A New Language for Privilege

I want to find a better way to engage people over questions of privilege. I want to find a more effective way to divorce the issue from individuals. The agent focus of most of my discussions up to this point obscures and frustrates an honest discussion of privilege and disparities in two ways.

First, in framing the problem and garnering support. The focus on individuals creates a focus only on choices people make, rather than examining how choices come to be offered to specific groups of people over others. The response “this person could have chosen not to do XXX regardless of social pressures…” creates a credible copout and a structure of victim blame. Creating a systemic picture of privilege/oppression as a distribution of available resources and options is necessary to understand why bad choices are less likely to be made by those empowered by racial, class or gendered privilege. There also remains a question of why certain practices are rewarded as ‘good choices’ that undergirds this discussion that can only be described by a systemic analysis.

When addressing people empowered by privilege, persuading them to understand oppression and responsibility requires a more subtle tactic. Often my arguments frame the discussion in such a way that too directly undermines people’s self perceptions. People like to believe they have achieved what they have in their lives through personal hard work, and my discussions of privilege too often end up sounding like an argument about why their hard work and effort should not matter. It’s like telling someone that they haven’t earned their lives and deserve to be punished for their achievements, which is a difficult argument to win.

Second, in framing solutions. Looking too much to the individual makes remedies sound like handouts, which sounds patronizing to those they intend to help, and unreasonable to those it does not. In a similar way as described above, arguing that classes or groups of people require ‘assistance’ can enfeeble and disempower them. Agent focus makes responses to privilege look like handouts or even reverse discrimination, which alienates key sources of support for change

A note on difference and oppression. The ability to term social situations as ‘opressive’ requires a notion of a universal subject. Without this tool, situations that empower particular groups can be treated as the natural result of inherent differences between the privileged and the disempowered. A potentially universal subject also creates the foundation for deconstruction of particular gender norms which emerge as the result of social systems aimed at oppression. Only by the ability to see people as having a universal will or humanity can we construct arguments for social change.

Available choices lies at the heart of the discussion of oppression I would like to have. I would like to describe oppression by discussing why certain choices are only available to particular populations, or why making certain choices disproportionately impacts other populations. Yes, that homeless person should not have started drinking. But why is it that that choice resulted in homelessness, while it did not for the alcoholics on campus?

Duncan