Privilege. How can it be talked about and acknowledged in today's society

[chomalungma]

Just a follow up from the recent threads. Male privilege. White privilege. It exists. But some people think it is a poor concept as they don't seem privileged. This thread is just to carry on the conversation.

@malylis Ok you get FSM if you work fewer than 16 hours but that isn't working class, it's the underemployed and few people fall into that category due to conditionality agreements. The majority of FSM recipients are from families who are either unemployed or claiming disability benefits. FSM doesn't come close to indicating even those who would fall into the category of working poor, never mind working class.

People constantly going on about male privilege have not contributed to this at all

It's working now with closing the gender pay gap.

Yes but they were not doing it BECAUSE they were a majority white area, possibly lower class but I would find an argument that austerity and deindustrialisation was deliberately targetd at white people hard to believe wouldn't you?

See there is another narrative going round at the moment . The working class = white ergo disadvantaged = white.

You can be BAME and working class

The gender pay gap isn’t closing.

And the gender pay gap is predominantly caused by disadvantages women face through greater caring responsibilities.

And the gender pay gap is predominantly caused by disadvantages women face through greater caring responsibilities

Male privilege - not being expected to care for children as much as women.

Or care for elderly parents as well...

Everyone listen to @CendrillonSings what he says MUST be true because he is 'informing ' us

NAh not buying it

Most discrimination isn’t caused by people deliberately discriminating against people though. It’s caused by not considering the impact various policies and actions will have on different groups.

@CendrillonSings you have not answered my questions about who you think should be the inequal ones in society

Ok, tell me how this mass data was collected?

I can tell you its boys in receipt of FSM. Go look t the Impetus report into it, same for the BPS study, the issue is one of language, working class is used as a synonym for disadvantaged.

White working class boys are a vulnerable group that teachers need to be aware of, so being white in itself isn’t always a privilege.

Thinking of a poster on another thread whose name I forget but was very eloquent, she was talking about choice and how when people say “but she had a choice..” how much choice did that person have? The more privileged you are the more choice you have and the less trapped you feel by factors outside your control.

I left home aged 17 because of emotional abuse and neglect. I found it easy to get jobs although I only ever lasted a short while in any of them. I was homeless but through tremendous providence found a very kind stranger who took me in then helped me find a hostel. I didn’t do as well in my a levels as I might have done. I met a boy who was a drug user and escaped that relationship by the skin of my teeth. I went to university and am now married, living in a lovely house with two children and a well paid job.

Is it because I was incredibly lucky? Well, yes. Was it because I was fearless because I didn’t realise how tough life could be? Yes also
But overwhelmingly it was because I was in lots of ways privileged. I came from a middle class home, was very well spoken and well educated. People reacted to that and if I’d have been a black boy the chances are I would have been given no chances.

Privilege gets you through doors that are shut to others

I don’t need men to do more care work. I need employers to stop discriminating against people who do care work.

Equalising the numbers of men and women being disadvantaged does nothing to actually remove the disadvantage.

Men not being discriminated against at work is not a privilege, because nobody should be discriminated against at work.

It’s not a privilege to be treated reasonably.

@malylis actually I think your point about the economic position of a typical Labour voter is relevant. This talk about privilege has switched people off in the parts of the country that Labour is from. There were seats turning blue in December that had been red for seventy five years. But tbh a fifty-five year old bloke in an ex mining town who hasn't seen any investment from either Labour or Tory in four decades, who probably lost a chunk of pension twenty years ago and certainly didn't get contractual redundancy any of times he lost his job and is perpetually patching over the rough edges of a zero hours contract after close to a lifetime of working, who looks around his town centre and sees bookies, boarded up shops and spice addicts while his kids face a lifetime of the same, isn't going to be too receptive to listening to theoretical notions of his white privilege.

The overall problem with ‘privilege’ is that whatever it originally was supposed to convey it is just now used clumsily to mean anything one group has more of than another group has.

@malylis is it privilege as a concept as a whole or just white privilege?

What do you think those in the parts of the country understand privilege to be?

I'll be totally honest i've not seen a great deal in any mass media about so called 'white privilege' in the last few years so I wonder where this narrative is coming from.

Is it because people are talking about racial equality (i.e Stormzy and cambridge scholarships) or are there other factors

Is it to do with immigration ?

CreekIsRising

Indeed. It’s amazing how this thread pretends that a GE didn’t just happen in which the parties obsessing over this stuff were soundly thrashed, whereas the one that plainly didn’t give a shit about it won in a landslide.

It seems people really don’t learn from history. Or even from last month!

But I didnt see the Labour party obsessing over 'white privilege ' that is such a weird thing to say

Class privilege maybe but as your Iain Duncan Smith in disguise you would know that

Well yes @Endofthedays this thread is littered with misunderstandings about privilege in this context

Nothing wrong with not wantng to go back to Victorian times and the age of the 'deserving poor'

• But the policies didn't target people BECAUSE they were white.

No one, including me, has argued this. It may not have been the intention but it’s the reality that public policy has allowed large swathes of white working class marginalisation and poverty. To continue to bang the drum that these people are privileged is insensitive and divisive, even if you can argue that they don’t experience some of the prejudice that BAME people experience.

Do you genuinely believe that? That people who don’t agree with privilege as a useful way of understanding how to reduce inequality want to go back to the Victorian age?

@OrangeCinnamon there has been plenty in the media about my fifty five year old bloke above. Mostly telling him that his generation had it all and then drew up the drawbridge, accusing him of stopping millennials from buying houses, calling him racist, a bigot and "gammon" (God I loathe that term). And then expressing complete shock when he turned around and told everyone to fuck off.

No i'm saying that there is nothing wrong with not wanting to go back to that age again the age of the deserving poor

where everyone had their place in society and inequality was viewed as very much a natural state as @CendrillonSings says

Of course there is nothing wrong with that.

But that isn’t what insisting people should understand the world through the concept of privilege is about.

Even if we are just debating between people with left wing aims and beliefs, most people don’t view inequality issues through the concept of privilege.

Viewing people as being more morally virtuous, intelligent, left wing or educated because they the world in terms of privilege is the problem here.

It just makes you out of touch with most of the people who would agree with you if you could try and find a common language for expressing this rather than imposing this niche ideology on people.

Which is why this thread was started was it not?

@Cendrillionsings

What inequality are you happy to accept then?

Also, the GE wasn't about 'white privilege'? (A term that is still being misconstrued on this thread by some people!) I'm not sure why you're crowing about the election.

It does seem like you're enjoying trying to point score rather than discuss.