Why I do not like the term "privilege"

[pozorvlak]

[This post is basically a holding page for a discussion that started on Twitter but quickly spiralled beyond 140 characters per point.]

I think that the term "privilege", as used by feminists and other equality-campaigners, is unhelpful. I think the concept to which it refers (which I attempted to explain here) is extremely helpful and important; I'm objecting only to the signifier, not the signified. The reason I think "privilege" is an unhelpful term is that the word's ordinary meaning hides the fact that it has a nonobvious technical definition, leading the uninitiated to think they know what's being talked about, draw (wrong) conclusions, and get offended/drag the argument off in the wrong direction/generally mess things up. This annoys equality campaigners and impedes the enlightenment of the uninitiated person.

The workaround is to say "blah blah blah privilege - which I am using in a technical and nonobvious sense which you should read up on quickly if you haven't met it before - blah blah pay gap blah." But this is unsatisfactory because (a) it takes (perhaps unnecessary) extra time and effort from the equality-campaigner every time, (b) you have to do it early on or you're already off down the wrong path.

This is one of the reasons I prefer the term "kyriarchy" to "patriarchy": it sounds like jargon, sure, but it doesn't have an obvious wrong meaning for your interlocutor to focus on. If they haven't met it before, they'll have to ask what it means, and you can tell them, and then you'll both be on the same level.

Some possible objections

1. Who the hell are you to tell us what term to use?

Oh, nobody in particular. Ignore me if you like. But I've seen this failure mode play out a number of times (most recently this morning, kicking this discussion off), and I bet you have too. Think of this as a bug report, which you're free to mark as WONTFIX.

2. Other scholarly disciplines give technical meanings to ordinary words all the time, and that doesn't cause a problem.

Well, sure. But those subjects don't deal with the basic stuff of everyday life. If I see "jerk" in a physics textbook or "exact" in a book on homological algebra, I'm probably going to assume that they're not using those words in their ordinary sense, and turn to the index. It helps that those words are very unlikely to be used in places where their ordinary meanings would make sense, of course. However, if I as an uninitiated person encounter the word "privilege" on a feminist website, in a piece about something I already think I have some handle on, I'll read it with the ordinary meaning, decide it more-or-less makes sense but is WRONG, JUST WRONG, and charge off in the wrong direction.

3. Why should we change our established terminology to make life easier for people who can't be bothered to do their own Google searching?

Well, the problem is not that they can't be bothered to do their own Google searching, it's that they don't realise they need to. Something which flags up "this is a technical term" would solve this problem (while still leaving you with the folks who genuinely can't be bothered to do their own Google searching, who constitute a more intractable problem).

Besides, you want your ideas to be widely disseminated and understood, don't you? Just think about the current penetration of feminist ideas into the wider culture. As a society, we still struggle with "equal pay for equal work" and "rape is bad". Anything more sophisticated, like the concept of privilege, is (I believe but have not checked) understood only by a depressingly tiny minority.

4. We've already got loads of books and websites that use "privilege". Are we meant to change them all?

This is a genuine problem - something I remember vividly from my time among mathematicians is how hard it is to change entrenched terminology. The problem is particularly acute when there's wide agreement that the old terminology is bad, but not about what to replace it with, because then you get lots of splinter factions using different words, and the only sensible default for the unaligned is the bad old terminology.

But as I said above, if "privilege" is entrenched terminology, it's only entrenched for quite a small fraction of the people who would benefit from understanding the concept.

I don't have any good suggestions for how to achieve a switchover, but hopefully one of my lovely commenters will.

5. Do you have a better term to suggest?

Alas, no. Sorry. But perhaps you do?

[Also: Happy International Women's Day! If you're feeling depressed about the much-tweeted statistic that women do 66% of the world's work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property, then cheer yourself up with The Guardian's top 100 women or the Awesome Shit Women Did tumblr.]

Comments

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I'd also be curious to hear more about the ways in which you think the colloquial use of the word 'privilege' differs from the way it's used more 'technically' in feminist (etc) contexts.

Well, I think the colloquial meaning is something like "David Cameron", and the technical meaning includes the following points:

1) conferred by society on groups
2) largely invisible, or perceived as "normal", by the beneficiaries.

This blogger (http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/) doesn't include point (2) in her one-sentence definition, but does include it in her "in a nutshell" pull-quote. I think it's pretty crucial (more on that below), though I'm aware you're much better read than me in this field.

I've been immersed in feminist, anti racist etc writing online for years and don't particularly remember having 'aha! this doesn't quite mean what I assumed it meant' moments around the word 'privilege' myself.

I'm fairly new to this stuff, and had exactly this misunderstanding (and subsequent ugly argument) when I first encountered the term.

I wonder if some of the resistance that you're attributing to genuine miscommunication around the signifier is at heart more to do with resistance to the concept being signified.

Quite possibly, yes. These days I deliberately look for opportunities to treat disagreements as miscommunication, because (a) they very often are, (b) it does wonders for my blood pressure, (c) trolls often get bored in the face of my earnest explanations and wander off, (d) carefully establishing terms early on makes it much easier to have a sensible discussion over the real points of disagreement, whatever they turn out to be.

But! This is where point (2) comes in. A feminist might say "You are privileged", meaning "through no fault of your own, your viewpoint has become warped and untrustworthy; you need a reality check". But what is heard is "you are David Cameron, the vile recipient of unearned largesse". This is hard to accept, even if true. But the crucial point, the one about unreliable viewpoints, is much less uncomfortable (I think). Does that make any sense?

[andustar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I guess I see (2) as more of an... optional effect of (1) than an integral part of what 'privilege' is, but I completely take your point that it's actually a pretty key aspect.

I'm really not an authority by the way, I just lurk and read a lot!

Here's another take on privilege I read a while back and liked, that agrees with you:

Privilege is a smooth road. When you have privilege, you still have to travel from point A to point B to get what you want. It may tire you out. But the road you walk is smooth. It's paved. The sun is shining and birds are chirping and there's a cool breeze helping you along. You don’t even notice that your road is smooth; you expect it to be, and it is, so you walk it. Whereas the less privileged person beside you, also trying to get from point A to point B? There are potholes in his road. There are man-made barriers that he has to climb over. There may be a pit of snakes. Oh, and it’s raining, and he can’t afford a coat or umbrella. Sucks to be him.

This is not to say that your road is always and entirely smooth. Just the portion of it affected by race, in the case of white privilege. Or the portion of it affected by gender, in the case of male privilege. And so on. This doesn't invalidate the individual and specific pain you may feel as you walk your road, because you have chronic arthritis, and your son has cancer, your boss is a sociopath, and your marriage is falling apart. We all have our individual pain. Privilege is the absence of pain in areas you can't even see.