Let's Have A Grownup Talk About Privilege - With Curiosity Rather Than Outrage

It's real. It's worth exploring even for the UnWoke. Its purpose is to open our own eyes rather than beat up others (and ourselves) over birth lottery results.

Image by Krimhild Kersting from Pixabay

I thought about white privilege before it became the most tiresome selection on the Wokenati’s Most Overplayed Hits list. My self-analysis comes because I get frustrated with men for not understanding women a little better. How freakin’ hard is it to comprehend, for example, that women can’t just make a snap decision on whether we want to date a man by virtue of his looks? We don’t know if he’s a nice guy or a serial killer, and he can’t even talk to me for like five or ten minutes so I can look into his eyes a bit before he moves in for the kill?

Or can’t they understand why sexual harassment is not flattery? That it’s scary? Or why we have to treat strange men as potential threats until we get a bead on them?

Privilege makes you blind to that which never happens to you. Complaining to myself about men’s cluelessness naturally led me to ponder my own white cluelessness. I try to see what I’m not experiencing the way I want men to consider women’s experience.

The world has been inherently unequal since the beginning of time. Hierarchy and power abuse is mostly true too for our primate cousins, with the possible exception of the bonobos. Ideally, levelling the playing field should aspire to equal opportunity. Where the privilege-obsessed fail is by hierarchizing it, and assigning primacy to the wrong category: Race.

An article on Quora years ago asked about white privilege; a dark-skinned Indian woman claimed she was more privileged than most white people she knew. She’d been born into a very wealthy family and she went to the very best schools. Wealth and education, she summarized, were the two most important levels of privilege there are. Little else matters.

She’s right. So was Martin Luther King, excoriated by the ‘woke’ today the way Malcolm X once did: Just a ‘chump’ who ‘doesn’t get it’ about the so-called evils of white people. Yet King understood the intrinsic importance of class, illustrating it with the story of Lazarus and the rich man in the Bible. “No, the rich man was punished because he passed Lazarus every day and did not see him … and I tell you if this country does not see its poor — if it lets them remain in their poverty and misery — it will surely go to hell!”

Not a word about the color of the poor.

My writing buddy Radical Radha wrote a devastating analysis of class privilege, from the standpoint of an Indian-American precariat who grew up in poverty, near-poverty, and clawed her way to the top 10% with a lot of hard work and study, who understands a lot more about privilege than most.

The high cost of class climbing - Radical Radha at Radically Pragmatic

I highly recommend her newsletter. She’s an ex-social justice warrior who ‘woke up’ from wokeness and is now one of its fiercest critics. Her article draws a direct line between the snobby, over-privileged rich girls she was insecurely friends with in school and the vicious, wealthy, mean women of the Democratic woke wing.

It reminded me of Rob Henderson’s Troubled memoir. It’s hard to take the problems of your spoiled, coddled compatriots seriously when their severest moral challenge is avoiding whichever words got struck from the ‘acceptable’ vocabulary list this week.

Radha makes perfectly clear which privilege she regards as the most powerful.

“My parents are the types of Indians that the narrative of the diaspora overlooks because we are known as the wealthiest and most educated of all the minority groups. This ignores experiences that have everything to do with class and nothing with race. My race didn’t somehow help me get ahead (it hindered me), but affirmative action for women probably did help. I don’t want special treatment or favors because it delegitimizes my hard work.”

There’s nothing that genuinely separates us—especially Indians—quite like class privilege. Be honest: Would you rather be black and wealthy or poor and white? I’ve been white all my life and if offered this reincarnation choice I’d pick black and wealthy. Racism is real, but so is the sexism and misogyny I’ve lived with my entire life, and it hasn’t stopped me from living the way I wanted. Class and education enabled it. I’m not even aware of my sex most of the time. That’s right, I’m too busy making my mark in the world to even think about my ‘marginalized’ chickie-boo status.

White privilege likely benefited me most when I grew up in Florida in the ‘60s and ‘70s, where and when blacks truly were oppressed, although Orlando already had a black middle class that emerged after former slaves settled the area which whites fought, unsuccessfully.

Middle class looks wealthy when you live in a trailer park or on the street. I was surprised, in high school, to find I was considered to live in a ‘rich’ neighborhood. My small Ohio town didn’t have a ‘rich’ neighbourhood. It was split mostly between working and middle class, with a few families that lived only slightly better than mine. They were a few blocks over, but if you drive between my old ‘hood and theirs, neither was ‘wealthy’ as we know wealth today, or even back then. I had family in New York in a well-to-do community and I knew what real wealth looked like.

Wealth privilege isn’t just a matter of economics, it’s also about opportunity and perspective. Wealth, for billions of people, means living with a full belly in a home with a roof. It’s when you have options that would seem pedestrian to us, even as we don’t visit Europe every year or own a Testarossa. I am extremely wealthy to many in the world, even though by North American standards my middle class existence is quite modest.

Class and education privilege are what the social justice warriors miss, over and over again. It’s easier to bitch via inscrutable academic jargonbabble than to actually address what truly levels the playing field—since it might demand sacrifices from them.

Comparison porn

Education privilege is wealth’s twin sister, beginning when a child is still in diapers. ‘Wealthy’ homes contain books and other educational materials; parents who have time to read to their kids; museums and other cultural attractions they can afford to visit; and the child is encouraged to make the most of her wealthy-country free public education—or her parents can pay for a better one. If she studies hard she can get into a good college, and a degree will open up doors with important professional and social connections her working class and poor peers don’t have.

We compare ourselves to others who seem more successful which creates dissension, envy and depression. But comparison porn works both ways. One can also compare one’s self with one’s peers who didn’t fare so well, perhaps explained by laziness and lack of motivation, or perhaps they simply never had one’s own opportunities. The comparer can feel quite superior. “Look at Joe! What a loser Mr. Big Shot Quarterback is now, and look where I am. I wish I’d known this was coming when he shoved my head into a toilet!”

Privilege is mostly a birth lottery. Although I imagine it must be difficult not to blame one’s self for having been born poor. Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why is that bitch Sandy better off than me? She doesn’t deserve it, I do!

Except if the roles were reversed, the muser would probably be the coddled, entitled bitch and Sandy the envious one. Why? That’s what unacknowledged privilege does to many.

Class doesn’t always tell. Radical Radha made something of herself and Hunter Biden didn’t.

Equal opportunity access holds it own limits. Some are born smarter or more talented; but granting it gives the more economically modest the ability to make the most of their hidden talents and avoid what the NAACP warned in the 1970s: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Of course, lack of motivation or laziness can get in the way of anyone’s true calling, whether to the manor or gutter born.

There’s always someone who’s worse off, or better off. Many grow up learning how to fight for what they want and need, while milquetoasts whine that the college administration isn’t feeding them and bringing them bottled water while they tear up the campus green protesting a part of the world they can’t even spell, let alone find on a map.

Life is pain, baby.

Class and nonsensical privilege categories have wasted billions of minds over the millennia. Where might the world be if our ancestors hadn’t divided themselves between Us vs Them? We still remake their same mistakes as culture evolves faster than our brains. We can challenge our modern-day numbnuts, so petty, so small-minded, so deeply ignorant of the world despite overpriced college educations. The ones who preach that extra epidermal melanin is the real reason you can’t succeed, and it’s not even worth it to try, despite countless counter-examples who took advantage of school, and libraries, and spent more time on the Internet Googling whatever they were curious about instead of scrolling through Instagram envying people who lie about their accomplishments with highly Photoshopped selfies.

Failure loves company.

Pondering our privilege—and questioning the overblown claims of others’—enables us to be more aware of what must be addressed to truly change society. The idea isn’t to beat ourselves or others up but to understand fixable inequities to become more empathetic citizens. I challenge my own class and education privilege regarding the stereotypes and harmful beliefs I have about those who didn’t ‘make it’, who didn’t hardscrabble their way to the top like Radical Radha.

The ultimate intersectionality of one’s own intensely unique experiences and circumstances can prevent an individual from even seeing a way out, rather like a man in a lightless maze who doesn’t know where the exit is.

Or even that there is one.

All I want is a room somewhere,
Far away from the cold night air.
With one enormous chair,
Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?
Lots of choc'lates for me to eat,
Lots of coal makin' lots of 'eat.
Warm face, warm 'ands, warm feet,
Aow, wouldn't it be loverly?

- Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady

When I’m not scrolling Instagram wondering those who have all those cute cats and puppy dogs doing cute funny things, I help women and others reclaim their power here on Grow Some Labia. Check out my new and improved website too!