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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.

Via Tyler Cowen Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree points to an interesting-looking social psychology paper on entitlement and selfishness as it relates to a sense of victimization.

Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?:

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.

via Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – Vol 97, Iss 5

Barker said it here.

Quick note: Barker may have been citing the print version. For whatever reason, though, the the article appears online in JPSP Vol 98, Issue 2: Victim entitlement to behave selfishly Zitek, Emily M.; Jordan, Alexander H.; Monin, Benoît; Leach, Frederick R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 98(2), Feb 2010, 245-255.

I’m not going to cough up ~$12.00 to read the gated version but while digging around for more information it looks like the same results turn up quite a few similar studies of selfishness, fairness, and sense of entitlement. I ought to add it makes sense because it’s been my intuition, stated repeatedly online and in real life, that privilege and entitlement (stereotypical male in particular, kyriarchal in general) derives more from insecurity and resentment than the stereotypical spoon-in-your-mouth aristocratic sense of “the peasants are revolting.” And finally makes sense because I’ve been around my children and their friends for 13 years now… although that experience might be unscientifically anecdotal. :-)

At any rate, assuming the research supports the conclusion, and assuming it confirms similar prior research, it’s going to supports my contention that those who exercise privilege tend to perceive their actions as defending themselves from unfairness or attack. With the result that asking, say, men to “give up” their privileges never seems to work (and, when it does sort of work, seems really wimpy, half-hearted, or passive-aggressive. Or chivalrous, which would be by far the least productive!)

I think it also supports my developing strategy of attempting to recruit “oppressive” classes with the entirely reasonable (and often easily-observed) point that conditions that are worse for someone don’t necessarily imply that conditions are better for you.

So I was over at Jill’s I Blame the Patriarchy a couple of minutes ago and she made the point that even BDSM submissive men have privilege.

...whether he likes it or not, when Nigel hoists up his Dockers and saunters out of your dungeon into the public square, he’s enjoying the privileged status he has had the pleasure of internalizing all his life. You are not.

Read the quote in context here.

This is, of course, true in the same sense that her Nigel enjoys privileged status whether he’s sauntering out of a dungeon, sauntering down the aisle of a church, sauntering through the produce section at Whole Foods, or sauntering (or maybe wheeled on a stretcher) out of an alley where he was beaten and robbed.

Anyway, “privilege” is one of those words where I know it’s used in reference to imbalance of privilege — something you’ve got that I don’t, or I’ve got that you don’t. Or we’ve got that they don’t, and so on. And of course one of the fun things about the idea of kyriarchy is that depending on context privilege can be something almost anybody can have next to someone who doesn’t have it.

So what makes my question dumb is that I can’t figure out whether the idea, when the term “privilege” is used to indicate power imbalance, is to extend privilege to those who don’t have it, or take it away from those who do.

Incidentally just because it’s a dumb question doesn’t mean it’s a trivial one. Or a “just semantics” one. In theories of politics there are some pretty strong disagreements about privilege in the context of, say, rights vs. opportunities. For instance to turn an old cliché on its head, even when rich and poor alike have the right to sleep under railroad bridges — or give lap dances in Detroit — it’s generally considered a privilege not to have to do so.

A. Serwer of TAPPED, reflecting on a misquote by a second party that made a third party look even more racist than he really is makes a really cool point about damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t politics. (Emphasis mine.)

Megan McArdle writes that “we have made overt prejudice into the social equivalent of a capital crime. I approve of this.” Well I don’t. I think it’s exactly like throwing people in jail for smoking weed. Everyone does it, and yet, as with Michael Phelps, everyone pretends to be scandalized when it happens. Racism becoming the social equivalent of a capital crime only fosters white guilt, that most useless of emotions. I’ve learned all too personally how that guilt curdles into resentment, resentment turns to hatred, and that hatred can lead to violence. As with the War on Drugs, the disproportionate response exists to perpetuate the disproportionate response. Well we shouldn’t pretend, and we shouldn’t be scandalized. We should just be honest. So let me be honest and say that I reacted somewhat belligerently to McArdle, and while I stand by my argument, I regret my tone. But I have no interest in making people feel prolonged feelings of guilt or shame over something everyone occasionally does. I just want to explain why something is messed up, rag on them a little bit, and move on. And I hope people will have the charity to do the same for me.

Read the quote in context here.

That last bit is pretty important too: the problem with privileged guilt, white or otherwise, is that when you’re in it it’s hard to get that you’ve just messed up, you’re just getting ragged on a little bit, but then to file it in the giant, all purpose pile of “dang it all I won’t do that again” we’ve all got instead of

- doing the huffy “how dare you…” defense – doing the anguished “how can I possibly apologize…” defense – doing the “I try but I’ll never learn…” defense – doing the “but I can explain…” defense – doing the (disasterous!) “I give up, I’m so sick of you people and your…” defense – doing the “{whatever}ism hurts {my privileged group} too…” defense – or…

...or otherwise when you’ve got guilt it’s hard not to make it all about you. Which, when you think about it is one of those major hallmarks of privilege. Guiltily turning someone else’s irritated “c’mon, you know better than that” into some kind of major life lesson (about yourself!) is still exploitation. In other words privileged guilt is a sentiment that exists primarily to perpetuate itself rather than, oh, say, cleaning up what you got ragged on for if it needs to be cleaned up, and moving on.