Privilege, then and now

[Comshaw]

I got to wondering how others perceived the concept of privilege as a kid/young person and now. As we mature and the vision of the world expands for us ideas like that change and grow. I'll add how I felt/feel about it and why a little later, but I'd like to read how others see it. So what comes to mind for you when you hear that word? What was your concept as a youngin'?

Comshaw

 

[MillieDynamite]

When I was a little kid, I knew we had less than other people had in other parts of Huston. I knew some of the kids at school had more and nicer things. I had an incredible sense of being, less, than others. Less important, less money, fewer things, all those things conspire against you. Once my birth father hurt me, and I ran away from home and lived on the street, my sense of worthlessness was heightened. When I entered my foster home, I knew for a fact I didn't deserve anything I had.

So, I ran away several times. But my father, foster father at that time, would come and find me and drag me back. Once I understood at least Dad and Mum believed I was good enough to be in their family, I felt privileged. Of course, they hit a brick wall, and we lost our 40-acre "ranch" and mansion we lived in. No, it was just 40 acres, four horses, and a not-very-large house. I had a fear for weeks that they would return me to where I came from.

Then we made a transition to a double wide, in a new place, and 2 1/2 acres, and Mum and Dad told me they were adopting me, which they did.

I've never been PRIVILEGED. Dad and Mum are white but don't act privileged. I have seen white privilege. I have experienced bigotry. I don't know how bad or good things are now for other people of color. But I do know how bad it was in the 1800s, 1900 - 2000. And things seem to have improved.

Well, that's what I believe.

 

[stickygirl]

To me privilege is acquiring status and opportunities without effort. In the UK that means private schools like Eton or Harrow, hand the brat on to Oxford or Cambridge and they have access to incredible employment options.
Top finance houses hold regular recruitment jamborees at Oxford, picking the greediest, smartest fuckers they need to keep the City at the level of corruption to which it's become accustomed. Barristers, same 78% went to Oxbridge. If you fail at Oxford they make you a Tory MP.
It's a process that hasn't changed in centuries. The next Labour govt intends to start taxing private schools who mostly enjoy charitable status.

So much for institutional privilege and silver spoons.

I guess there are benign privileges, like experiences - travelling to parts of the world or studying under an especially good teacher. Celebrities will blush at the lectern, bashfully brushing away compliments with the platitude 'It's been a privilege' and Hollywood loves that line, as a soldier dies in the arms of his comrades.

To stretch the point, I'd say the same of a couple of my past relationships. Two super smart people from whom I learned so much - I consider that to have been a privilege too.

 

[lovecraft68]

This would be better off in the politics forum.

All we're going to get here is narratives and agendas and nothing resembling reality

The one thing I'll say is I find it funny how many people who had a safe comfortable upbringing and followed that path to a nice life where they want for little to nothing, try so hard to deny how easy they have it. They want to tell you all about how they know the hard knocks life...because they think its cool, which shows they have no understanding of what its like not to be them.

I hope this has something to do with an exchange I had with a poster last night, so he can come running in here whining some more.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Honestly, the best metaphor I've ever heard for privilege is likening it to a character sheet in a game.

Every D&D player worth their salt knows how much stats matter. If you have a high strength, you're more likely to pass strength checks. If you have a high intelligence, you're more likely to pass intelligence checks. That doesn't mean you WILL pass a check, but the odds are with you. It doesn't mean that the character with low strength or intelligence or whatever can't pass them, but the odds are against them.

If you're white, you rolled an 18 on your Race in America. If you're rich, you rolled an 18 on your Social class. If you're straight, white, Christian, etc. you have a character sheet that should make your DM glare suspiciously at you. All of those high stats mean you're going to do better for no reason other than that the dice favored you at the beginning of the game.

And it's not just rolls, either. It's all the little knock-on effects that were so prevalent in D&D 3.5E and earlier. High Intelligence? You got more skills and started with more languages... like the kid from the rich family that can pay for tutors, private school, and college. High Str? You can carry more, you notice the weight you carry less, and you're more likely to have the right tool for the job... like the white guy that doesn't have to constantly worry that someone is power is going to take offense at his race and pull him over for a "random" drug check or deny him a loan. High Dex? Easier for you to move around quickly, climb better, get through difficult spaces... like the person without physical disabilities.

You can keep going from here. Privilege is insidious precisely because it's subtle in most cases. Beyond that, people want to believe they're the heroes in their own stories, that they succeed on their own and you failed on your own, that there's an inherent fairness involved. Because if there's not? Then it's all dice rolls.

I can't find the specific study right now, but I remember one that was done a couple decades ago. You have people play Monopoly, but one of the players is given an advantage; not a major one, but still an advantage. A little extra money to start with, getting to roll three dice and pick the two you want to go with, etc. Those players with the advantages, as expected, won more often.

But the interesting thing was the post-game interviews. The losing players tended to identify correctly why they lost, whether they actually were outplayed or because of the "cheating" player's advantage. But the "cheating" player? He almost always said, "Well, I played it right here, and I did this thing there." If prompted, he might admit that the advantage was an advantage, but they downplayed the effect it had on the game. Sounds awfully familiar.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

I didn't think much about privilege when I was younger. Now realize how much I had growing up. In the context of privilege, I love the concept of "intersectionality". Privilege is not a singular axis. As a straight white woman, I have lots of privilege compared to a queer black man, but that doesn't mean that my experiences with institutional misogyny don't count.

I think the best we can do is for all of us who have some privilege to use it to help those around us who have less.

 

[ElectricBlue]

It's not something I go on about or worry about. I summed it up in a conversation years ago: "So what if you've got a law degree? I've got an arts degree, doesn't make me an artist."

An asshole remains in its natural state, no matter what sophistication you bring to it. People are no different.

 

[NoTalentHack]

It's not something I go on about or worry about. I summed it up in a conversation years ago: "So what if you've got a law degree? I've got an arts degree, doesn't make me an artist."

An asshole remains in its natural state, no matter what sophistication you bring to it. People are no different.

But some assholes can ruin your life, and some assholes can only glare impotently at you, largely determined by their inborn privilege and how they've leveraged it.

 

[Comshaw]

This would be better off in the politics forum.

All we're going to get here is narratives and agendas and nothing resembling reality

The one thing I'll say is I find it funny how many people who had a safe comfortable upbringing and followed that path to a nice life where they want for little to nothing, try so hard to deny how easy they have it. They want to tell you all about how they know the hard knocks life...because they think its cool, which shows they have no understanding of what its like not to be them.

I hope this has something to do with an exchange I had with a poster last night, so he can come running in here whining some more.

No sorry. On the PB all I will get is people pissing in each other's boot. Few if any want to really have a civil discussion about anything. And it's only getting worse over time. Before the PB, when all that was on the GB there were at least a hand full who were interested in discussing such things. But most of them stayed on the GB. Most of what's on the PB are a bunch of hard left and hard right people taunting each other. And only one or two actually use anything approaching logic. I learned a long time ago I will never get anyone to think about or consider what I said if I slap 'em upside the head with it.

Comshaw

 

[Euphony]

I hope this has something to do with an exchange I had with a poster last night, so he can come running in here whining some more.

 

[djrip]

This would be better off in the politics forum.

All we're going to get here is narratives and agendas and nothing resembling reality

The one thing I'll say is I find it funny how many people who had a safe comfortable upbringing and followed that path to a nice life where they want for little to nothing, try so hard to deny how easy they have it. They want to tell you all about how they know the hard knocks life...because they think its cool, which shows they have no understanding of what its like not to be them.

I hope this has something to do with an exchange I had with a poster last night, so he can come running in here whining some more.

Not me. I've never even been in a fight unless you count the time in 1st grade when that girl kicked me in the family jewels over a turn on the swing.

 

[Comshaw]

Honestly, the best metaphor I've ever heard for privilege is likening it to a character sheet in a game.

Every D&D player worth their salt knows how much stats matter. If you have a high strength, you're more likely to pass strength checks. If you have a high intelligence, you're more likely to pass intelligence checks. That doesn't mean you WILL pass a check, but the odds are with you. It doesn't mean that the character with low strength or intelligence or whatever can't pass them, but the odds are against them.

If you're white, you rolled an 18 on your Race in America. If you're rich, you rolled an 18 on your Social class. If you're straight, white, Christian, etc. you have a character sheet that should make your DM glare suspiciously at you. All of those high stats mean you're going to do better for no reason other than that the dice favored you at the beginning of the game.

And it's not just rolls, either. It's all the little knock-on effects that were so prevalent in D&D 3.5E and earlier. High Intelligence? You got more skills and started with more languages... like the kid from the rich family that can pay for tutors, private school, and college. High Str? You can carry more, you notice the weight you carry less, and you're more likely to have the right tool for the job... like the white guy that doesn't have to constantly worry that someone is power is going to take offense at his race and pull him over for a "random" drug check or deny him a loan. High Dex? Easier for you to move around quickly, climb better, get through difficult spaces... like the person without physical disabilities.

You can keep going from here. Privilege is insidious precisely because it's subtle in most cases. Beyond that, people want to believe they're the heroes in their own stories, that they succeed on their own and you failed on your own, that there's an inherent fairness involved. Because if there's not? Then it's all dice rolls.

I can't find the specific study right now, but I remember one that was done a couple decades ago. You have people play Monopoly, but one of the players is given an advantage; not a major one, but still an advantage. A little extra money to start with, getting to roll three dice and pick the two you want to go with, etc. Those players with the advantages, as expected, won more often.

But the interesting thing was the post-game interviews. The losing players tended to identify correctly why they lost, whether they actually were outplayed or because of the "cheating" player's advantage. But the "cheating" player? He almost always said, "Well, I played it right here, and I did this thing there." If prompted, he might admit that the advantage was an advantage, but they downplayed the effect it had on the game. Sounds awfully familiar.

What most don't understand or want to admit is part of it is all about a roll of the dice, being in the right place at the right time, not all or even a majority, but a significant amount. The biggest privilege though is money. Sometimes you don't have to be smart, or more talented or strong or more dexterous as long as you can buy your way through. The college admission scandal where parents were buying their kids a spot on a sports team (even if they never showed up for even a practice) to assure them a spot in a particular university was a great example. Where there are greedy people and people with money, some of the latter will pay off the former for something that rightfully should go to someone else. The best way to combat that is to root it out and shine a spotlight on it.

Yes, those who are smarter than most, or stronger, or faster are privileged. But there isn't a damn thing we can do about Mother Nature handing out those things. Well I take that back, there is, but it's too damned scary to contemplate: genetic manipulation. But again we are back to money, those who have it so they can do such things.

I do believe hard work, perseverance and stubbornness can get you a long way.

Comshaw

 

[XerXesXu]

Privilege: a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

A sound body and a sound intellect are fundamental privileges, not rights. Nature assigns these, not all get them. Nature isn’t discriminatory, it isn’t sentient; inequality is essential to the anthropomorphic understanding of its success.

Time and place are secondary privileges. We’re all privileged to be alive today and benefit from modern medicine and science. We’re, mostly, privileged to live in democracies. Study immigration flows.

Family, upbringing and schooling. Different societies have different degrees of privilege with respect to each of these. Two parents or one, a stable or conflicted society, no school, school, what sort of school?

Social Mobility. Can you create your own life or change your status in your community?

I was lucky on all counts. I was born, able-bodied and healthy, in England shortly after the end of WW2 - the Second World War in 30 years. In war, every able-bodied person was conscripted. Rich and poor, men and women, stood shoulder to shoulder in the shield wall, according to their ability. The National Government decided that, come the peace, the old order should be adapted, and, as everyone was expected to contribute in times of war according to their ability, they should be able to achieve according to their ability in times of peace. I’m a child of the Post-War Consensus - of left and right – the UK should be a Welfare State. With two parents, both working, free primary schooling, local authority scholarship to a selective secondary, based on exam results, free university education on a local authority fees and maintenance grant, free professional education, again, paid for by my local authority, I was lucky with my timing.

I never knew what a shitty place the world could be ‘til I went abroad.

I recently found that a relative of my wife had three children who weren’t going to school. He's poor and lives in the barrio. They couldn’t go to school because they had no birth certificates. The parent was ignorant and poor and didn’t know how to register the births. I’m taking him to City Hall on Monday to do so; they’ll still have to wait ‘til next year to enrol at school.

That’ll be my benchmark for who's underprivileged.

 

[Bramblethorn]

As a kid, not something I thought about a lot. I grew up in a very whitebread area (I'm not sure I knew a single black/Aboriginal person until well into my twenties), I had a lot of advantages that back then I mostly took for granted. Stable home, not rich-rich but never felt short of money, able to pay for prompt treatment for a couple of medical issues that could've been disastrous for me otherwise. Lots of educational opportunities. I knew not everybody had that life, but it was a theoretical thing I didn't have to deal with.

In hindsight, I did have a couple of things going against me. Some stuff I won't discuss here, but one thing was undiagnosed autism/ADHD in a society that didn't handle that well. All I knew at the time was that I was Weird, and it was my responsibility to work very hard at being Normal to avoid discomforting other people with my existence. That one fucked me up a bit, and I'm still working through the process of unfucking it. That led to some rough times in my twenties and thirties, and without those other advantages I could've ended up in a bad place.

Like @BrightShinyGirl was suggesting, privilege is complicated. As an adult, I understand that I've benefited from it in many ways; there are people who've been working all their lives much harder than I've ever done, for much less reward. I have the vocabulary and the background that I can go to a doctor and be taken seriously, for the problems that doctors can help with (that's one that a LOT of people take for granted), I can talk to police and government agencies and not be instantly profiled as "one of those people", yada yada. I try to use that for good where I can.

But occasionally it still runs the other way. I had to leave a job I loved, with co-workers who valued me and wanted me to stay, because the same employer who kept giving me awards for high-quality work made it clear that they were fundamentally incapable of understanding or accommodating the modest requirements of their neurodivergent staff. (Not just me, either; I know several others they lost for the same reason.) I put in years trying to change that from inside, I think I made things a little better, but if I'd stayed there much longer I would have burned out and crashed badly. I was very fortunate that a contact gave me a way out, and the new job is great, but it's still been a lot to deal with as somebody who doesn't cope well with change.

(I think one of the reasons the concept can provoke such hostility is that it is situational; you can't just rank people on a ladder from Most Privileged to Least Privileged and have done with it, and some folk desperately need the world to be governed by simple rules that they don't have to think about.)

 

[ChloeTzang]

It's all relative and as Bramblethorn said, it's situational too. I grew up in a smallish Mid-West town because my parents chose to move back there. Very white, low-crime, safe, and rather laid back and relaxed. It was a great place to grow up as a kid, the education system was good, there wasn't too much in the way of drugs or shit like that floating around, altho that's changing. My dad did consulting and he was always travelling, most of his work was on location so it didn't matter where mom and dad lived, they could have lived wherever they wanted but they chose to move back to where my grandparents lived and base themselves there, which was where i grew up. My grandparents and my parents were pretty well off compared to most families there, altho their lifestyle didn't reflect that at all - but growing up, I always had that awareness that I was rather priviliged compared to most of my peers. I mentioned somewhere else about travelling a lot when I was at school - that wasn't something that anyone else I knew did - except maybe to Disney or something like that. I was a lot more exposed to the world, and very aware of just how our lifestyle was so much better than people in 2nd and 3rd world countries - and that was from personal exposure, not books and classes and social media.

There was always that unspoken assumption (lol, altho it was spoken) that I'd go to university, unlike 80-90% of my peers who had no real expectation of a higher education, except maybe something technical or farming related. And there was never any concern about whether anything could be afforded or not, altho in the end I paid a big chunk of my own way thru uni, working when I was at high school and thru uni - my grandparents and parents were all pretty old school about making your own way. I guess the end result was I always knew my own place, I was always pretty secure and confident about myself and who I was, and there was always that awareness that I was a bit privileged compared to my peers where I grew up, and also very much aware that the rest of the world was rather tougher, and there were a lot of people out there with pretty shitty lives and no real options.

Much the same now - between himself and me, we live a pretty frugal lifefstyle but it's by choice, not because we have to. We both come from somewhat similar backgrounds, we both have very similar attitudes, and we both more or less paid our own way thru higher education - him thru the military. We're both aware that compared to a big % if the US, we're in a good place, relatively speaking, but at this point I don't really regard that as privileged. It's the end result of hard work, hard study, and upbringing as much as anything, altho there were also high expectations from my parents and grandparents, altho a lot of that was cultural.

Are cultural expectations "privilege?" I don't think so. Asian parents and grandparents have high expectations and they enforce them. I was always expected to do well academically, and my parents made sure that I did. I don't regard that as privileged, and what a lot of people regard as "privilege" is much more about cultural expectations and drives. If you're not expected to do well, and your parents don't set those expectations and rules, then you won't do well. And of course you'll grade lower academically. I was always expected to study my ass off, and if I didn't get marks in the 80's at a bare minimum, it was more study time for you, Chloe. So yes, like a lot of kids with Asian parents, I did really well academically and I'm good at study, but thats practice and discipline, it's sure not innate, believe me. LOL.

So I think a big part of the "privilege" discussion is based on false premises. It's not privilege to study and work hard. It is privilege to have access to a good education system and good teachers tho, but it's your responsibility to make the best use of those assets. Take Baltimore, where a recent survey showed NO students at 40% of Baltimore high schools achieved math proficiency. Baltimore has one of the best funded high school systems in the country. Those kids are privileged, but they all failed. In 40% of the high schools. Despite the level of funding provided. I won't get into the quality of the education, regardless of that the outcome is disastrous but a lack of privilege, it ain't. It's a cultural attitude to education. So IMHO, a the discussion around privilege in the USA is just an excuse for a culture of low expectations and lack of discipline and work ethic.

LOL. I guess I'm lucky to have been brought up with that work ethic, discipline, and attitude to education drummed into me. Does that make me priviliged. I don't think so. Does having been born and brought up in the USA make me privileged? Compared to a lot of the rest of the world, it sure does.

 

[Bramblethorn]

So I think a big part of the "privilege" discussion is based on false premises. It's not privilege to study and work hard. It is privilege to have access to a good education system and good teachers tho, but it's your responsibility to make the best use of those assets. Take Baltimore, where a recent survey showed NO students at 40% of Baltimore high schools achieved math proficiency. Baltimore has one of the best funded high school systems in the country. Those kids are privileged, but they all failed. In 40% of the high schools. Despite the level of funding provided. I won't get into the quality of the education, regardless of that the outcome is disastrous but a lack of privilege, it ain't. It's a cultural attitude to education. So IMHO, a the discussion around privilege in the USA is just an excuse for a culture of low expectations and lack of discipline and work ethic.

Some context:

Our student from Reach! Partnership [one of the Baltimore schools with no proficient students] lives a much different life than our student from Walt Whitman [high-performing school]. There is only a 33% chance that this student has stable access to food and housing, meaning this student or their close friends will experience food instability or homelessness before they graduate high school. Students without stable food or housing are called “economically disadvantaged” by the state of Maryland and make up 77% of Reach! Partnership. Compare this to our student at Walt Whitman, where only 2% of students are flagged as economically disadvantaged, meaning 98% of their classmates will never experience homelessness or even government support through WIC, food stamps or other programs.

...

Baltimore City schools have a high cost per student, on par with other metropolitan areas such as New York City. However, this money isn’t equally distributed to schools in the system, and, unlike in New York, a significant portion (34%) of the budget goes to caring for homeless or economically disadvantaged youth through an allotment called the compensatory budget. If we break this funding down at the school level, the $21,606 per student figure that Fox45 relies on tells a different story. To get its number, Fox takes the school system’s entire $1.6 billion budget and divides by the total number of students in the city system. The amount actually spent per student is much lower.

Taking per school allocations, or the money actually delivered to the schools, from the Baltimore City Budget, by my calculation, we find that Reach! Partnership receives about $6.5 million for its 695 students, averaging to $9,549 per student. The schools in the Project Baltimore report have an average funding of $9,923 per student by this allocation. But if we look at the state’s high-performing schools, they have an average of $14,000 per student, with Walt Whitman having $15,077.

Further context: those funding numbers are from after a 16% increase that kicked in just last year, but the results students are getting now will obviously be influenced by their entire school experience up to this point. The school I went to had good facilities because of decades of good funding, not just one year of generosity.

 

[djrip]

So I think a big part of the "privilege" discussion is based on false premises. It's not privilege to study and work hard. It is privilege to have access to a good education system and good teachers tho, but it's your responsibility to make the best use of those assets.

If a good education system and teachers are privilege, so are good parents who push you to excel and model that behavior when raising you. And certainly so are parents who travel the world with you exposing you to far more experiences than other kids.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Geez, you can see privilege play out on TV News every night or on the internet. Of course you have to be a believer.

 

[Dearelliot]

I'm an older guy, a Depression baby born in"34." and never felt that I had much in the way of privilege. Most of my friends like me grew up pretty poor, none of us had our own room, we all lived with hand-me-downs, and joined the service in order to go to college for an education, although I'm sure there were a few who didn't. That was then, and as for now, I suppose the way the first 30 years of my life went, it was pretty well ingrained in my life if there were to be privileges, I would have to work for them.
But I had a home life, and parents that provided a roof, 2 hots and a cot, (not 3) and took me to a doctor once in a while, and didn't beat me, so maybe that was a privilege.

 

[NoTalentHack]

I'm an older guy, a Depression baby born in"34." and never felt that I had much in the way of privilege. Most of my friends like me grew up pretty poor, none of us had our own room, we all lived with hand-me-downs, and joined the service in order to go to college for an education, although I'm sure there were a few who didn't. That was then, and as for now, I suppose the way the first 30 years of my life went, it was pretty well ingrained in my life if there were to be privileges, I would have to work for them.
But I had a home life, and parents that provided a roof, 2 hots and a cot, (not 3) and took me to a doctor once in a while, and didn't beat me, so maybe that was a privilege.

One of the things about privilege is that you often don’t realize you have it. It just seems normal, and it isn’t necessarily all-encompassing.

I’m going to assume you’re a white guy from America. If not, my apologies. But if my assumption is correct, you never had to worry about a loan officer turning you down or raising your rate for being black. Your family wouldn’t get rounded up in the 40s and sent to internment camps for being of Japanese descent. You might have gone to a school on the poorer side of town, but you didn’t have to go to the significantly less-funded black school.

As a man, if you needed to divorce, you didn’t have to figure out how to survive when employers didn’t want to hire you and “take away a job from a man.” You wouldn’t have had to live without a bank account or a loan due to laws preventing women from having them without co-signing from a husband or father.

If you’re straight, you didn’t have to worry about your love being illegal. Cops wouldn’t bust, blackmail, and possibly rape you for fun. You could get a security clearance and serve in the military without lying about your sexual orientation.

Privilege isn’t never having to struggle. It’s about never having to struggle in specific ways. It’s about your existence being “normal” on some level that others’ aren’t.

Privilege is, by design, often invisible to the privileged. It’s baked into society from the power structures that determine laws all the way down to the entertainment available. When was the first time you saw a non-white character on TV that wasn’t a stereotype? How about a non-white superhero in comics? Or a gay character that wasn’t there for comic relief, whose whole existence wasn’t treated as comic relief? Imagine growing up in a world where the only role models in your stories were people that looked nothing like you and that came from backgrounds you never could.

None of this is trying to make you feel bad. Like I said, there’s a huge amount of unremarked-upon effort involved in making privilege invisible. Because if it wasn’t invisible? Most people are moral enough that they’d be enraged at the treatment of their fellow human beings, treatment they were unknowingly, unintentionally complicit in.

 

[sr71plt]

In general in my life, I am in touch with having privilege. By the time I was born, my father was a senior military officer and I could see that we were privileged--but both of my parents had come from rich families that had been laid low (my mother from a divorce that sent her mother and children to live in an abandoned copper mine) and my father (from losing his father at the age of three to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic which also devastated the family business). So, I was close enough to being aware that both parents had to work their way up again from poverty to that I understood the effect of privilege.

To relate this to writing, though, having chosen my own path to work that supported being privileged, I understand how that financially secure status has enabled me time and opportunity to pursue writing without the need to make money from it to live (although I do make a bit of money from it).

 

[jehoram]

If you're white, you rolled an 18 on your Race in America. If you're rich, you rolled an 18 on your Social class. If you're straight, white, Christian, etc. you have a character sheet that should make your DM glare suspiciously at you. All of those high stats mean you're going to do better for no reason other than that the dice favored you at the beginning of the game.

You forgot to add "male" to that list.

I agree with BrightShinyGirl that if you have privilege, it is your responsibility to do your best to level the playing field for everybody else.


"Privilege" literally means "private law"... a condition where rules that apply to others do not apply to you.

Until I was in high school, privilege meant nothing to me, because nearly all my peers were in the same boat as I was, and I was oblivious to many of the nuances of race and gender. I was an army brat, and the on-base schools I went to were integrated and co-ed, so we were free to mix socially. The fact that we were all strangers to each other made it more difficult for cliques to form on racial lines. So I don't remember that race or sex or affluence was much of an issue.

After that, I moved to the American South, where my white, male, and semi-affluent status was in stark contrast to that of many others. And reading Black Like Me, Soul on Ice, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X I began to see the underlying racist patterns that had been there all the time. (My sensitivity to women's issues came somewhat later, with the advent of neo-feminism in the 1970s.)

But if I had been raised in that Southern environment all my life, I would have accepted that privilege as the status quo and would probably have continued to be unconscious of my status.

Nudists like to point out that when people are naked, the usual badges of privilege like uniforms and expensive clothes go away, and people are more likely to be accepted for who they are. Of course, it's obvious what gender people are, and how dark or light their skin or hair is, so those factors are still in play. For women, male privilege shows up in a concern for being hit on, to the point where they feel uncomfortable being alone with a man. That's a problem for which there's no easy cure.

How has it affected my writing? For one thing, erotica is a genre where I can create characters both white and non-white, male or female, rich or poor, and put them in a world where things like privilege aren't a large factor. All that matters is lust. And it's been pointed out to me that there is a sort of sexual parity in my stories, where women are as likely to be calling the shots as men are.

 

[NoTalentHack]

(I think one of the reasons the concept can provoke such hostility is that it is situational; you can't just rank people on a ladder from Most Privileged to Least Privileged and have done with it, and some folk desperately need the world to be governed by simple rules that they don't have to think about.)

I think this is one of the things that’s gone mostly uncommented on until the latest 10 years or so, at least among the non-activist crowd. Intersectionality is big now, and it’s attacked by both entrenched power structures on the right AND narrow-focus activists on the left. A friend of mine calls it “Oppression Olympics,” the “I had it worse than you and therefore my voice needs to be louder now” attitude. Trying to bury intersectionality helps both of those groups, albeit in different ways. The ones who want privilege to go undiscussed entirely benefit in obvious ways, While the sort of… grifters may be painting with too broad a brush, but the people in an underprivileged groups who gain power within that group by acting in a vocal, obvious leadership capacity; those folks are weakened in the short term by admitting, “okay, they have it rough, too,” because playing activism as a zero-sum game can have results if you’re willing to be vicious enough with it.

That actually brings me to another interesting point: privilege isn’t all or nothing. It’s possible to be part of a group that’s overall privileged and still have aspects of being part of that group tend towards negative outcomes in certain respects. But if you are part of the overall-privileged group, you’re unlikely to be looked kindly upon by other activists in the same space, for very Oppression Olympics-style reasons, to the point where they’ll expend significant effort to tell you why your issues aren’t actually a problem at all.

One example I’m thinking of is the umbrella “men’s rights” issues. Now, to be clear, a lot of those MRS guys are douchenozzles, but there really ARE places where outcomes are poorer for men than women. Some of it can be explained by pointing out that it’s a knock-on effect of sexism (I’m thinking things like dads being less likely to get custody, regardless of pre-divorce family dynamics, which can be explained by the received prejudice of “children should be raised by women”), but that still doesn’t fix the problem, and the people pointing it out are often made to feel unwelcome in activist spaces as a result. Even bringing it up can make you the enemy.

 

[KeithD]

In general in my life, I am in touch with having privilege. By the time I was born, my father was a senior military officer and I could see that we were privileged--but both of my parents had come from rich families that had been laid low (my mother from a divorce that sent her mother and children to live in an abandoned copper mine) and my father (from losing his father at the age of three to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic which also devastated the family business). So, I was close enough to being aware that both parents had to work their way up again from poverty to that I understood the effect of privilege.

To relate this to writing, though, having chosen my own path to work that supported being privileged, I understand how that financially secure status has enabled me time and opportunity to pursue writing without the need to make money from it to live (although I do make a bit of money from it).

Oops, sorry. This post is really by me, keithD. Sr71plt is me too, but I try not to post to the board under that account. I was checking sr71plt's story file and lost track of what account I was in when I posted this.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't know that you can compare your hardships in life to those who were raised in the inner city at the same time. Just saying there are degrees of underprivileged just as their are of privilege.

I'm an older guy, a Depression baby born in"34." and never felt that I had much in the way of privilege. Most of my friends like me grew up pretty poor, none of us had our own room, we all lived with hand-me-downs, and joined the service in order to go to college for an education, although I'm sure there were a few who didn't. That was then, and as for now, I suppose the way the first 30 years of my life went, it was pretty well ingrained in my life if there were to be privileges, I would have to work for them.
But I had a home life, and parents that provided a roof, 2 hots and a cot, (not 3) and took me to a doctor once in a while, and didn't beat me, so maybe that was a privilege.