The Distress of the Privileged

I tried to talk about privilege with a conservative acquaintance, and he got mortally offended by me pointing out his (and my own) heterosexual white maleness. He spouted off some nonsense about how his family wasn't rich (I think that's what they think 'privilege' means) and other such foolishness regarding bootstraps and hard work and personal responsibility. I tried to explain that it's not a criticism to say "you live with privilege that others don't" but he just shut off and wouldn't even attempt to hear me out. It was weird, like he was scared that if I talked about it too much then some vile entity would appear from thin air and make him live on food stamps.

I'm really just repeating what Johan Osterman said, but, Nazism had some degree of an "innoculatory effect" in Europe. In the wake of WW2, the great majority of people developed a profound aversion to Nazism or anything that looks like it. If you're a young white male suffering from "privilege-loss shock", and you start hunting around for an ideology that fits your feelings and a movement of like-minded peers, you end up joining a group that either are Neo-Nazis or are seen as Neo-Nazis by the centrist majority. Americans hate Nazis too, of course, but in American culture the Nazi is just a kind of stock cartoon villain. In European culture, he's the face of the reaction against modernity, the appeal to racial unity and superiority, and the nostalgic longing for the good old days when your in-group's privilege was unchallenged. So, in Europe, the right-wing political fringe has helpfully placed itself under a banner which is utterly politically toxic for the majority, although there are some signs these days of this effect wearing off.

I grew up in India. Needing to avoid dead bodies in the street when a small child did teach me that I was pretty damn privileged.

It's amusing also listen to my Indonesian friends complain about the Difficulty Of Keeping Servants (Indonesia is going through an economic boom, so, much as in like early 20th C Europe, people are going to work as shop assistants/ waitresses/ factory hands rather than as domestic servants)

The first part of the book is pretty theory oriented (albeit very well-written, given the genre), but Ann Laura Stoler's Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power might prove a really interesting read/skim to anyone interested in the colonial/postcolonial mindset and how servants and employers/masters view each other. It's unusual because it's a chronicle of a failed hypothesis: she expected that by interviewing and analyzing what former domestic servants under the Dutch racially/culturally/economically divided regime in Indonesia she would find a lot of really specific ideas to contrast about how the participants in the domestic relationship felt about one another. Instead, she found that where the employers had elaborately constructed memories of the role of the servant's life in theirs, the former servants often displayed something that I would describe as something aking to a PTSD-type recollection of the experience of being intimate with their "betters", in every sense of both words. For me as someone who grew up in a culture where "middle class" meant having servants from vastly different socioeconomic strata and in many ways being raised by them, it was pretty heavy stuff.

The parts of it on evolving notions of race (especially as a result of Stoler's transparency around her methods) during the course of colonial occupation and the whole marriage to locals phenomenon are no less riveting, but not as directly relevant.

These are far points in addition to the religious and class-based factors. Specifically, the uniquely screwed up legacy of the South.

L_King, Thanks. Both my wife and I were brought up with/ by live in servants so will be an interesting read.

One of the more amusing lines I remember from a Nature report on origins of AIDS - that it could not have been widespread in West Africa in pre-independence times as, given the sexual procolivities of English colonial civil servants, it would have spread back to UK...

My theory (born from a discussion w/ a friend): Post Industrial-Revolution, Europe experienced a gnarly capital/labor crisis that was resolved via the establishment of the ol' social democracy stuff we liberals long for, along with all the other happy crappy stuff that ended up infecting European culture. The vast natural wealth of the United States, coupled with the nature of the postwar years, papered over the capital-labor conflict (it was getting pretty gnarly in the lead up to the Depression, but subsided), and as a result we kept our pre-industrial revolution culture of individuality as the paramount value and here we are.

I've always believed in the paramount virtue of individual freedom, partly because I see it as so fragile. Throughout history the individual rights have been restricted in the name of a collective idea - God, the state, race, whatever "ism" was dominant in that time and place. The American achievement in enshrining those freedoms in their constitution is always something I've admired in our southern friends, and wished we could emulate here in Canada. That said, I've tried to come to terms with the idea of privilege and to accept that being a white heterosexual male Canadian provides a completely different framework in which those individual freedoms exist than others who aren't part of that demographic. It's an ongoing process, and I doubt it will end with me extolling the wonders of social democracy. I don't really like social anything.

Obviously a big part of it is the natural tendency to ignore one's position in the greater picture, and that it's just mo fun to complain about stuff if you admit you might have it better than someone else! That and so many (white/male/both) people just fail to realize that belonging to their demographic leaves them often free of:

-Immediate mistrust or scrutiny
-Radically altered/tailored behavior of various kinds. My personal non-favorite is what anecdotally to me seems a higher likelihood of police officers issuing tickets/arrests for the same infractions others get let off with a warning.
-Unwanted advances in literally any public setting. Ask a woman sometimes about whether or not she ever stops to get gas after dark.

Now all of these things, rather their absence, falls under the umbrella of "Well OF COURSE none of these things happen, they're not supposed to!" Ignoring of course that just because something ought not to happen, in no way does that mean it does not to many. So people confuse privilege as meaning getting something as opposed to the just-as-common if not moreso not being subject to some treatment or situation (or getting the worse outcome).

The Economist has run similar articles about the same thing in India and I think a South American country. I guess finding good servants is a global problem these days.

I fully understand my white male privilege. While I was parked in an alley waiting for some friends, Atiba and I started cleaning my car. Atiba is a young black male, and when the police came by they wound up arresting him. Granted, he had an outstanding warrant for possession, but the only reason the police even took a second look was because he was a black man. I can say this with certainty because I lived and cleaned my car out in an alley 3 blocks away for 5 years and was never hassled.

As a white male I have privilege, and sometimes I abuse it by putting on a suit, looking important, and walking into VIP areas, conventions, etc. It works.