Just to be clear, since several people have mentioned it in email, in my post Privilege: A Perfectly Accurate Word That’s Perfectly Unusable For Communicating With Those Who Have It I wasn’t complaining about the concept of privilege. At all! It’s actually freakishly important!

Instead I was complaining (and it is a complaint) that the language that we use is perfectly descriptive when recognized in others but not descriptive to the people it’s recognized in.

Consider the late gentleman who was privileged enough to own a private airplane, a consulting company, and a brick and stone house. He was privileged enough to be able to marry the person of his choice, privileged to be able-bodied and oriented towards someone he could have two beautiful children with. He was privileged to be loved enough by them that they became distraught when he failed to return home. And he was privileged to have a car he could drive to the airport. He had privileged skin color, car, haircut, clothes, and age such that he didn’t have to even think about getting pulled over for a “background check” by police or border patrol when he drove to the airport hanger where he kept his plane.

He saw none of this privilege. As with everyone when they have privilege it was invisible to him. It gave him no solace nor comfort. Even as it surely grated on those around him who had less. Or none.

The stupid fucker was exercising his privilege when he flew his airplane into an office building in Austin, Texas the other day, killing himself and someone else and injuring others — directly from the burns and impact, indirectly through grief, displacement, and loss of loved ones. He was exercising privilege when he killed his children’s father, when he killed his wife’s husband, when he emptied their lives of him and of the home he burned in… an only-slightly extraordinary expression of his sense that he had no privilege at all… because he was evidently unable to resolve some manner of dispute the way his (unrecognized) privilege let him to imagine he should have been able to, over taxes he owed on income he didn’t recognize himself as having been privileged to be able to earn.

I wasn’t thinking about that guy when I wrote about privilege. Instead I was thinking about the friendship-jeopardizing gulf of communication between Champagne and Benzedrine, who disputes the notion of privilege, and Britni Danielle, who clearly gets it but can’t get it across to C&B.

The inability to articulate it such that it can be received spreads chaos. The invisibility of privilege in those who have it spreads injustice. Sometimes, as between Britni and C&B the cost of failure is measured in loss of friendship. In Texas the cost must be measured in lives. In all cases the cost of privilege, as we can see over and over, outweighs the benefits: it increases the misery of others without noticeably improving the lives of those with.

This is not “mansplaining” and it’s certainly not justifying privilege. As in Texas it’s a deadly killer that manages to hide itself in plain sight, ruining, and even ending the lives not only the myriad victims but also its banally evil perpetrators. All things considered even a zero-sum game would be an improvement. Fortunately that needn’t be the only alternative. But it ain’t going to get better by telling guys who are suffocating trying to rebreathe the stagnant air of the unnoticed wind at their backs that they’re privileged. Even though to everyone else it’s achingly obvious they surely are, if they don’t see it that way the trick is to find out how to get through to them. Before they drive another fucking airplane, or yacht, or BMW into another crowded building, or, with their shoes full of their own fearful urine, write “legal opinions” that a Vice President who orders the torture prisoners is acting in “self defense.”