"Privilege" and the Assassination of Effective Discourse

[Bella Fortuna]

I came across this article this morning, and think it's pretty spot on, that the legitimate concept of 'privilege' has been irrationally expanded far beyond its original meaning and is often twisted to be a method of invalidating others' opinions and shoring up the impenetrable walls of one's own opinions and subjective perceptions so as to make them rigid and unassailable to criticism, other legitimate interpretations, or any kind of change.

http://manhasset-press.com/2012/not-so- ... rivileged/

Not So Humble Opinion: Privileged

At times, my intuition is way ahead of my brain. I’d like to think that I arrive at a lot of my opinions through logical reasoning, but often, I feel like something is wrong long before I can articulate why it’s wrong. This was the case with the word “privilege” as used in the phrases “white privilege,” “male privilege,” and the especially reviled “white male privilege.” Something about the way these terms are bandied about bothered me, but I couldn’t explain why until recently.

It’s not that I have any doubt that privilege exists; I’ve certainly seen it in action. Even if you’re not particularly devoted to the cause of achieving greater social justice, it’s not difficult to see that being white and male confer some advantages in our culture. So if I admit privilege exists, why does the term make me wince in annoyance?

What I’ve realized is that this term almost always seems to be part of a conversation where two people are either unwilling or unable to listen to each other. Example:

Woman: Wow, that show was really offensive.

Man: Really? I thought it was pretty funny, actually.

Woman: You’re just too blinded by your white male privilege to understand how I feel.

Man: What, so just because I’m a white guy, I’m not entitled to an opinion?

Woman: You’re totally missing the point, and because you are a man, you will never get it.

Man: And you’re a totally hysterical, feminist person! I am now too defensive about this privilege thing to pay attention to a woman’s feelings ever again.

That’s the first problem: no matter how much legitimacy the term privilege should have, when it’s used to disqualify someone from having an opinion on something, you’ve already lost the argument…or more accurately, there is no argument. You’ve lost by not even showing up.

The second problem is the fact that, while white and/or male privilege are bandied about most often, other kinds of privilege exist that aren’t talked about. My understanding of feminist theory is that most feminists believe that “female privilege” doesn’t exist because any possible benefits to being female are miniscule compared to the advantages of being male, but this has not been my personal experience.

If I ask someone on a nearly empty subway platform what time the train is getting in, people will assume that I want to know the answer to the question, not that I’m not hiding some dangerous agenda. If a woman walks past me pushing a stroller and I smile at her toddler she’ll smile back, secure in the knowledge that I’m just acknowledging her child’s infectious cuteness. If my husband were to do the same thing, there’s a chance her smile would be brittle; in the back of her mind, she might be thinking “A grown man, looking at my child? Is he a pedophile?”

I like the fact that people never assume that I’m violent or a sex offender. It’s kind of nice. If it’s something I benefit from, how is that not privilege?

I’ve also encountered plenty of religious-based privilege. Someone I worked with years ago once told me that he was okay with the fact that I was Jewish, because I wasn’t “in-your-face” about it, as opposed to a coworker. It never occurred to this man that he had certain privileges as a Christian: his holidays were in my face all the time, on the streets and in the media, but that was just seen as normal.

However, there’s also Jewish privilege; I might say, “That guy had a lot of chutzpah,” knowing that enough of the people around me are either Jewish themselves, or grew up surrounded by Jewish people, that they’re familiar with some common Yiddish. If someone doesn’t get it, oh well; I’m not going to bother defining it. It’s an in-club thing, also known as privilege.

If you think about it, virtually every kind of group has some kind of privilege, but the only kind that’s safe to acknowledge are the white, male kinds. It’s almost as if people think that if we acknowledge that there can be such a thing as female privilege, or Jewish privilege, or tall privilege, people might make the mistake of thinking that the terrifying behemoth of white male privilege has been cancelled out—yeah, right. Acknowledging that social dynamics are complicated doesn’t suddenly make you blind to injustice.

And that’s the real problem with the privilege concept; the assumption that if someone has privilege, they’re too blinded by their supposedly elite status to have a valuable place in the discourse. I don’t know if we need a moratorium on the word privilege, but at the very least, we need to stop constraining the discussion in this manner. Someone might be blinded by their “privilege,” but at least give them the opportunity to demonstrate that; don’t just assume their opinion can be dismissed, unheard, due to accidents of birth.

Karen Gellender is editor of the Syosset-Jericho Tribune and Plainview-Old Bethpage Herald.

[Rum]

The notion of privilege when used in a neutral and/or academic way if fine by me - when used properly. The problem over there is that they use it completely judgementally and not in an impartial way at all. In fact they use it to bully and build up their own privileged positions.


So there!

[Bella Fortuna]

The notion of privilege when used in a neutral and/or academic way if fine by me - when used properly. The problem over there is that they use it completely judgementally and not in an impartial way at all. In fact they use it to bully and build up their own privileged positions.


So there!

Exactly my point. It has an academic definition that is very appropriate. But as we've seen elsewhere the term has been hijacked to be an excuse to not give credence to differing opinions and stay entrenched in one's own intractable position.

[Azathoth]

[Tyrannical]

No one questions Chinese privilege in China, or Mexican privilege in Mexico

[Jason]

Or Black privilege in the US. Black walks into a restaurant, walks past all the white people waiting for a table, and demands to be seated. The concierge, afraid of creating a 'racist' incident, promptly buses a table where a fine dinner is being enjoyed by a happy white family, has them bounced out the back into the alley and seats the Black at their table with a candelabra some fine claret and a quartet of strings to play background music.

Privilege!

[laklak]

That only happens at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

[Audley Strange]

It's the typical misdirection of feminists when questioned, not to answer the question, but to imply that questioning itself is suspect and thus the questioner can be dismissed. They used to use sexist, but that doesn't that the oomph of such terms as privileged or misogynist or the real rhetorical nuke of "rape enabler."

It is that which evinces their lack of arguing from any charitable position. The phrase is weaponised specifically to outrage those accused of it, to silence, to make the opponent react aggressively, to misdirect the discussion to "why do you hate women?"

I do not understand what their obsession is about rape. I don't understand why they make claims about a "rape culture" when they are the only ones talking about it consistently. Both of how much they fear it, how much it ruins lives, even if you were raped you weren't properly raped unless it's caused you to be driven past the edge of madness, into the cold perimeters of paranoia and self loathing. About how everyone else, especially men and all wandering around with rape clocks and switches and no doubt rape kazoos and rape laptops giggling about rape while they enable and support a coterie of Silent Movie lotharios with barbed prehensile penises which ejaculate white hot bullets of oppression in to the wombs and anuses of weaklings.

There can be be no effective discourse with people who expect you to accept that the above is a reasonable apriori assumption of your behaviour and motivations until you prove to them otherwise.

[charlou]

That only happens at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

You are a bad, bad man.

[Pappa]

Regarding this bit:

If I ask someone on a nearly empty subway platform what time the train is getting in, people will assume that I want to know the answer to the question, not that I’m not hiding some dangerous agenda. If a woman walks past me pushing a stroller and I smile at her toddler she’ll smile back, secure in the knowledge that I’m just acknowledging her child’s infectious cuteness. If my husband were to do the same thing, there’s a chance her smile would be brittle; in the back of her mind, she might be thinking “A grown man, looking at my child? Is he a pedophile?”

I think that kind of response is actually uncommon in the UK.

[Robert_S]

Regarding this bit:

If I ask someone on a nearly empty subway platform what time the train is getting in, people will assume that I want to know the answer to the question, not that I’m not hiding some dangerous agenda. If a woman walks past me pushing a stroller and I smile at her toddler she’ll smile back, secure in the knowledge that I’m just acknowledging her child’s infectious cuteness. If my husband were to do the same thing, there’s a chance her smile would be brittle; in the back of her mind, she might be thinking “A grown man, looking at my child? Is he a pedophile?”

I think that kind of response is actually uncommon in the UK.

I thought it might be because of that line on the Scroobious Pip song.

[Svartalf]

That only happens at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Dunno, I see more North Africans than blacks in our KFCs

[Audley Strange]

Here's a rough first draft of something I'm writing about this crap.

Patriarchy.

In Bavaria, there was a gentleman by the name of Adam Weishaupt. Weishaupt considered himself a free thinker who on May the First 1776 started a short lived secret society called the Bavarian Illuminati. It was the arrogance of someone who thought themselves smarter and wiser than his peers and obviously it caught on amongst those who considered themselves “enlightened.”

They were hammered out of existence within a decade. However that did not stop them from being the subject of two very well published conspiracy theories shortly after they were disbanded. The claims were that they were godless anarchistic revolutionaries who had inspired the French Revolution and all manner of other outrageous and unprovable things from a bunch of reactionaries, who failed to understand that times were changing. That the Sun Kings and other run offs from religion were living in obscene splendour while those who they ruled starved and lived in squalor was normal, so it must have been an outside group responsible.

This conspiracy caught fire. The illuminati are now considered by many to be a Global network of magicians, of communists, of capitalists, of gnostic christians, of higher vibratory immortal reptilian intelligences that take human form. They are accused of running the banks, ruining the banks, of setting up socialist economies and fascism, of child rape and sacrifice, of mind control, of creating a world run for an elite while the rest of us are slaves, of creating a world with no leaders, of creating a world which is a spiritual time bomb so they can feed on our souls.

In short the Illuminati is a conspiracy theory without meaning. It is a empty container word that those who cannot accept that the world is run on bluff and that their behavioural and signal interference emerges between individuals and cultures. No, to the conspiracy theorists there is a hidden tone amongst all that, a silent control signal that did not start with Adam Weishaupt but instead goes back to pre-history, influenced the writers of the Bible, the ancient Egyptians, the Mystery Cults and probably the dinosaurs too.

Now those that believe in such a shadowy elite group, really believe it. If anyone has seen the footage of Alex Jones sneaking into Bohemian Grove (“the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine”: Richard Nixon) then imagine what must have been going through his mind when after infiltrating this illuminati playground and sneaking through the forest at night at last he sees a large stone owl, people in robes and what appears to be a ritual sacrifice. To him it does not matter that it's an elaborate and lame performance for the benefit of a few wankers. To him it is actual, real evidence of the ungodly nefarious nature of THE ILLUMINATI.

So. This is meant to be about The Patriarchy right? Well the reason I bring up the Illuminati is to show that even if there was a historical precident, an actual patriarchy, that is not the same as the common concept spouted by victim and radical feminists (and probably believed by many people to be true even if they don't agree with feminism.)

So let's get to it. While there have been patriarchal cultures throughout the world and throughout history, the predominant patriarchal rule came primarily from the Roman idea of Pater Familias in which the Father of the family was the sole autocratic power over his livestock and property (livestock included women and children.) It seems that when the Roman Empire went Christian they got all guilty about nailing their new God to a stick, after all he was the Prime Pater and rather than accept Jesus' incomprehensible waffle about mustard seeds and lilies and fishing as being a good enough reason to nail the troublemaking lunatic to a stick, the new Christians just added “Holy” to the Empire and doubled down with the oppression of women by perpetuating this system of the Father as the legitimate ruler.

This was privilege. Private law. What it meant was that women and children were not seen as responsible agents and no matter what they did, be it cuckoldry, wantonness, thievery, murder, black magic, the man of the household was legally responsible.

This is important. Privilege meant that women and children were not subject to laws, only men were. It did not mean freedom, it meant overwhelming responsibility because he would be punished for their actions. As such it was up to the man to keep his house in order or face the consequences.

It is fair to say that treating women without any sense of self responsibility was NOT an idea that was popular amongst the indigenous peoples of the rest of Europe at the time. However the new Christians turned the other cheek by eradicating most of those cultures. It is also fair to say that the practices of that church of fools really mistrusted women. However the system in place was not designed to oppress women as much as it just didn't consider them equal to men. Still any casual glance at history will show that there were many many women who were also considered as part of the Patriarchy. Usually these were royals or women of wealthy means.

Still it must be admitted that for a good long while the concept of “the man of the house.” was indeed the predominant one. There were many women of those wealthy means though who stood up against this roman religious concept both physically and mentally, in literature and in politics. They were pretty much dismissed.

Up and until about the time in the early 17th Century when the Catholic church's rule over Europe went into freefall. The previous couple of centuries had provoked the reformation which had shook the authority of the vatican more than the diet of worms. This undermining of their authority along with a bunch of smart educated women on the thrones of Europe or sitting next to the sickly half mad inbreeds upon them began slowly to disengage from the idea of women as property and instead concentrate on Women's rights.

While this was appalling to the Church, it was not so shocking in the culture who was sweeping away the old models (see various revolutions as mentioned above). However some traditions are hard to kill and so it took a long while before Marie Gouze and Mary Shelley was even remotely vindicated. By the mid 19th century women in society were given property rights which in turn allowed them to legally complain that as owners of estates they should be entitled to vote (as an aside this had fuck all to do with the concept of universal suffrage.) By the early 20th century they were out demanding the right to vote and slowly they achieved that in the Western Democracies.

That changed things rapidly until in the late sixties early seventies they were given the same full legal rights as men.

No more Privilege. No more Private law. No more Patriarchy.

Still apart from a few outlying weirdos, no one really mentioned “The Patriarchy” as a concept outside of the ideology of feminism. The feminist critiques on society were Marxist, they were about the dialectics of power, having achieved legal parity they could no longer claim that there was any legal oppression against them.

That wasn't enough. Around the late eighties early nineties the Feminist cultural marxist critique of society was mostly redundant. The problem was that for feminists who'd made a living out of whining about life not being fair, such legal parity left them redundant. So they purloined the post modernist sophisty of Jaques Derrida's decontructionist literary theory (which is bollocks) as a critical theory.
This gave rise to Post Modernism which a lot of people have difficulty with but at it's heart is a simple concept. All meaning is relative. Critical cultural theory was an erroneous extrapolation of this, which served seemingly two purposes. To use language as obfuscation and to legitimise any slight against an individual as part of a long term cultural mechanic known as Patriarchy.

That they missed out that their meanings were equally as relative was ignored. by them. Instead around the early 90's pseudo-academics latched onto this highly specialised semiotic noise and started to talk absolute fucking nonsense. It wasn't that young Helen was a lazy cow at school, it was male educational oppression deliberately cultivated to keep women down (at the same time as women were beginning to outnumber men in colleges) it was not her fault, it was an ancient set of codified rules that had never been shifted that was to blame not her. The fact that so many other women were getting a good education was all relative, objectively men were to blame.

The Feminists always had a streak of misandry underneath those claims of equality which is obvious from their consistant accusations of male“privilege” of which there is no such thing. There may well be beneficial sexism but that works both ways. There is no private law oppressing women, thus there is no Patriarchy. By definition we do not live in societies where the law applies only to men and that women have no legal rights.

Thus those spouting about The Patriarchy and Privilege are no different from those claiming the Illuminati runs things. They are anachronisms, used by people to blame for anything and everything
and to any rational or reasonable person those claiming the world is run by Patriarchy or Illuminati they just sound like paranoid nutcases, professional victims and bitter shrews

[orpheus]

It's the typical misdirection of feminists when questioned, not to answer the question, but to imply that questioning itself is suspect and thus the questioner can be dismissed. They used to use sexist, but that doesn't that the oomph of such terms as privileged or misogynist or the real rhetorical nuke of "rape enabler."

It is that which evinces their lack of arguing from any charitable position. The phrase is weaponised specifically to outrage those accused of it, to silence, to make the opponent react aggressively, to misdirect the discussion to "why do you hate women?"

I do not understand what their obsession is about rape. I don't understand why they make claims about a "rape culture" when they are the only ones talking about it consistently. Both of how much they fear it, how much it ruins lives, even if you were raped you weren't properly raped unless it's caused you to be driven past the edge of madness, into the cold perimeters of paranoia and self loathing. About how everyone else, especially men and all wandering around with rape clocks and switches and no doubt rape kazoos and rape laptops giggling about rape while they enable and support a coterie of Silent Movie lotharios with barbed prehensile penises which ejaculate white hot bullets of oppression in to the wombs and anuses of weaklings.

There can be be no effective discourse with people who expect you to accept that the above is a reasonable apriori assumption of your behaviour and motivations until you prove to them otherwise.

(bold mine)

And with some (I'm looking at you, Apelusters), it's worse than that, because according to them, you can't prove to them otherwise. Nobody can. It's an accepted TruthTM.

[orpheus]

Anyway, good article, Bella. I think someone should take it over to the Apelust church and go all Martin Luther on their ass. Post the sucker and see what happens.