“Checking your privilege”

By The Prussian • Jul 14, 2014 • No comments

“Check your privilege” is a term I have come to loathe intensely. Scott Alexander has an excellent post, to which I’d add some supplementary points. First though, go and read it. Done? Good. Now the first thing I’d like to tackle is the definition of the word ‘privilege’. The trouble is this word has gotten confused, as you can see from the definition:

1.a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most: the privileges of the very rich.

2.a special right, immunity, or exemption granted to persons in authority or office to free them from certain obligations or liabilities: the privilege of a senator to speak in Congress without danger of a libel suit.

3.a grant to an individual, corporation, etc., of a special right orimmunity, under certain conditions.

4.the principle or condition of enjoying special rights or immunities.

5.any of the rights common to all citizens under a modernconstitutional government: We enjoy the privileges of a free people.

6.an advantage or source of pleasure granted to a person: It’s my privilege to be here.

Number 6 is another way of saying that something is nice, and the rest refer almost exclusively (back to that in a moment) to endowments of policy. The most common form is that of a legal endowment (an extra right, or entitlement, that you are granted by law), but I’m going to include, e.g., corporate policy. If it is written policy in Megacorp that you are to receive better treatment and be promoted faster, then you are in possession of a privilege.

This is actually a pretty clear definition. If there is special, explicit rule to treat you better because of who you are, rather than what you do, or more specifically, to treat you better than the rest because of the physical/physiological group you belong to, then you hold a privilege.

A good example would be Apartheid South Africa: there were specific laws that demanded that whites must fill a certain number of jobs, places that they could use that others couldn’t, etc. That is an example of privilege.

This brings me to Alexander’s question:

Why can’t social justice terms apply to oppressed groups?

To broaden and deepen this a bit, I’ll add the following:

Can privilege be held by someone who isn’t a straight, white, cisgendered male?

The answer is obviously yes. The current President of the United States is an African American, and as such has the power to use the tax service to harass political opponents, dispense pardons, to have anyone in the country killed, and to pass the sanction of extinction on our entire species. Those are some pretty hefty privileges.

But all the previous Presidents of the United States have been white!

True, but we’re not discussing whether or not whites can hold privileges, we are discussing whether or not non-whites can.

We can go further and point out that affirmative action laws and racial quotas at US universities (that are harshly discriminatory against Asians, incidentally) are an example of black privilege: they are benefits as a matter of policy that are extended to black Americans because of their skin colour, and not because of their ability.

Now here we have to back up a second. Because ‘privilege’ is always used in a sneering way, something needs to be clarified, and it’s an observation of Scott Adams: Everyone know two wrongs don’t make a right. What people don’t tell you is that two wrongs can sometimes cancel each other out, and while that’s not as good as a right, it’s better than having a big old wrong (I quote from memory).

Consider the case of a highly competent female corporate lawyer from Christian Africa. Now, as has been pointed out previously, she will face a certain amount of opposition from the corporate sector in many Western corporations, opposition that will quite unjustly hinder her ability to advance. However, it is also true that for other reasons, she will find herself thrown a few opportunities she would otherwise not. Call it tokenism or whatever.

Here you can see the Scott Adams point: The ‘right’ would be a situation where everyone was judged on merit and performance. The first ‘wrong’ are the unjust barriers placed in our young lawyer’s way. The second ‘wrong’ is the tokenism (because it is the flipside of the foregoing, both unjust to others and insulting to its recipient). You can have good arguments – irrefutable arguments – against either or both of these, but the fact is that having them together, they kinda, sorta cancel each other out, and it’s a better situation than just having either tokenism or racism on its own. It’s not perfect, but then – what is?

Put yourself in the shoes of a conscientious CEO who really wants to have ‘right’, but is aware that he cannot police every single hiring decision and knows that he cannot convince everyone who works for him to see things entirely his way. He might decide that the best case scenario is to put some policy like that in place and hope for the best.

[However, this exemption does not apply to legally enforced quotas. The restriction on the use of force applies here.]

Again, I would infinitely prefer to deal with people as individuals and judge them by their words and deeds, by their convictions and their actions. So all that we need to do is fill up the world with people like me. But if we could do that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place.

Yet to make that argument, which I am sure the social justice warriors would want, you have to admit this: sometimes privilege can be worthy. And if you grant that, then the whole cry of “check your privilege” becomes obviously senseless. And worse still: then you have to deal with the hard work of working out which privilege is unjust and needs abolishing, and which one is an unfortunate necessity, and realize that other people might judge things slightly differently, but sufficiently differently to provoke an argument, and yet still hold true to the same ideals – and if you have to do all that, then where is the time to be a self-satisfied, self-righteous, self-important, perpetually outraged waste of everyone’s time?

Privilege as power

Let’s argue this another way. What about the idea that privilege is really about power? If you wield power over another human being, regardless of whether or not you’ve sought that power, it is good to be aware of it, since you may inadvertently use that power in a way that harms someone else.

It is hard to argue with that. What one can argue, though, is the idea that power can only be wielded by cis-gendered, white, male, heterosexuals.

Try the following headline:

Mugabe: Whites Can’t Own Land in Zimbabwe

Who is wielding power here, and on whom?

On a much less dramatic scale, consider the state in the United States. An accusation of racism, real or not, can completely destroy careers and lives. That is another form of power.

(Of course, there are plenty of reverse cases, but, again, that is not what is being discussed).

But even to dignify this racial nonsense is to oversimply the way power is wielded in fact. I’ll return to C.L.R. James here:

The race question is subordinate to the class question.

That is in his history of the Haitian slave revolt where he notes that numerous freed blacks were perfectly happy to take black slaves, and did not want to see emancipation. Or consider the example of the Clinton years, where the Clinton administration enjoyed unwavering support from the black American community (Clinton even being described as ‘the first black president’) while he destroyed Sudan’s only medicine factory and greenlighted the Rwandan genocide. You could easily say that that is a case of black Americans wielding and abusing power over black Africans.

But there are black Americans and there are black Americans. More specifically, there are working class blacks and middle- and upper-class blacks. I remember the black American conservative Thomas Sowell argued that programs such as quotas and affirmative action worked out really well for educated blacks with PhDs and so on, who could get hired more easily. It was a disaster for the working class black who had to face an employer who was now less likely to take a chance by hiring him – because the employer knew that he could get into trouble if he reverse the decision later on.

The idea of a boss class promoting policies that are supposedly for the benefit of all, but in fact just for the benefit of the boss class is something that would not have surprised C.L.R. James, or any serious student of history. The conservatives and the Marxists can come together here.

But why then are those who keep using the term ‘check your privilege’ hell bent on arguing that they, themselves, cannot possibly have privilege? Alexander argues that this is a matter of power itself. The “check your privilege” argument is there to shut people up, and by imputing ‘privilege’ to someone else you can get them howled down and thrown to the mob.

It’s another version of Arguing Like STALIN.

This brings me to a point of disagreement with Alexander, his comment that ‘everyone is a little bit racist’, referring to the, proven, fact that all humans tend to respond better to people who are in their in-group and less well to those who are in their out-group.

The problem I have with this is that it is an example of the Original Sin argument. It judges everyone guilty of something that by definition they cannot control. And the purpose of this is what it always is: power. You cannot rule innocent men. You have to make people feel that they are guilty, that they deserve to be punished. They are much more pliant that way.

Have you not noticed how all movements that rose to rule millions made a huge show of sacrifice and giving up – and guilt?

On a lesser scale, this sort of nonsense acts as job insurance for the Social Justice Warrior. By defining racism so broadly that it cannot possibly be eradicated, it ensures that the SJW will always have something to feel righteously indignant about. It won’t actually make the world a better place – it will, in fact, increase real racism and real inter-group problems – but the SJW will feel nice and warm inside.

Alexander finesses this by, effectively, saying that ‘a certain amount of racism is okay’. I disagree with this approach, because that’s not the way morality works. A certain amount of evil isn’t okay, any more than a certain amount of cyanide is okay. Both are destructive.

There is a reason that in my anti-racialist Q & A I focused on explicit statements that defined people by their racial adherence. That is an overt act that you can choose to do or to avoid. You can’t really choose your inherited reactions, but you can choose whether or not you decide to judge people by the beliefs they hold and the actions they do, or the group they are born into. That’s why I went through points 3.5 – 3.7 in my Q & A, discussing the fact that people will tend to group with those from a similar background, and that is just fine, as long as no group is attacking the rest.

“Checking your privilege”

Article by: The Prussian