AN ONION PIECE from 2014, “White Male Privilege Squandered on Job at Best Buy,” seems, from the headline, like it could go either way.1 Is it hilarious that a man who had everything in his favor ended up where he did? Or is the joke that we’re now calling Best Buy employees—well, ones with certain, altogether common demographic traits—“privileged”? The item’s brilliance lies in the fact that this ambiguity is maintained through to the end: “At press time, the man born into the world’s most affluent and privileged socioeconomic group was spending his 15-minute break silently consuming a sleeve of Donettes purchased out of a vending machine.” If we read it as critical of the concept—and, perhaps wishfully, I do—it would seem that class might be the unstated element, and the post is a takedown of an expression—“white male privilege”—that evokes a person who has still other unearned advantages. Yet whatever a white man’s reasons for ending up in a job like that (and of course, plenty do, including some with college degrees and from relatively well-off backgrounds, especially post-2008), at a certain point, where someone has landed tells you more about how “privileged” they are than where a likely inaccurate calculation of their unearned advantages would place them. (Does intelligence count? Does drive?) Privilege theory would have it that Best Buy dude is privileged. Common sense might offer a different interpretation.
The question rarely asked about “privilege,” which is also really the only one worth asking, goes as follows: Has it helped? Has the introduction of this framework brought about a more just society?
It’s only once the framework gets examined from that angle that the flaws become self-evident. The privilege approach is, practically speaking, about raising awareness of the minutiae of injustice. While gaps remain, huge swaths of awareness have certainly been raised. And? Let’s set aside (briefly) the question of whether we’d think this would lead anywhere. Has it done so?
Jia Tolentino gets at the flaws of the awareness fixation in a brilliant December 2015 Jezebel post about the relationship between “offense” and online journalism:
Contemporary life means being hyper-aware and worse off than ever; we are increasingly shut out of the mechanisms of representational democracy and simultaneously being forced to know more and more and more. We know many rape kits are backlogged in all the big cities, how many black teenagers have been shot by the police this year, how shamelessly the NRA pulls its levers, how corporate campaign finance ensures that the wealth gap is here to stay. And we can’t change any of it—or at the very least, not very easily, not when it’s so much easier to sit around and get very precisely insightful online.2
Tolentino’s point was especially striking given the context. Left- and youth-leaning media generally, and Jezebel especially, has devoted itself to awareness-raising and witty-but-sensitive online observations for years. What does it say that members of the media are themselves (ourselves) tiring of this? We have, in the one corner, journalists producing intricate articles parsing exactly what was the teensiest bit racist or sexist in the (out-of-context) speech of whichever actress or male scientist, and, in the other, fairly blatant, out-there online abuse getting directed at (among others) these same journalists. It can seem—whether or not there’s any truth to this impression—that there are some forest-for-the-trees issues at play. The blame lies not just with the privilege framework in the abstract, but also with a media landscape that—for reasons that have as much to do with what readers want as with production costs—favors the churning out of “privilege” content (celebrity gaffes, navel-gazing from the ordinary-but-privileged) over, say, war reporting. (If the two pay the same, which is to say, nothing or not much…?3)
Honing in on YPIS specifically, Berkeley senior Efe Atli offers the following damning critique, in a Daily Cal op-ed (“Checking privilege serves to reinforce it”) from January 2016:
The number[s] don’t lie. Three decades of checking privilege directly correlate with an astronomical rise in income inequality. The more inequality we have, the more privilege gets checked by more privileged people, and the more the privileged feel pleasure (and power) in being aware of their privilege and so, grow in power.4
That seems about right, although it hasn’t been quite “Three decades of checking privilege”—more like, at the time of Atli’s writing, eight years. Still, the culture was already neck-deep in privilege awareness when the 2016 all-white Oscars lineup rolled around. The term “microaggression” had entered the lexicon when Donald Trump started winning primaries with a platform based almost exclusively on hurling the macro variety. It goes without saying that privilege awareness didn’t bring about a revolution on the ground. (While quite prepared to call out Hillary Clinton for bourgeois feminism, Bernie Sanders’s supporters tend to lean anti-“privilege,” and to view Clinton as the embodiment of style-over-substance liberalism.) Yet even when it comes to pop culture, to the more superficial concerns, even there, not much has changed since the early 2000s, at least not for the better.
There’s a limit, though, to what we can conclude from the apparent inefficacy of the “privilege” approach. Is leftist infighting (and I’m including hyperbolic criticism coming from the center left) distracting progressives from the real issues? Probably, if not necessarily in terms of individual commitment, then at least as far as media coverage is concerned. And can we root Trump’s popularity (especially because, as journalist Matt Taibbi has written, so much of it is private popularity5) in widespread fears of saying the wrong thing on social media and getting fired? Here’s a guy whose thing is saying outrageous things publicly—maybe that’s only appealing in a climate where saying a slightly wrong thing (or a thing that was intentionally misinterpreted as offensive, to get clicks) is such a social crime?6
Maybe. Or maybe not—there was plenty of outspoken racism, sexism, and xenophobia before the privilege turn. The causation case is there, but is tougher to demonstrate than—as Atli subtly mentions—the correlation one. Yet correlation alone should be reason enough for concern. Even setting aside the many ways “privilege” seems to have backfired, we have to consider its failure to bring about a kinder society, let alone a more just one. If “privilege” hasn’t worked—and it hasn’t—then it’s time to stop assuming that people who reject the framework necessarily do so for defensive or reactionary reasons. It’s time, more to the point, to step away from the question of individual motivation altogether, and to approach questions of injustice from more productive angles.
I’ve never quite sorted out by what mechanism awareness of privilege is meant to inspire a desire to shed oneself of it. Back in the good old days, when elites knew exactly who they were, were they eager to redistribute their wealth? No—if you’ll excuse my historical oversimplification—they were not. While there’s certainly something irritating about the elites of today who mistakenly think they’re scrappy or “normal,” what happens differently when unearned advantage is out in the open? Children of politicians are presumably aware of the unearned advantages that their name-recognition inspires, yet Bushes and Kennedys (not to mention Windsors!) don’t seem too worried about it, and even get to claim that actually, it was harder for them, what with all the expectations. What’s to make the average schmo turn down a job gotten through connections? Where’s the gorgeous person who, however much he or she disapproves of beauty standards in the abstract, would like to be uglier, or for society to make no distinctions on the basis of appearance?
The privilege framework promises a neat, as-the-world-should-be relationship between background and character, which results in the surely-you’ve-never framing of so many privilege accusations. For example, rather than tell someone that he’s being an asshole to the waitress, you have to make a pronouncement about how he’s surely never worked in food service. It is an interesting way the world might work, but I’ve seen little evidence, out in the world, that it does. And there’s research backing this up: Northeastern University psychology professor David DeSteno presented his and some other studies in The New York Times, concluding, “Living through hardship doesn’t either warm hearts or harden them; it does both.”7 Research, in this case, lines up with common sense: Life experience has some impact on empathy, but not a direct and simple one. It’s not always—as the privilege framework would have it—that insensitivity stems from a lack of personal experience with things that don’t involve falling ass-backward into good luck.
“Privilege” is best understood not as a real trait, but as a construction. Anyone can be “privileged” if it suits someone else’s argument. There’s no wealth or income threshold for “privileged.” It doesn’t require membership in the One Percent, or even the top 50 percent. And anyone can, with proper rhetorical flourish, play the role of the implicitly underprivileged. To call out another person’s white privilege, you yourself can be white. And to call out class privilege, you don’t need to demonstrate that you yourself aren’t a J.Crew-wearing Whole Foods shopper. The trick is simply to announce that this other person is those things, and to do so in a tone that suggests that you go around in a potato sack and subsist on lentils (or better yet—because lentils suggest cultural capital—McDonald’s). YPIS is about constructing an underdog stance. It’s about making as if you’re craning your neck to look (and punch) up, regardless of where you’re actually situated.
“Privileged” is part of a family of terms used for euphemistically describing the not-destitute (or the “middle class,” or—for a double whammy of socialism and Francophilia—the “bourgeoisie”). Like the others, “privileged” is ambiguous and can refer to everyone from unambiguous elites to people who simply have some advantages—a college diploma, say, or a childhood spent in a two-parent household. However, “middle class” and “bourgeois” allow, at least rhetorically, for the existence of an upper class, an aristocracy. They’re not just word-variance synonyms for “rich”; whereas there’s nothing above privilege, no implied higher rung. Referring to everyone who isn’t desperately poor as “privileged” may be inaccurate as well as off-putting. Yet it’s a shortcut to always seeming self-aware.
From its inception, proponents of the privilege framework have warned against leaving it at that. Awareness, they remind in unison, isn’t enough. Critics of the framework, who insist that it’s all talk and no action, aren’t always being fair to proponents, who do—at least if we’re talking about scholars and activists, and not fourteen-year-olds on Tumblr—acknowledge this. Yet it’s never entirely clear, not merely how progress would follow from privilege awareness, but why it would, and, moreover, why the reverse wouldn’t be the case. Why, precisely, would rendering all hierarchies transparent lead to these hierarchies’ disappearance? Why, indeed, wouldn’t it just lead to those at the bottom of each despairing, while encouraging those at the top to view their unearned advantages as that much more precious? This implicit, but implausible, step after the awareness epiphany is, at its essence, my issue with “privilege.” Constantly reminding everyone of where they fall … why would such candor lead to empathy? Why wouldn’t a society where systemic injustices are front and center in everyone’s mind at all times only serve make interactions between men and women, blacks and whites, rich and poor, that much more fraught, inhibiting the development of everyday social and professional bonds?
THE CRUELTY OF “PRIVILEGE”
BUILT INTO “PRIVILEGE” is the idea that the normal state of affairs is for things to be going terribly. This assumption emerged as a necessary corrective to the idea that it’s “normal” to be rich, white, able-bodied, and so forth, but has wound up—as tends to happen with “privilege”—as overcorrection. It can seem as if the desired goal is for everyone to be oppressed, rather than for all to be free from oppression. Is it a problem that white killers are captured alive by police? That white drug addicts appear in the media as real people with a medical condition? Or is the problem that black killers and drug addicts, respectively, don’t get that treatment? It seems right to use “privilege” if your point is that some people do indeed have it too easy. That is, after all, what “privilege” implies, which is why it’s such an odd fit for cases where the point being made is that the world is just for some and unjust for others. Calling justice “privilege” is certainly a way of highlighting that not all experience it. The problem is that it also implies that no one should.
The biggest glitch in the privilege framework is the it-could-be-worse component. Whether we’re talking about progressives casting doubt on “bourgeois feminism” or conservatives wondering what black Princeton students could possibly have to complain about, this supposedly hypersensitive way of looking at the world somehow manages to be incredibly dismissive of any plight that isn’t quite as bad as another.
As anyone with a Facebook account and some earnest acquaintances has probably noticed, “privilege” has turned every conversation about tragedy into one about how other tragedies are worse. You know the routine. One person posts something sad, and another responds that actually, something else is much sadder, and so it goes until most of the thread participants have retreated to cat-photo Instagram. Yet where this really took off was in the aftermath of the deadly November 2015 Paris attacks. Sure, those were sad, but isn’t it even sadder that white tragedies (involving the deaths of plenty of nonwhite people, too), get more attention than others? Isn’t that the real story, and shouldn’t your friends with those Eiffel Tower photos feel bad?
What played out on my social-media accounts (that is, the wave of “here’s a photo of me on vacation in Paris,” followed by “what about Beirut???”) was, it soon emerged, representative of something greater. On Twitter, Guardian writer Jamiles Lartey offered a spot-on rebuttal to the “tragedy hipsters” who responded by shaming those who’d posted messages of grief about the attacks.8 Shaming them, that is, for not caring enough about other, more obscure (if still reported-on) global tragedies, particularly another (less lethal) ISIS attack that occurred around the same time in Beirut. I’d reacted to that social-media tendency toward dismissal of Paris grief along about the same lines as Lartey, asking that those grieving (because yes, that’s what some of those Paris posts were about) be given a moment to do so before getting chastised for implicit racism.
Once the “What abouts?” started, it was tough to question them without seeming defensive and—horrors—lacking in awareness. However, Lartey’s inclusion of caveats, as well as a privilege disclaimer (“Obviously there are salient asymmetries in power and privilege which govern this response, but it nonetheless feels dismissive & insensitive”), helped his case, as did his after-the-fact point about how it’s not one-upmanship if you’re Lebanese and posting about Beirut. It also may have helped that Lartey is black, left leaning, and therefore not easy to dismiss as being motivated by defensive pro-white-people impulses. Through a combination of his arguments and his place in the culture, he got the point across: “We (the left),” he wrote, “need to be cautious that the reparative weighting of the suffering of marginalized people doesn’t cross into minimization.”
Yet the privilege lens makes such “minimization” inevitable. Every situation gets instantaneously analyzed in terms of privilege. To mention any form of suffering that doesn’t result from a clear-cut lack of privilege is to come across as bratty, oblivious, first-world-problems-ish. Fine, if the problem is, say, that it’s just so hard to decide between Ibiza and Saint-Tropez for your next vacation, but people who are privileged—privileged on paper, privileged along one or more axes—do deal with personal tragedies that are anything but frivolous. A defender of “privilege” might say that I’m missing the point—that of course you could be privileged and unlucky (for example, see Parul Sehgal’s New York Times article on that time when Joan Didion got YPISed for a book about her daughter’s very untimely death9). And that’s where “privilege” really loses me. It’s a nifty rhetorical point—systemic injustice doesn’t map up with individual circumstances, and that people who don’t get privilege don’t get this—but in the world of actual people, flagging the privilege of those dealing with something dreadful is a derailing of the cruelest sort.
It’s bad enough that “privilege” has brought about pseudoconcepts like “Asian privilege,” “female privilege,” and so forth. In a category all of its own, though, we’d have to put something like “rape privilege.” What’s that, you might wonder? Well, it depends who’s YPISing. There was the time when conservative commentator George Will wrote, in reference to one claim of sexual assault, that US colleges “make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges,” and claimed that the “privileges” of victimhood extended to female college students’ accusations of rape. How was it that he described college students, again? Oh, that’s right: as “especially privileged young adults.”10
Although an even better example might be the headline given to a New York Times op-ed by public-affairs professor Callie Marie Rennison: “Privilege, Among Rape Victims.”11 The headline belied what Rennison was saying:
Women at the margins are the ones who bear the brunt of the harshest realities, including sexual violence, and they do so with the least resources. Am I saying that we should ignore sexual violence against the wealthy and educated? Of course not. Nor is it wrong to pay special attention to college-age women: The one risk factor that remains consistent whether women are advantaged or disadvantaged is age, and women ages 16 to 20 are sexually victimized at the highest rates.
That sounds reasonable. Yet “Privilege, Among Rape Victims” posits a privileged rape-victim caste, or, worse, some sort of epidemic of “privilege” among rape victims, with some sexual-assault survivors lording it (whatever “it” might be, in this context) over the rest. Social disparities, racial disparities, and more will obviously extend even to categories like “rape victim.” But there’s something tasteless and vile, really, about using “privilege” to describe that situation.
For me, the biggest indictment of “privilege” is the frequency with which it’s used to refer to some of life’s least fortunate. Actually, “life’s least fortunate” doesn’t quite cover it; the dead can, as we shall soon see, be YPISed. It might seem that there’d be some sort of “life privilege” that trumps all other forms. Not so! In 2012, Jezebel published a post12 by Katie J.M. Baker called “How to Feel When an Impossibly Promising 22-Year-Old Passes Away,” in reference to Marina Keegan. How promising was Keegan? “She was a 22-year-old recent Yale graduate about to start a job as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker in a few weeks—before then, her plan was to revise the musical she had written, set to run at the New York International Fringe Festival later this summer.” And! “Keegan had already contributed to NPR and the New York Times.” And! “She was also president of the Yale College Democrats and involved with Occupy Wall Street.” Consider that the past tense here was not because Keegan had graduated, but because she had died in a car crash. Dead is dead, one might think. Since that Jezebel post, Keegan became a New York Times bestselling author. Posthumously.13
Yet Baker (or whoever wrote her headline) had committed the crucial sin of telling the Jezebel readership “how to feel.” What if you aren’t particularly sad that this young woman has died, hmm? Some commenters were not sad, thank you very much, and resented being told that they should be.
The comment thread devolved into a discussion of “privilege”: how much of the stuff Keegan had (well, had had), and whether it’s really a good idea to be talking about how sad it is that a twenty-two-year-old died when there are other, sadder situations, like the existence of living twenty-two-year-olds who don’t have jobs at The New Yorker. A contingent in the comments took a fair point—the media values some lives more than others—and chose a wildly inappropriate context for making it. Yet that was the mood of the moment, of the threads on that site and of progressive online media more generally. Where there was privilege, it had to be checked. The possibility that some truth greater than “privilege” might exist—that the story might not be about privilege—was simply not fathomable. So off the commenters went:
[F]or every Keegan who dies too young there is a POC from a poor background who worked just as hard under worse circumstances with extra pressures. So while I don’t think we need to undermine Keegan’s work, there is nothing wrong with asking why we are so drawn to her accomplishments that are markers of privilege, and not others.14
There is something wrong with checking the privilege of a specific person who is dead. The time to parse whether “Yale” and “The New Yorker” fall more into the unearned-advantages category than the achievement category has passed once the person has. The (fictional) “POC” who had it worse than Keegan (and, apart from the slight, if evocative, biographical sketch, with little knowledge of how easy, exactly, she had it) is nevertheless alive. Doesn’t a person—yes, even one of color!—who’s still with us have more unearned advantages than someone who’s not? In the land of YPIS, categories must be analyzed according to the rigid, sanctimonious framework. And the framework has no place for the category of “dead.”
And on it went:
She was young, wealthy, talented, well educated, and white. She was given more chances than most people ever get, and while my heart is saddened by the fact that she could potentially have made good contributions to the world, I can’t help but feel our time would not be best spent mourning what could have been but rather working to help those with a fraction of her gifts reach THEIR potential.15
And these comments—the ones that admitted that a twenty-two-year-old dying is awful—were among the more reasonable. Some were far more cold: “She’s White, pretty, and a graduate from an Ivy League college. That’s enough to get coverage for something that happens to millions (you know, death) on Earth everyday.”16
It’s hard to know, here, where to start. The commenter appears to think that dying at twenty-two is the most normal thing in the world outside of rarified circles. Why take that tack? Tellingly, some of these commenters use the present tense, as if privilege were a force so strong as to extend beyond the grave.
Another, however, reached peak YPIS:
Her life is of value, simply because she lived it, but also because she tried to leave her mark on the world. But her life is not of more value because she bears certain markers of privilege, and the fact that her death has received so much attention when younger and less privileged men and women of color are largely ignored in the media, and often subjected to character assassination even when they do manage to garner such attention, a far more savage defamation than questioning the priorities of the media in covering the story in the first place, is not unworthy of note.17
So far, about the same as the others. Then, here it comes:
And for the record, the ability to dismiss privilege (putting the word in all caps doesn’t lessen its salience, but it certainly conveys your contempt) as intangible and (cough) imaginary tells a lot about the position from which you are castigating others. Must be a nice view from up there above the fray.
This comment is the most YPIS of all, because it’s no longer just the dead girl who’s privileged, but anyone who’s spoken out against YPISing a young woman who is, after all, dead.
What was going on, exactly? Were these commenters so overcome with righteous concern for the alive-but-oppressed that they simply had to say something? Or was the response—or some part of it, at any rate—jealousy? It’s not socially acceptable to complain that a dead girl has all the luck, so maybe that discomfort was what was being channeled? The psychology here is, of course, unknowable. However, I’d put my money on a third possibility. It had, in that climate, simply become so ingrained that YPIS is the only possible response that commenters YPISed the dead young woman almost reflexively. The story seemed as if it fit a Missing White Girl–type narrative, so that’s the narrative these commenters went with.18 In doing so, they backed themselves into a corner of cruelty and absurdity.
Some other Jezebel commenters, thank goodness, were at hand in the thread to point out the problem with a “privilege” take in this context:
“Bollocks to privilege,” wrote one, adding, “When someone dies before their time it’s a tragedy, colour/race/religion/wealth be damned.”19
Regular Jezebel commenter LaComtesse summarized the mini-controversy quite well:
What I got from this article: A promising young woman, who had already contributed her young, female voice to a lot of issues that Jezebel readers care about has died. This is understandably very sad. What I got from these comments: I am not allowed to be touched by anyone’s death because death is not a unique experience. I am particularly not allowed to be touched by the death of someone who had even a teeny bit of that dreaded P-word: privilege.20
Another commenter, though, got straight to the point: “God, I hope I never read the word, ‘privilege’ ever again.”21
That is my sentiment as well. The Keegan thread was the moment it crystallized for me that YPIS is nothing short of a disaster.22 What’s changed in my view of YPIS, since 2012, is that “privilege” itself harms more than it helps. Its role as an aide in online bullying exceeds its utility as a theoretical framework. The underlying (and legitimate) point the YPIS-hurlers ostensibly cared about—injustices in media coverage—got damaged in the process.
The “privilege” framing, with its focus on unearned advantage rather than unjust disadvantage, doesn’t fit with situations where even the “privileged” person is still quite screwed. It’s true and tragic that the typical American woman lacks Angelina Jolie’s access to medical care.23 Yet “privilege” suggests there’s something spa-like about the preventative removal of potentially cancerous body parts.24 There isn’t, even under the “best” of circumstances. And yes, one probably could attribute some of the disproportionate attention the Paris attacks received to racism and xenophobia. But is watching your city get attacked by ISIS ever “privilege”? Even if people worldwide are sending messages of support? That a situation is terrible but could be even worse doesn’t mean that it makes sense to speak of it as a good situation. Much as “white privilege” serves to confuse and to summon defensiveness in white people who aren’t otherwise privileged, so it goes with “privilege” in the context of tragedy. It cuts against common sense—but more importantly, basic decency—to classify these types of situations in this way.
All of which brings us back to a main flaw of “surely you’ve never” approach to deciding who has the authority to speak about which topics. From the outside, it’s not clear who’s been dealt which hand. A framework centered on “grit,” and on obstacles overcome, requires obstacles to be out in the open. I suppose there’s a “privilege” of sorts in having only invisible obstacles, but it doesn’t take long to think of individual cases where an invisible challenge would be greater than a visible one.
Progressive writer Matt Bruenig has a great blog post25 on what he calls “identitarian deference” (ID)—that is, the tendency, on the left, to declare the person without a given form of privilege the winner of any argument related to that identity group—and its implicit sharing requirement:
ID works the most smoothly for identities that are readily apparent. Most of the time, you can tell what someone’s gender and race is just by looking at them. But when the identity is less apparent, or indeed totally invisible, the only way to establish yourself as belonging to a particular identity is by revealing all sorts of private details about your life.26
This winds up placing anyone with obstacles, but not quite the right ones, in a bind. The dangers of sharing are generally going to be greater than the ones in keeping quiet. Share, and you reveal idiosyncratic challenges that make you seem like what would be called, in college-admissions lingo, a “liability.” Refuse to share, though, and you’ve tacitly nodded along to the world’s assessment of you as someone who’s had it easy. Suffering that falls through the cracks of the privilege framework gets dismissed. I’m thinking of a line from a satirical but not especially clever Medium post, “It’s Not Easy Being a White, Heterosexual Male”: “You’ve got problems with the system? Tell me about it. I have to stand in line at the DMV, too, you know.”27 But that post also recalls the proverbial white Best Buy employee. The privilege framework doesn’t know where to place the person who should, going by the crudest identity rubric, be at the top of life’s hierarchy, but for whatever reason hasn’t wound up there.
That brushing-off is its own insult, as one sees in a post by another white male progressive writer, Freddie deBoer, responding to an accusation he’d fielded on Twitter from someone insinuating that he had never faced “trauma.”28 Not content to play the role of privileged-by-assumption, deBoer goes on to tell the story of his own tragic childhood, then writes, “Understand: I have never experienced trauma, according to the theories of the time. Not in the way that politics recognizes. Not in a way that they regard as legitimate.”
Yes, one could point out that tragedy also strikes people who aren’t white men. One could even go further and note that we have, historically, heard a disproportionate amount, in literature and media, about the travails (including really serious ones) of people who happen to be white and male. Yet what does that add? Who’s helped? Privilege ought to be about all-things-equal advantage. All things, however, are not equal. Some people who fit every last privilege-checklist category wind up facing tremendously bad luck. Enough so that they’re actually worse off than a great many people who lack their systemic privileges. However technically true it may be that A is more privileged than B, if A nevertheless has it worse on the whole, why are we drumming on about A’s privilege in the first place? Why not have that all-things-equal conversation, but leave A out of it? The cruelty of a framework that treats certain types of suffering as, in effect, logically impossible exceeds any social-justice benefits (doubtful at best) that come from privilege-checking people while they’re down. Or dead.
FROM TREND TO ZEITGEIST
IN 2007, THE New York Times (specifically, food writer Melissa Clark) discovered kale salad. “Tuscan kale does not have to be cooked to be edible,” read the caption, exhibiting such blissful ignorance of the near-decade of raw-kale veneration that would follow.29 All along, though, we’ve known, or rather, we should have known, that kale would have its moment on menus and in lifestyle pagers, only to join the lineup of yuppie clichés gone by. When a trend is at its height, it can have a way of feeling eternal.
There were times, while writing this book, that I wondered if what I was offering was a microhistory of that time when everyone was caught up with “privilege,” either from the vantage point of a new micro-era, one with its own preoccupations, or, at the very least, from the perspective of someone who understands that the moment will pass. As of 2016, I think there’s more to it. I can’t predict whether “privilege” will be with us forever; my inclination is to doubt that any concept possibly could. Yet it’s become clear that “privilege” isn’t a blip. Yes, certain privilege motifs, particular rhetorical turns of phrase, have already become passé. The “X Shows Y’s Privilege” think-piece template, while surprisingly persistent,30 sounds stale.
However, that moving on hasn’t happened. In February 2016, a New York magazine piece on the concept of “white privilege” went viral.31 The submission page of Pacific Standard magazine includes an explicit awareness requirement. Under “What we’re not looking for,” they’ve included, “Pitches that do not consider or reflect upon anything outside the affluent white, male experience.”32 This item is, in effect, inviting rich white men to pitch I’ve-examined-my-privilege essays. (These men aren’t going to not pitch.) Or, worse, to pitch thoughtful articles that go beyond their personal experience, but that must, because of privilege, include digressions where their privileged white selves come under the microscope. There’s also a hint of the patronizing toward writers who aren’t rich white men, as if anything they’d produce (except, I suppose, a hagiography of a rich white guy) would arrive with a certain level of thoughtfulness.
It’s perhaps not so surprising that “privilege” lives on, because it’s more than a buzzword. More, even, than a theoretical framework. It’s a generally accepted worldview. The “clear and executable moral theory” David Frum attributes to cartoonist Garry Trudeau—“1. Identify the bearer of privilege. 2. Hold the privilege-bearer responsible.”33—remains the lens through which everyone interprets everything, and I exaggerate only slightly.
The temptations of YPIS are great. So great that the accusation’s detractors on the left wind up making them. Once it’s your cause on the line, your pet issue, it’s easy to drum up a privilege argument that makes your case.
The best case for “privilege” is a circular one: It’s the concept that’s used these days to address injustice, so you can’t, practically speaking, announce that it’s counterproductive and leave it at that. As long as journalists, activists, and scholars who are otherwise doing good work opt for “privilege,” it’s clumsy as well as dismissive, in that moment, to hold forth on why you’re not a fan of the term. Insofar as “privilege” is used as a form of protest, as a way for people in marginalized groups to express grievances (whether or not those in nonmarginalized groups are convinced that the grievances “count”), it is best to just set aside the fact that your interlocutor has used “privilege” and to listen. Anything else can rightly be called derailing.
Yet the point I’ve just made is a tepid defense of the framework at best. That there are moments when questioning the efficacy of “privilege” would be inappropriate doesn’t mean the term is effective. Yes, “privilege” refers to various important phenomena—but is it important (or necessary, or helpful) to use “privilege” to speak of them? And yes, sanctimoniousness is better than rabid bigotry, but it hardly follows that we can’t do better than that. The concept’s well-intentioned users are vastly overshadowed, if not in number than in influence, by a sea of narcissistic self-righteousness and privilege denial. In principle, having some sort of basic step that everyone agrees to, and that’s the starting point for all of us finding ways to make the world a better place, has a certain idealistic appeal. In practice, “privilege” just seems to breed resentment. Those accused of certain specific types of “privilege” hear this word, “privilege,” that would seem to imply that they’ve had it easy, which is, in effect, an invitation for them to tell you exactly how far that is from the mark. A 2015 study showed that white people prompted to ponder “white privilege” wind up exaggerating their own disadvantages in other areas.34 Is this defensiveness evidence that white people should be further educated in their privilege, or maybe that an entirely different angle is needed? Do we really need more workshops where white people tell other white people to acknowledge their privilege, when such endeavors result so predictably in resistance?35 So it goes, too, with other forms of privilege. Tell a man he has “male privilege.” Tends to go well. And the swapping out of “rich” for “privileged” as a way of discussing wealth is the quickest way to get your rich interlocutor to summon the one biographical detail that makes him seem plausibly scrappy, to have you know that he and his parents summered in one of the lesser Hamptons.
That “privilege” so reliably prompts the accused to list his or her disadvantages can, I suppose, be interpreted as an aha of sorts in favor of privilege as a concept. It’s just that powerful! However, it’s also clear evidence that this approach tends to accomplish the precise opposite of what it’s meant to do. If the idea is to inspire people to reveal and then renounce their advantages, it fails, mainly because the framework is confusing. And if the idea is to promote engagement, to bring allies onboard, and so on? There, too, it’s a dubious proposition. YPIS from haves reads as sanctimony. And YPIS from have-nots tends to inspire, at best, self-flagellation and other forms of navel-gazing. At best, the privileged recipient of a well-earned YPIS becomes that much more preoccupied with his or her own psyche. Rather than looking outward, he or she will try to sort out (and it won’t always be self-evident!) how he or she has inadvertently offended (and admitting to ignorance will be interpreted as willful disregard). A widespread increase in self-awareness sounds like a good thing. Yet the privilege framework has made self-awareness—or, more accurately, self-presentation—at the center of all struggles, of all conversations. It produces—daily, with every Twitter/think-piece controversy—winners and losers, the individuals who get it and those who do not.
BEYOND “PRIVILEGE”
THIS BOOK IS an argument against using the concept of privilege to understand and fight against injustice. Still, in the course of writing, I’ve often been struck by how much my sympathies lie with many of the people who use the term, and how off-putting I find so many of the arguments floating around against it. What I don’t want this book to be is a contrarian anti-“privilege” take, one amounting to a mockery of those who use a particular term. It’s all too easy to take ideas for granted once they’ve taken root, and to forget what life was like earlier. In many cases (not all), the privilege turn is more a matter of overshooting the mark than fully getting things wrong. Awareness overload is an overreaction to the apathy that preceded it.
But if not “privilege,” then what? To suggest an alternate term, though, is to presume that the only problem with “privilege” is the word itself. If you’re wondering what to hurl instead of a YPIS, my advice would be to simply refrain from hurling, period. Telling someone that his or her cluelessness is showing isn’t any real improvement. While individuals’ naïveté may betray larger societal injustices, unsolicited education in the form of a call-out isn’t productive, whether the word “privilege” is used or not.
That said, shouldn’t there be some way of describing and addressing inequalities of all kinds? Would chucking the “privilege” framework mean a return to an overly simplistic view of life’s unfairness? Would it mean backtracking to the bad old days, when things like the Puerto Rican Day Parade Seinfeld episode could happen? Or has overt bigotry actually decreased following the “privilege” turn in pop culture?
If we do move away from “privilege,” there are ways to keep the good and lose the bad. Some suggestions follow:
■ Less awareness. Or, rather, we should hang onto awareness in the numbers sense. By all means, be aware if your company is favoring white men, or if the university you’re in charge of is only admitting billionaires’ kids. Be aware if you’re a reporter and your news publication is featuring only elites and their travails. Be aware, as a person—as a citizen, if you prefer—of what’s going on in the world, in your locale. However, that’s a different, and fully external, sort of awareness. It’s not about looking into our own navels and contemplating why we may act in ways that support discrimination. Indeed, given that members of marginalized groups often internalize bigotry against them, the whole surely-you-think-X-because-of-who-you-are assumption is flawed.
■ A return to the anti-prejudice framework of yore, but with intersectionality this time around. There’s no reason that an –ism approach (racism, sexism, anti-Semitism) can’t be used to describe forms of bigotry that weren’t much discussed until recently. (Yes, “transphobia” sounds jargony and I’m sure the National Review finds the very thought hilarious, but anti-trans discrimination is a real concern.) Nor is there any reason one would need to present society in terms of privilege in order to acknowledge the unique struggles of those facing more than one form of systemic discrimination. Speaking of prejudice rather than privilege doesn’t fix the call-out issue, but it’s a way of addressing injustice that doesn’t end up inaccurately categorizing huge swaths of humanity under the haves umbrella. It avoids the inevitable confusion when someone white and wealthy apologizes for what is ultimately not just white privilege.
■ A returned focus on capital-capital, and (partially) away from cultural capital, in discussions of class. Less “socio,” more “economic.” That doesn’t mean focusing less on race and gender, but it does mean giving some of the more amorphous cultural stuff a rest. As it stands, we’ve been sliding toward an ever-broader definition of what it means to be culturally privileged. How “privileged” is a college graduate with enormous loans and no job prospects? YPIS encourages the calling-out of people whose cherry-picked consumer choices would seem as if they could be extrapolated into dare I say holistic assessments of their financial situation. The markers also shift too quickly—cultural hints that someone’s loaded (specific brands, styles, etc.) will generally only mean something for approximately five minutes if at all. That someone has an iPhone in one hand, a latte in the other, tells us … what, exactly, at this point? We need a common-sense definition of “elite,” one that doesn’t lump in everyone who’s ever had cold-pressed green juice or worn expensive yoga pants.
■ A shift back toward the macro, away from the micro, where aggressions are concerned. That doesn’t mean mirroring the problems of “privilege” and responding to specific, but relatively minor, complaints by pointing out that things could be worse. Rather, it means looking into editorial strategies and social-media approaches that don’t involve digging for digging’s sake. The emphasis on micro gives the false impression that the macro problems are done. That racism these days consists merely of pop stars culturally appropriating, or of Princeton students finding building names problematic. Even when (as with the building names) those speaking out are right about the merits, the disproportionate coverage these issues tend to get makes it seem as if the Left, as a whole, has its priorities wrong.
■ Enough with the gaffe story already. The aspect of “PC” I fully support is where it’s no longer acceptable to be casually bigoted in polite society. Yet the fifty aggregated think pieces that appear every time a celebrity says something that could be interpreted as problematic (a quote that will reliably, with context, appear less so if at all) haven’t actually moved things forward. All that they’ve done is turn the person-accused-of-bigotry into a sympathetic figure. What remains is a glazed-over reading public, prepared to believe, one minute, that Meryl Streep is a super-duper racist who thinks everyone’s African and so diversity doesn’t matter, only to await the next round of information letting us know that, oh, wait a moment, she didn’t actually say that, so maybe she’s not pile-on worthy after all.36 (How any actual Africans benefited from the “Africans” controversy, and the conversation it launched, is unclear.) I don’t blame the writers, though, and unfortunately don’t know how to break the cycle of pop-culture journalism’s celebrity-outrage coverage. But let’s start writing and assigning something else, even if (and here’s where this suggestion is probably hopeless) that means a slower pace of new content.
■ A complete and utter (and here I will, for once, get word police-y) halt on use of “violence” to describe things that are not, in fact, violence. Shootings, sexual assaults: violence. Cultural appropriation? Tweets of questionable tone? Not violence. This rhetoric, and its cousins (“rape culture” for discussions of billboards of women in lingerie, “white supremacy” for casual racism in the you-all-look-alike vein), is not only jargony and confusing, but also sets things up so that detractors will have an easier time dismissing relatively minor concerns as irrelevant.
■ Rethink the concept of the “ally.” Scrap it, or better yet, restrict it to the people who are full-time dedicating themselves to a cause that doesn’t line up with their identity. (Unless it’s Rachel Dolezal. If you’re posing as a member of the group you’re trying to help, you’re in your own special category.) What we can do without is the category of a “woke” layperson. The default should be human decency. Not some sort of hyperawareness where everyone is magically in on what might offend everyone else. Just don’t be overtly racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory. It’s that simple.
■ Keep social justice as a means to an end, not the end in itself. While the “I don’t see color”-type approach clearly fails, so, too, has the hyperawareness reaction. The goal needs to be recognizing the humanity of all, which means remembering that life isn’t just about structural oppression and the feelings it inspires. Too much awareness from haves winds up becoming exhausting for have-nots, who would like their hurt to be acknowledged, but who would also like to be seen as just people, people who experience joy and heartbreak and annoyance that the café Wi-Fi is down. Relatedly, let the privilege lens be a lens for reading books or watching TV shows, not the only one. Don’t expect entertainment by-and-about women, gay people, people of color, etc., to be overtly political.
■ Understand that the haves want to remain in power, and that their enlightenment is not, in fact, the road to justice. Yes, one microaggression is avoided when a prep-school senior remembers not to mention his family’s estate in Saint-Tropez. Yet his choice to cultivate sensitivity doesn’t in any way change the social structure that allows his family to have a second (or tenth) home while his interlocutor can barely make rent on a first. Ostentatious self-awareness has become a way of signaling status in its own right. I don’t mean that insensitivity is the real social justice (ahem, Trump), but it needs to be understood, generally understood, that gaffe elimination can only accomplish so much, and in no way implies any further steps in any particular direction. Attempts to encourage a more just society shouldn’t depend on those with power becoming flawlessly sensitive to the concerns of those without.
Impeccable, unimpeachable self-awareness is not part of the human condition. Everyone’s oblivious to life beyond his or her own experiences, and that’s normal. This obliviousness needs to be the assumption and the starting point. We should be suspicious of the people who claim to have transcended such limitations, not condemnatory of those who’ve failed to do so. Awareness isn’t a necessary first step, but a futile, and often dangerous, diversion.