Summary: As promised (here: The Perversely Non-Perverse Reason You Don’t Need the Kings Navy to Protect Heterosexuality), here’s why I think the word “privilege” is a perfectly accurate but also in communications terms perfectly lousy term.
The problem with the word “privilege” is that people who have it never get to enjoy it. Or even appreciate it. Or, generally speaking, even recognize it.
Consider the old brain twister “we don’t know who first discovered water but we can be sure it wasn’t a fish.” When you’re totally surrounded and supported by something it’s literally invisible to you.
Viewed objectively it makes total sense that the technical term an observer would give it would be “privilege.” After all it’s visible only to those who don’t have it.
Rhetorically, though, it’s a total catastrophe. Because the term’s non-technical usage implies knowing luxury — one the recipient experiences knowingly, not unconsciously. Sort of like my grandfather talking about his childhood in Scotland in the late 1800s when instead of plain oatmeal three times a day his family had oatmeal boiled with bits of mutton in it for Sunday dinner after church. He thought that was pretty wonderful.
Ok, so now we’re getting to the point: Imagine that the only protein in your diet, every day, was oatmeal boiled in dead sheep. You probably couldn’t imagine the tedium of having to live that way. Until just now it might never have occurred to you that anyone would daydream about living like that.
My grandfather, who was 5’1” tall and had legs as crooked as a goat, and gazillions of other people throughout history, would snort at you with contempt. (As he would snort at his grandchildren, including me.)
The privilege part isn’t not eating the diet, or not being so well-fed you wouldn’t look forward to it the way my grandfather would have. Privilege is having it so far removed from your reality you’re not just unaware of it, you can’t even imagine it.
That you can’t even imagine it is precisely why calling it “privilege” is such a lousy choice: people who have it don’t have the experience of, well, experiencing it! Even though its existence is glaringly obvious to everyone who doesn’t have it.
If you want to try and discuss such a very, very real thing with… anyone who’s got it, you’re going to have to find a way to communicate their condition such that they a) get it but b) are not alienated by it. For instance if I see you popping open a Yoplait and call you privileged you are you’re going to totally eyeball-roll me. Nor would you be mollified if I then tried to explain that that the very fact of your eye-rolling was an exercise of your privilege. It’s not that I wouldn’t have communicated it to you. And (as, for instance, my grandfather or roughly 10,000,000 Hatians could tell you) it’s not even that you’d be very, very mistaken for thinking having an 89-cent yogurt didn’t make you privileged because anybody can have one any time they want. It’s that by naming your privilege I’d have alienated you to a point where further communication was shut down.
That’s going to be exactly the same experience when you tell a man he’s privileged because he can walk down the street without ever noticing that nobody’s checking out his ass, let alone groping it. Or, more specifically, if you try to tell a white one he’s privileged because he can walk down the same street completely oblivious to whether he passed a police officer, let alone whether the officer noticed his passing.
It’s not that there’s something to be communicated. It’s just way more tricky than you probably imagine.
Thus even though technically it’s a marvelously accurate word we need a better one for actual communication.
Actually Figleaf I can’t
Submitted by Redleader (not verified) on Tue, 2010-02-23 17:56.Actually Figleaf I can’t label something like that privileged, not because of the word, but because plenty of people who DO have access to either Yoplait or otherwise plentiful yogurt STILL can’t afford (not just because of bad habits or lack of education but by money and food choice limits) still can’t really meet several key nutritional criteria set by the WHO.
And despite having been raised to a non-destitute family in the developed world, when I ended up in a situation where for nearly two years I had nothing to eat except rice, milk, cornmeal, beans, and whatever fruits, vegetables or nut butter the food bank had that week, I was actually grateful for that food. Grateful despite the fact that I developed some serious nutritional deficiencies and health problems. Grateful for the food, even though the Iraq War and Bush policies broke my heart like nothing else can compare with. Grateful because I never expected to live to be 20 let alone over 30, as a child. And because if I had, I would be certain that my rations rather than lovely things like cornmeal, rice, milk, beans, and some fruits and veggies let alone some limited amounts of peanut butter was better than what I expected to enjoy growing up, because of the nuclear war that I thought would happen. And even without the nuclear war, I expected a Soylent Green world.
So to me every bite of food in my mouth is a miracle. And I felt that way as much before that time period as I do now. I can never take food for granted, because that’s just how I feel about it. Period.
Would you call taking good food “Didn’t grow up under Reagan” privilege? Probably not!
But the real problems with the term is that if you can label something a “privilege” simply because many people in this world don’t have it, than you would have to entirely get rid of the concept of human rights. Free speech, rights to a trial, and so on would also become privileges rather than rights. Even with health care reform the argument being made is that health care is a right rather than a privilege. Sounds correct to me!!
Besides there’s that issue about feeling you have to make statements like everyone.
I never worry about having men check out my behind while walking down the street, but I constantly worry about the police even thought I’m female and considered “white”.
But like I said, you shouldn’t have to make pronouncements about everyone’s life experience to argue that certain prejudices are common in society.