Twelfth Blog

If you have been paying attention to current discussion of discrimination in the modern United States, the notion of privilege should not be alien to you. Privilege, in this context, refers to special advantages that certain social demographics have over each other. And you can’t deny that it exists – if you are white, you are not as likely to be a victim of police abuse as a black person is; if you are male, you are not as likely to be a victim of sexual assault as a female is; if you are rich, well, you’re rich.

Some people, particularly in arguably privileged demographics, are nevertheless gung ho on denying this, but why so? Sometimes it is simply due to plain old bigotry. Other times though it can be the result of an innocent ignorance – if you have a stable upbringing and do not follow current events or else get your information from dishonest sources, you may simply not be aware of ongoing injustice in this country and may feel skeptical to hear people speak otherwise.  More often, though, this denial is rooted in stinginess – the concept of privilege is really not hard to understand, and any well-informed citizen can see the evidence for it. Plenty of people would rather not acknowledge it so they would not feel obligated to apply effort required to remedy widespread social injustice. Frequently, however, people, out of fear or fury, will deny the existence of privilege, associating it with the idea that they are to blame for the injustice. This mistrust often arises from misinformation and misunderstanding of the concept, but it is not completely unjustified, as several of the people who push for the awareness of privilege are instigating it themselves.

A few weeks ago, US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders stated that “when you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto,” or to be poor, or to suffer police abuse. Never mind that white people can suffer poverty and police abuse, and plenty of them do – they just aren’t as likely to do so as black people are. It is important to spread awareness to certain groups that other ones are more likely to have it bad, but to tell them that they cannot have it bad at all is not how one gets them to listen. Nonetheless, there are even louder, more extreme voices that will go as far as to blame the privileged for injustice, or else hold them to higher standards by arguing that only they can cause it (not a far cry from the White Man’s Burden of the 19^th century). In the newly rising social democratic left under Bernie Sanders, the rich are being blamed for poverty – 1% has become a political slur. (Not to say this country has not suffered under abuse by wealthy elites, but being wealthy does not make one guilty of that abuse.) White people are all blamed for racism. Men are all blamed for rape. (Not to say that all social justice activists use this rhetoric – many do not – but the ones who do have a sizeable voice.)

This discussion culminated in its worst point when the word privilege earned a negative connotation – privilege is now being evoked, such as in the case of affirmative action, to obligate people to “pay reparations” for injustice. One may defend this by arguing that doing so is the only way one can remedy the effects of injustice – this idea, however, is ultimately poisonous. Let us not forget that being healthy, educated, academically or intellectually gifted, or otherwise successful are privileges: and these are probably the factors on which affirmative action defeated its own purpose – helping discriminated minorities – by discriminating against Asians. You might perceive this as benign, but do not fool yourself as to how far this mentality can go – the deadliest genocides and mass murders in the 20^th centuries targeted the privileged. The Jewish people, one of the most successful ethnic groups in the world, earned the envy of their German neighbors until the Nazi Party seized power; the Rwandan genocide targeted the Tutsi people, who made up the country’s historical wealthy, ruling class; and the massacres carried out by Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot targeted the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia.

In the end, the problem is not that certain people have privilege, but that certain people are deprived of it.