I hate to say it, but you're completely failing to convince me that the concept of "privilege" has any value at all.
The examples you gave of privileges both had very clear corresponding cases of oppression. Women were being denied access to political self-determination, and black slaves were denied pretty much any form of self-determination at all. Also, your argument around universal suffrage costing men "complete control of government officials" strikes me as a rather absurd way to describe the dilution of any man's franchise; after all men already had to share their control of government with other men.
The examples I'm thinking of run more along the lines of people describing the ability to drive a fancy car without getting pulled over for DWB as white privilege. If it's the privilege that's unfair and in need of correction, then the solution would be to start applying frequent spurious traffic stops (with the occasional subsequent false arrest thrown in for good measure) to white people. Sure it accomplishes equality, but wouldn't it be a whole hell of a lot better if we looked at the oppression end of the stick, and focused our efforts instead on making DWB stops go away.
I'm quite happy to forfeit some privilege in the pursuit of justice when the system in which I have that privilege is a zero-sum game. In such a situation though, this forfeiture of privelege will naturally arise when oppression is eliminated, so we are served just as well by a discussion of oppression as by a discussion of privilege.
In the case where it's not a zero-sum game however, if we talk privilege, we're implicitly identifying injustice with the "have" situation and will be subsequently inclined to remedy the situation by changing "haves" into "have-nots". Talking oppression in this case though, identifies the injustice with the "have-not" situation and directs us towards the more difficult but vastly more worthwhile remedy of turning "have-nots" into "haves".
Never mind that an oppressed class which identifies its situation as normal rather then oppressive is bound to be more easily pacified than an oppressed class who can identify their lot in life as being substantially wrong.
The way to eliminate privilege is to expand or (in the event that it can't be expanded) to distribute it to everyone so that it ceases to be a privilege anymore. I think that contemporary discourse on the matter pretty consistently fails to acknowledge that.
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Zero-sum games
Date: 2009-03-17 08:00 pm (UTC)The examples you gave of privileges both had very clear corresponding cases of oppression. Women were being denied access to political self-determination, and black slaves were denied pretty much any form of self-determination at all. Also, your argument around universal suffrage costing men "complete control of government officials" strikes me as a rather absurd way to describe the dilution of any man's franchise; after all men already had to share their control of government with other men.
The examples I'm thinking of run more along the lines of people describing the ability to drive a fancy car without getting pulled over for DWB as white privilege. If it's the privilege that's unfair and in need of correction, then the solution would be to start applying frequent spurious traffic stops (with the occasional subsequent false arrest thrown in for good measure) to white people. Sure it accomplishes equality, but wouldn't it be a whole hell of a lot better if we looked at the oppression end of the stick, and focused our efforts instead on making DWB stops go away.
I'm quite happy to forfeit some privilege in the pursuit of justice when the system in which I have that privilege is a zero-sum game. In such a situation though, this forfeiture of privelege will naturally arise when oppression is eliminated, so we are served just as well by a discussion of oppression as by a discussion of privilege.
In the case where it's not a zero-sum game however, if we talk privilege, we're implicitly identifying injustice with the "have" situation and will be subsequently inclined to remedy the situation by changing "haves" into "have-nots". Talking oppression in this case though, identifies the injustice with the "have-not" situation and directs us towards the more difficult but vastly more worthwhile remedy of turning "have-nots" into "haves".
Never mind that an oppressed class which identifies its situation as normal rather then oppressive is bound to be more easily pacified than an oppressed class who can identify their lot in life as being substantially wrong.
The way to eliminate privilege is to expand or (in the event that it can't be expanded) to distribute it to everyone so that it ceases to be a privilege anymore. I think that contemporary discourse on the matter pretty consistently fails to acknowledge that.