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.

@KatyCarrCan I hear everything you say and it's appalling. No-one is disputing that discrimination. But you seem to be suggesting that those travellers somehow don't benefit from white privilege, which (assuming they're white) they do. As said in numerous pp posts- that phrase doesn't negate the other terrible forms of prejudice they may experience. But, for example, the male Irish traveller is 9 and a half times less likely to be stopped and searched than a Black male barrister.

Should there be discussions about access, about bigotry, about institutional racism, etc? Yy absolutely. But I don't see the concept of 'privilege' helping in RL situations.
I regularly work with disadvantaged minorities what we focus on is bringing people round the table, facilitating discussion and shared experiences, providing information about lived realities. Labelling as privileged and non-privileged in that context isn't beneficial.
By all means, use it in academic discourse or research. But, just as I wouldn't talk about John Stuart Mill's dialectical approach if I was wanting to open up dialogue across groups, then I wouldn't use 'privilege'.
It's an oddly wrong-headed approach that acknowledges a word has lots of negative connotations, that it's understood differently depending on where it's used, that it shuts down dialogue - and then they insist on using it anyway.

I agree of course Privelidge exists but I think it can course a them and us mentality, and if your a white poor person your not really more priveledged then a black rich person are you. (In some ways yes but I wouldn,t try telling the poor person that.)

I don’t really understand why it needs to be talked about. Genuinely, I don’t get it. I can see that there are types of privilege obviously, but people are complex and while they might be privileged in one aspect of life, it’s likely that they are either average or disadvantaged in another aspect.

@NailsNeedDoing genuinely and with the greatest of respect, this in itself is a privileged attitude. You feel there is no need for it to be talked about because in your experience there is no need. Again, with respect can I suggest you read Reni Eddo-Lodge's book about race and educate yourself a bit more about this? I feel like you acknowledged your privilege at the start of you post but then didn't go further by acknowledging how this privilege actually manifests itself.

Perhaps there should be a privilege on line calculator which accounts for the numerous combinations, the lower number you are the more privileged you are.....that would sort the class and privilege issues once and for all, perhaps the number could be added onto our National Insurance number...... I am not being serious but the way the world is heading I can see something like this happening.

if your a white poor person your not really more priveledged then a black rich person are you.

Again, not the case. Read the current statistics on stop and search, prison sentencing, job interviews etc.

As in my example before, a rich black barrister is still 9.5 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than a white unemployed man.

@BettyBoo or to save time people could just acknowledge their privilege?

Oxford read my whole comment please, before choosing which section to quote.

blind auditions for orchestras is really interesting - Apparently it increased diversity. In addition - no one can really fault it on ‘fairness’ (though it certainly does not level the playing field totally as many kids cannot access music lessons).

I wonder whether in the era of computer animations, deep fakes etc, we could use this technology for good - to do a similar ‘blind’ Virtual interview process? So you can see someone’s facial expressions and gesticulations when they talk, but can standardize someone’s appearance?

OxfordCat I hear you, really I do. I’m not saying that there isn’t disadvantage associated with being from an ethnic minority, there clearly is. But the question in the OP is ‘how can this be discussed openly’, and I think the biggest barrier to talking about it openly is by calling something a privilege when it is so easily accompanied by other forms of disadvantage that are dismissed.

I appreciate that I do have some ‘privilege’ in that I don’t know what it’s like to live with racism, but in the nicest possible way, I kinda resent being called privileged when I’ve had other, equally significant disadvantages in life.

Using the term ‘white privilege’ is just so dismissive of everything else that can make life difficult. It comes with an insinuation that a while person can’t possibly have experienced hardships as bad as anyone else, and that their lived experiences and opinions just aren’t worth as much. Change the phrase to something less offensive, and people might be more open to hearing what it’s about.

There's something quite telling about calls to change the terminology used to discuss institutional prejudices to something less upsetting to the people who aren't the victims of that prejudice...

Perhaps BannaTaffy, but perhaps we have to recognise privilege and prejudice occur in many forms and sometimes people don,t see it. Perhaps the terminology is holding us back.

jilly “Or maybe - because it never really catches on outside of middle-class left-wing circles and the rest of the country has just demonstrated they really couldn’t give a toss by voting in the whitest, male-est, most “privileged” PM imaginable - it’s time to give up on the whole concept?”

I honestly think there are bleak times ahead.

The country gawped in one big self congratulatory back pat at the ‘wonderful inclusive display’ that was M&H wedding. As if it was a testimony to the ‘tolerance’ in this country and how marvellous we all are.

Wallpaper.

And 18m later H is probably looking at little Archie and thinking ‘when will it ever stop?’. The styling of Archie’s grandmother as a drug dealing gangsta because she is black and being a social worker can’t afford to live in a posh neighbourhood. The Danny Baker chimp stupidity.

The BAFTAs, where the wonderful Cynthia Erivo was passed over for her role in Harriet.... and asked to
Sing for the assembled white casts, as the entertainment.

Class, power, all isms, it all needs to stop.

But I am sick of hearing white people denying, minimising or glossing over racism.

but perhaps we have to recognise privilege and prejudice occur in many forms
And we need to do that without referring to privilege?

I think there is an issue with the word privilege simply because it gets conflated with economic privilege or advantage.

Having said that it is not easy to come up with an alternative. Advantage?

Nails why, really why, cannot white people listen and learn and understand that the phrase white privilege refers specifically and exclusively to having white skin?

Instead of deflecting to ‘what about me’ and citing things that also apply as deficits in privilege to blacks people (poverty, etc)?

Maybe we should change the word to “advantage”? As in “white advantage”, “wealth advantage”, “male advantage”?

As that is more of a comparative term rather than “privilege” which sounds absolute.

I think that for example a poor white person might be able to accept that being white is an “advantage” over being black, in a way that they struggle to accept that they are in any way “privileged” when their life feels so hard.

@ChazsBrilliantAttitude ha, cross-post! Great minds!

Iam a white supremacist. Who knew? I didn’t. I have, however, just read Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad, published next month by Quercus, which has made clear to me that I am white, therefore I am a racist. In fact, Ms Saad told me in the introduction to prepare to “become overwhelmed when you begin to discover the depths of your internalised white supremacy”.

On a similar note, a friend recently told me that my failure to recognise a vast malevolent patriarchy was as a result of “internalising your own oppression”. There seems to be a lot of internalised weirdness going on: gender victim battling it out with racist in my gut. I thought it was wind.

The publisher is pretty sure that the ranks of underpaid, bookish folk who work for them are also all white supremacists. It is distributing the tome to all the British employees of its parent company Hachette, and telling them to spend 28 days “reflecting on manifestations of white supremacy, including white privilege”.

The self-flagellation of all the white supremacists at Hachette is yet another example of how much the Woke borrow from the Church. Identity politics has become a secular religion, and “white privilege” is one of its shibboleths. Indeed Ms Saad makes the point clearly in her book, stating that “I strongly believe that anti-racism practice and social justice work are also spiritual work*

unherd.com/2020/01/modern-politics-is-christianity-without-redemption/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3

www.amazon.co.uk/Longer-Talking-White-People-About/dp/140887055X?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

“A wake-up call to a nation in denial about the structural and institutional racisms occurring in our homes, offices and communities ( Observer)”

Drat, only meant to copy and paste the last two paras. Anyway, thought it interesting, the email just dropped into my inbox and this very topic ties in.

'[X] Advantage' has an air of supremacy about it, to me.

why, really why, cannot white people listen and learn and understand that the phrase white privilege refers specifically and exclusively to having white skin

Because unfortunately frequently the references to white privilege go further than this.

ChazsBrilliantAttitude "I think there is an issue with the word privilege simply because it gets conflated with economic privilege or advantage."

This is exactly the conversation I had this morning! 'Privilege' is a word with baggage. It's too laden with ideas of wealth, aristocracy, sailing past the queue at the nightclub because 'I'm on the list'.

People don't see themselves as being 'privileged', so they dismiss the whole concept as navel-gazing by the middle-class academics.

I wish there was another, less compromised, word to use.

ConkerGame