, the just world. Model simultaneously reinforces privilege and denies its existence.

Privilege and the rhetoric police

[Image from George Walling’s 1887 Recollections of a New York Chief of Police]

A lot of people assume that the only function of rhetoric is to persuade all readers to adopt your point of view. That’s wrong in a bunch of ways. A lot of times people have a composite audience, and might have different intentions for different audiences (such as a text with dog whistles, intended to calm some audience members down about whether the rhetor is a war-mongerer while having enough dog whistles that other members of the audience are cheered by the racist and war-mongering of the text—Hitler’s March 23, 1933 speech).

But, in addition, sometimes people have an intended audience, and have no intention of trying to persuade every person who comes in contact with the text.

Imagine that you and a friend are chatting quietly in a fairly empty Tacodeli, and you’re talking about how much you hate squirrels and how awful squirrels are. Although uninvited, I come in and sit at your table, and then say, “You shouldn’t be saying this or talking this way. I like squirrels, and you are doing nothing to persuade me that you’re right. In fact, you’re making me think that your kind of people are irrationally anti-squirrel.” You’d be thoroughly justified in saying, “We weren’t talking to you.” This is rhetoric policing.

Imagine that you and a friend are ranting about squirrels in a Tacodeli, and everyone there is forced to listen to your rant—it would be fair for someone to tell you to tone it down.

The internet makes that analogy weird, in that you can wander into all sorts of conversations in which you’re not part of the intended audience. Imagine a site oriented toward talking about college football. A person who thinks college football is boring might wander on and say, “This site is stupid, and I’m not interested in anything you’re saying, so you all suck. You need to make this site more interesting to people who hate college football.”

Perhaps it’s someone who loves Twilight, and the site has a lot of snark about Twilight, and so that officer of the rhetoric police says, “I have no interest in college football, and I love Twilight, and so your site is doing nothing to persuade me to like football. You should be more welcoming to Twilight fans who hate college football.” It would be perfectly fair for the regular members of the community to say, “I am so sorry that there is something so wrong with your internet connection that you have no possible way of engaging with the vast array of possible communities, and only have access to this site.” Or, perhaps, “I am so sorry that someone is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read this site. Try dialing 911.” Or just, “Go away.”

I once wrote a talk I rather liked, oriented toward academics, about the ways that Milton’s Samson Agonistes exemplifies misogynistic discourse about women. I had a misogynist (let’s call him Bunny) not at the conference,but who ran across the talk somewhere, tell me that it wasn’t a good talk because it didn’t persuade him. He was rhetoric policing, and he wasn’t part of my audience.

But, he said, if feminists really want to change things, we will have to persuade men like him that there is some validity to our arguments. Therefore, I should have imagined someone like him when I wrote that talk. I pointed out to him that he didn’t try to think about how feminists might respond to anything he wrote, including what he was writing to me at that moment. He never understood that point. He was pretty clear that changing things about feminism would require that anything that any feminist wrote at any time and for any audience had to be oriented toward him, but he honestly was confuzzled at my notion that he would try to be aware of my rhetorical needs in something written to me.

All discourse had to accommodate him and his beliefs, but he didn’t have to accommodate others’ beliefs. His rhetoric policing was an absolutely perfect gem of privilege.

One of the powers of privilege is the power to interrupt conversations of which you are not a part and insist, not just that you be made a part, but that the whole conversation be oriented toward you, accommodating your beliefs, answering your concerns, being careful about your feelings.

Imagine a problem-solving discussion between two highly-ranked tech people about a very specialized issue. It would be seen as weird (or worse) if an intern in advertising interrupted their conversation and insisted they have the discussion in a way he could understand. But their boss, even if zir background wasn’t tech, could interrupt and rhetoric police. The boss has that privilege.

And lots of people have that privilege. Parents have the privilege to ask what their children were talking about (and most children will lie), K-12 teachers have the privilege of asking students what they were talking about (college teachers have the privilege of saying “STFU and listen to what I’m saying”).

If you are from a privileged background (as I am—very privileged), you have a tendency to assume that everyone must accommodate your beliefs, preconceptions, prior knowledge. Bunny unintentionally gave away the playbook for misogynists—what he was saying was that he knew people like him were in power, and that they would only go along with change if their concerns were pandered to.

There is a website that is, as it says everywhere on their site, “Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture.” And a white guy wrote in and said that, while he was trying to be anti-racist, he found the site didn’t really accommodate his beliefs.  And so, Michael Harriot wrote back:

“The Root is a site for black people, by black people, about black shit. We are not in the business of transforming racists into social justice warriors or changing hearts and minds in hopes of reversing white supremacy. Words cannot do that. If they could, I would have slit my throat with the sharpest, shiniest razor I could find years ago. I would consider my life a failure.
We don’t mind if white people read our content. In fact, we like it when you do. But don’t think for a minute that we are selecting words while considering the sentiment of Caucasian acceptance.
I know that you are accustomed to existing in a universe where everything bends toward whiteness, but do not let that factoid delude you into believing that you are the sky. You are eavesdropping on a conversation among black people. We don’t care if you listen. In fact, we are happy that you are listening, but don’t be bamboozled into thinking we are talking to you.”

Rhetoric policing can be helpful, when it’s from someone we’re trying to reach, and they’re helping us be more effective. As soon as it’s about how you can persuade me, and you should do so because I count more than the audience you’re explicitly trying to reach, it’s all about privilege.