CHAPTER TEN

Privilege and inequality

Lost my job in 2006. Sold my home and moved in with my 87-year-old mother.

Worked temporary jobs on and off for over 5 years with little or no benefits.

Cancer survivor. Need medical care. Can’t afford health insurance.

TOO YOUNG TO RETIRE.

Watching my retirement funds and savings shrink.

Moved to Mexico to get medical care. Rent a room and live on $250 a month. No car. No phone.

Mom is in the hospital and I wonder if I can afford to come home.1

The post appeared on a Tumblr account entitled ‘We are the 99 percent’, in support of the Occupy Wall Street sit-in at Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district. For a brief period in 2011, Occupy offered a tantalising glimpse of a different kind of a left, a direct-politics alternative to identity liberalism and the culture-war right.

Despite its eventual global impact, OWS began as a small, ad hoc, and quite confused intervention: basically, a handful of protesters establishing themselves in a park. The initial call-out from Adbusters magazine asked president Obama to hold a ‘Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives’, but that demand faded away as the occupation became a local — and then national and eventually international — focus for opposition to the neoliberal order.

By a simple act of civil disobedience in the heart of New York’s financial district, Occupy popularised two related ideas.

First, it highlighted the huge contrast in wealth and power between those it called the ‘One percent’ (the global elite) and those it described as the ‘99 percent’ (essentially everyone else). The Tumblr providing personal accounts was part of that. Another entry read:

I am 45 years old.

I was laid off twice in 18 months.

The second time 6 months after I got married.

I am ‘unemployable’ because of layoffs.

I have not worked since November 2008.

We have NO healthcare.

My husband works so that I can go to college to get a degree.

We are also dependent on family to make ends meet.

Each story was different, but the individual anecdotes were united by their common experience of economic disempowerment, implicitly contrasted with the super-rich.

The collectivity inherent in Occupy’s analysis naturally facilitated its second simple idea: the possibility of ordinary people acting together to change society fundamentally. The idea of mass occupations spread across America and around the world, seized upon (for a while at least) as an organisational alternative to the collapsing infrastructure of the left. ‘[I]t has temporarily liberated some of the most expensive real estate in the world,’ wrote Mike Davis of the Zuccotti Park action, ‘and turned a privatized square into a magnetic public space and a catalyst for protest.’2

People who didn’t belong to political parties, trade unions, church groups, or community organisations could join an occupation and, by so doing, feel that they were making an immediate difference. By controlling strategically located space, occupiers necessarily rediscovered the central ideas of direct politics. They identified the One Percent as a common enemy, and so raised the prospect of structural social change, even if they struggled to articulate what form that might take. The actions were both collective and participatory. The occupations could only survive if people joined them. By their nature, they posed immediate questions to everyone who was involved. How would the encampment be protected? What attitude should the occupation take to police and the media and politicians? Where would food come from? How should the camp be kept functioning? Such issues were confronted by participatory democracy, via extended meetings in which everyone present argued over what was to be done.

Moreover, Occupy identified a new constituency. By definition, the 99 per cent embraced almost anyone. Irrespective of race or gender or sexual orientation, so long as you weren’t among the nation’s wealthiest, Occupy addressed you. Obviously, hostility to the super-rich did not, in and of itself, resolve the historic divisions of race, sexuality, gender, and so on within the working class, but it did provide a basis for unity against a common enemy. Surveys showed, for instance, that African Americans tended to be more supportive of Occupy than whites, probably because they — like other oppressed groups — had suffered most because of the GFC.3

The collectivity of an occupation, the commitment to a shared goal, created an environment in which overcoming division became of importance to everyone. If the camp divided along racial lines — or if people of colour did not feel comfortable in participating — the protest became markedly less viable. Conversely, insofar as the protesters could find ways to work together, they all became stronger. Again, this didn’t resolve the legacy of oppression, and in many places the occupations splintered on racial or other grounds. But the mass meetings at least made it possible to debate the necessity of solidarity among the 99 per cent, in an environment in which all recognised the advantages of unity.

Perhaps inevitably, the Occupy movement did not last long. After a brief period of toleration, the authorities, more or less everywhere, sent in the police to disperse the camps, often with extreme brutality. The inability of the protesters to resist the state caused Occupy to disintegrate almost as quickly as it arose.

Nevertheless, even if for only a few months, Occupy put the question of social privilege and social inequality on the agenda all over the world — something the left had, in recent times, found almost impossible.

In a sense, Occupy represented a road not taken. For the majority of this period, a very different approach to privilege dominated on the activist left.

In a number of important essays written from the late 1980s on, the legal theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw developed the term ‘intersectionality’ to analyse the relationship between interlocking forms of oppression. ‘If an accident happens at an intersection,’ Crenshaw wrote, ‘it can be caused by cars travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a black woman is harmed because she is at the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.’4

Intersectionality theory was, in some respects, a critique of identity politics.5 After all, the crudest versions of identity politics suffered from an obvious reductionism, implying that all members of a particular group shared similar experiences that almost automatically gave rise to similar politics. Crenshaw, however, insisted that all women did not share the same interests or histories, and neither did all African Americans. Such identities were, she said, complicated and fragmented, with new identities emerging from the intersection of oppressions.

The argument encouraged a more complex analysis. Intersectionality theorists emphasised the importance of recognising oppression as an interlocking system. The slogan ‘My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’ became, for many, a challenge to white liberal feminists who universalised their own experience.

Yet the popularisation of intersectionality theory took place alongside — and often in conjunction with — another, related idea, with which it became entwined.

In 1988, an American writer named Peggy McIntosh wrote an article entitled ‘White Privilege and Male Privilege’, which was subsequently circulated in amended form as ‘White Privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack’.6 McIntosh outlined various manifestations of everyday racism drawn from her own experiences. She described these as:

an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks.

Her essay culminated in a list outlining many of the ‘daily effects of white privilege’ in her own life. She could, she said, ‘arrange to be in the company of my race most of the time’, if she so desired. She could be confident of finding a house she could afford in an area where she wanted to live — and if she did move, she could be ‘pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me’. She could go shopping alone without worrying about being harassed; she could see people of her race represented on the television and in the newspapers.

She suggested that, by compiling similar lists of their own ‘unearned assets’, which would vary according to their circumstances, activists could overcome their complicity with a repressive order. Over the next decades, McIntosh’s argument was widely adopted for pedagogical training, and disseminated through activist groups and NGOs, until ‘privilege theory’ developed into a kind of common sense on the left.7

In some respects, McIntosh’s presentation echoed ideas and techniques developed by the New Left. As Asad Haider pointed out, a theory known as ‘white-skin privilege’ had been developed by the Maoist writers Theodore Allen and Noel Ignatiev in the 1960s, while McIntosh’s inventory method recalled the ‘consciousness raising’ employed widely throughout the New Left.8

But McIntosh’s work reflected the evolution of delegated and smug politics in the way that it inverted ideas appropriated from direct politics.

The consciousness-raising employed by women’s liberation, black radicals, and various Maoist organisations was fundamentally linked to mass action. Sarachild, for instance, explained that the technique mattered to the women’s movement because it was ‘a method of radical organising tested by other revolutions’ that would ‘keep … the movement radical by preventing it from getting sidetracked into single issue reforms and single issue organizing’.9

By contrast, McIntosh presented her approach less as a method of radicalisation and more as a form of self-improvement. Her ‘privilege checking’ didn’t unveil reasons to revolt so much as expose personal complicity, with the participant tabulating the invisible benefits attached to their identities as a prelude to individual rectification. Someone wanting to change the world must, it was argued, admit their privilege, listen to those who didn’t possess the same advantages, and then educate themselves about the history of oppression. Until that happened, they were part of the problem.

Indeed, by locating privilege in the relationship between individuals, the theory made progressives responsible for each other’s oppression. When McIntosh listed her own day-to-day experiences of ‘white privilege’, she offered her description of racism as if it were an explanation — as if, by enjoying those advantages, she were self-evidently responsible for the disadvantages suffered by her workmates.

But that didn’t follow at all. In her second point, she noted that she, unlike her non-white colleagues, could live in a nice neighbourhood. The unaffordability of housing — and the racialised manifestations of that — was not, however, a problem for which she was responsible. In any other context, blame for housing shortages would, quite correctly, be directed at governments and property developers rather than at academics.

In this way, McIntosh’s concept of privilege reversed the Allen and Ignatiev formulation. Haider noted that the original presentation of ‘white skin privilege’ described ‘white chauvinism’ as ‘actually harmful to white people’, because despite the fact that they were granted some advantages over black people, they ended up ‘even more entrenched in their condition of exploitation precisely by accepting these advantages’.10

For instance, the classic study of income distribution in American cities in the 1970s by the economist Michael Reich found that in places where the gulf between white and black incomes was high, white employees tended to earn less money than white employees in places where the racial disparity was lower.11 The ‘privilege’ they enjoyed might have offered them a sense of superiority, but in material terms it left them worse off — exactly the opposite of what McIntosh suggested.

Ignatiev himself had argued:

White-skin privileges serve only the bourgeoisie, and precisely for that reason they will not let us escape them, but instead pursue us with them through every hour of our life, no matter where we go. They are poison bait. To suggest that the acceptance of white-skin privilege is in the interests of white workers is equivalent to suggesting that swallowing the worm with the hook in it is in the interests of the fish.12

The contrast with McIntosh’s metaphor of a knapsack full of provisions could not have been starker. For her, oppression was a zero-sum game, with the victimisation experienced by one person the consequence of the advantages enjoyed by another.

Though McIntosh’s original examples emphasised race and gender, a specific focus on whiteness wasn’t integral to a methodology applicable to any kind of oppression (‘able body privilege’, ‘class privilege’, etc). The array of advantages enjoyed by each person varied according to whom that person was being contrasted with: Person A might enjoy ‘white privilege’ compared to Person B, but Person B might be the beneficiary of ‘male privilege’ relative to Person A. Sexuality, age, faith, skin colour, geographical location, mental, and physical health: questions of privilege conferred to all of these, as well as many other categories.

Furthermore, following Crenshaw’s argument, the intersection of multiple advantages or disadvantages could be understood as creating new and different privileges and oppressions. In fact, because privilege pertained to individual ‘lived experience’, its manifestations were, by definition, almost infinite, combining and reassembling depending on the circumstances of specific subjects.

This meant that, if privilege checking was understood as a necessary precursor to activism, activism itself became problematic, since there was no end to the unexamined privilege that might be discovered within any given group of protesters. With identities (and thus privilege) combining (at least in theory) almost without limit, solidarity was forever deferred: it was difficult to imagine a circumstance in which someone didn’t enjoy an ‘unearned advantage’ over somebody else. The left’s new focus on ‘microaggressions’ — the subtle, unintended expression of prejudice or discrimination in day-to-day life — reflected this understanding of an oppression resulting from everyday people rather than from specific social or economic structures.

Intersectionality might, then, have been intended as a radical critique of identity politics, but in practice it reinterpreted identity in an even more paralysing fashion. Where earlier versions of identity politics at least held out the possibility of the oppressed acting as a bloc, the new understanding of intersectionality and privilege pushed towards a radical individualism, one that implied a struggle of all against all.

It wasn’t, then, surprising that the rise of privilege theory paralleled the normalisation of neoliberalism. McIntosh’s actuarial description of privilege as an ‘unearned asset’ echoed an understanding of society as an aggregation of antagonistic subjects, each assessing their advantages over each other like entrepreneurs in the marketplace.

Because of that, privilege theory offered very little strategic direction. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy quipped, ‘I’ve never quite sorted out by what mechanism awareness of privilege is meant to inspire a desire to shed oneself of it.’13 One would, in fact, expect the opposite — that an acute awareness of privilege among, say, the super-rich would foster the kind of capitalist class-consciousness shown by the One Percent.

By its nature, privilege checking could only become a widespread practice within a milieu already broadly sympathetic to progressive causes. As such, it was, first and foremost, a method for leftists to negotiate their relationships with each other other, coinciding with a broader despair about collective agency — a trend where, as the organisations and institutions associated with delegated politics weakened, activists shifted their emphasis away from changing the world to positioning themselves within the relatively small circles of remaining progressive influence. As Haider wrote elsewhere, ‘If the “personal is political”, it is in the sense we are left with no practice of politics outside of the fashioning of our own personal identities, and surveillance of the identities of others.’14

That inward turn explained the notoriously unforgiving tenor of ‘call-out culture’, in which activists (particularly online activists) launched sustained campaigns against other progressives for seemingly minor political infractions.

Left-wing infighting was nothing new, of course. Even so, the call-outs of the mid-2000s were notorious for their intensity, which often varied inversely with the real-world consequences of the offences being chastised. ‘At the height of its power,’ noted Angela Nagle, ‘the hysterical liberal call-out, no matter how minor the transgression, could ruin your life.’15

Like the privilege theory that it rested upon, call-out culture both reflected and reinforced the left’s isolation. A movement engaged in real-world struggles could assess disagreements in relation to their consequences and judge the contending arguments by their practical results. A mass movement obtaining actual outcomes fostered solidarity, a collective identification against a joint enemy. This didn’t necessarily make debates civil or productive, but it did at least provide a framework — and even, perhaps, an organisational structure — within which contested issues might be thrashed out with some measure of fairness.

Call-out culture, on the other hand, emerged out of institutional collapse. Where once it was at least hypothetically feasible for disputes to be adjudicated with some procedural rigour by the community group, political party, or trade union to which activists belonged, the decline of such bodies left social media as the forum of choice, despite its manifest unsuitability.

Not surprisingly, some of the more famous call-outs resulted in grotesque injustices. In 2013, for instance, Justine Sacco, a director of corporate communications at IAC, tweeted about a trip to Africa. ‘Hope I don’t get AIDS,’ she said. ‘Just kidding. I’m white!’ The tweet — widely read as racist — provoked a massive pile-on, after which Sacco lost her job and became internationally notorious. But in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson convincingly argues that Sacco had been misinterpreted — that, in fact, her quip was intended as a parody of the very sentiments later attributed to her.16

If call-out culture was a product of the left’s separation from ordinary people, it also contributed to that separation. Any movement, campaign, or struggle that sought support from outside the ranks of the already converted needed, by definition, people unfamiliar with the ideas of the left. The traditional approach of direct politics — replicated by Occupy — recognised that new recruits carried all kinds of ideological baggage, some of it good and some of it bad. It also understood that active participation in social-change politics provided conditions in which old prejudices could be more easily shed.

But if an acknowledgement of ‘unearned entitlements’ was a precondition for progressive politics, activism became the preserve of those already convinced, for they alone were sufficiently woke to recognise their various privileges. Everyday folk (without, say, a background in cultural theory) were not liable to admit immediately their complicity with oppression — and, as a result, it was easy for activists committed to smug politics to conclude that such people were, once again, irredeemably reactionary.

Furthermore, the linguistic reforms achieved on campus and generally accepted within the narrow circles of the left didn’t necessarily enjoy currency within wider society. As a result, many working-class people remained unfamiliar with the political lexicon that had become hegemonic amongst progressives, and thus could often find themselves treated as overt enemies.

Call-out culture exacerbated the tendency. If a man with no previous experience of activism uttered a sexist phrase, one response might be to explain patiently the problem with the term, its relationship to institutional oppression, and the importance of overcoming misogyny within a movement that needed maximum unity. But spectacular, performative call-outs were not designed to persuade. They were designed to punish, to make public examples of wrongdoers, in the context of an activism that understood itself as policing the left against the backwardness of the masses.

As the philosopher Wendy Brown argued, ‘politicised identity’ thus became ‘more likely to punish and reproach … than to find venues for self-affirming action’.17