In case the dashing portrait on my profile didn’t tell you, I’m a fairly sub-par white guy. I live a decent middle-class existence in a prosperous neighborhood full of single-family homes. While I have yet to find a proper job (I’m 26 as I’m writing this), I have some confidence that I’ll get one before my birthday comes around. The only real way I haven’t won the social lottery is that I’m mildly autistic; even then, I’ve managed to get by in spite of that.
Privilege is a charged word in this day and age, mainly because of how people use and abuse it. Well-meaning progressives often throw the term around as an insult, and—especially when discussing more abstract concepts like white (cis/straight/Christian/male/etc.) privilege—use it in a way that implies that it’s undeserved and needs to be taken away for justice to be brought about. In turn, conservatives will often deny that these sorts of privilege exist at all—despite the fact that whites (on average) live fairly decent lives by most statistical measurements.
On average is the key term here. The thing that most of these people don’t seem to understand is that privilege, regardless of the type, is relative and exists on a spectrum; in other words, privilege is a matter of degree, not kind. If you pick out a random individual from the US population, they’ll probably have at least one or two privileges in their life, even if their life sucks more generally. White privilege isn’t some concrete thing that white people just have, by virtue of being white; by my understanding at least, it’s simply an abstract term referring to how most of the traditional measures of “having a life that doesn’t suck” are statistically skewed towards white people. It works the same way for the other categories you hear thrown around—straight, male, Christian, etc.
And that’s okay! That’s the other thing that progressives need to do a better job of emphasizing—it’s okay for your life not to suck. It’s good that your life doesn’t suck, in fact! And it’s okay to be white (and cis, and straight, and male, and Christian, and etc.)! You don’t have to self-flagellate or apologize to anyone for your “privileged” characteristics or close-held values, any more than anyone else does—and any progressive who says otherwise is out of their fucking mind!
At the same time, though, those attributes don’t give license for someone like me to pretend like other identity groups live the same sort of lives (again, on average) that I or a lot of other white people do. Generally speaking, if I meet someone from a marginalized group—or especially someone who has multiple intersecting characteristics, such as being a black trans lesbian—their life is probably going to suck more than mine does, in at least a few regards. That’s generally what people mean when they talk about being privileged, and it’s why terms like white and male privilege still hold some meaning—despite the fact that we’ve had a black man be elected President, and why we had a woman become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee for the first time in American history. I must emphasize this again, for all the people in the back—privilege is relative.
I first heard the term white privilege—as well as the related cis/straight/male/Christian variations—fairly early when I started paying attention to these kinds of things, and it only took me until very recently to have a conception of it in my head that made sense to me. This is partially because, as I stated in my last post, I had been consuming “anti-SJW” content—a lot of which was critical of the very idea of white privilege. But this is also partially because progressives have done a very poor job of communicating what they mean when they talk about these kinds of privilege. Class privilege is the only thing that really makes sense at first glance, even to conservatives, because there’s a material basis to it that can be easily observed—wealth, income, good healthcare, good education, a roof over your head, etc. If you’re sitting on a boatload of material resources and financial assets, you’re about as privileged as they come in that regard, regardless of whether you’re a straight white male or a black trans lesbian. Given how a lot of the progressives who talk about these kinds of topics are college-educated urbanites, it makes sense for conservatives to see them as rich kids who simply made up all these newfangled privilege categories to make themselves look less privileged than they are.
But the flipside of this is, class privilege doesn’t cancel out the very real lack of privilege in other, more personal areas of people’s lives. No amount of material resources can make a gay kid feel better after they’ve been bullied for being gay. No amount of material resources can make a grieving black couple feel better after their child gets shot, whether it’s by a white supremacist or by a cop. And no amount of material resources can help someone suffering from gender dysphoria—not if social and physical transitioning are made illegal where they live. What would help all of these people is simple acceptance into a community that loves them for who they are and is willing to help them access the resources they need. If that makes me “woke” or an “SJW” or whatever other conservative buzzword, then so be it.
Privilege is not something that can simply be redistributed in the same way as material wealth and assets. But privilege is something that can be cultivated—partially through material redistribution, partially through structural reform, but largely through the full societal acceptance of marginalized individuals, and the teaching thereof to future generations. I believe it’s in this way that marginalized groups will finally get a full, proper experience of liberty and justice for all. It probably all seems very trite; and, I’ll be real, it is. But to that I would say—I think it’s better than most of what you see on Twitter; and given how influential Twitter seems to be on American politics and media, that’s a high enough bar for me.