Do you consider yourself privileged?

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fiby41
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Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by fiby41 »

Do you think you had certain advantages by virtue of birth, opportunities or coincidence that has made your life better?

Lose definition of privilege:

A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

Might be a difficult question to answer but might help us realize how good we have it.

Did
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by Did »

For sure although I prefer the word fortunate
- speak English
- born with brains
- raised in Australia
- parents pushed education which was available
- stable childhood in western city not at war
- skin colour accepted so far

It you can't make a go of it with those things going for you you aren't trying....

chenda
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by chenda »

Yes very much so, almost entirely through luck of the draw at birth.

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Egg
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by Egg »

Absolutely, although not necessarily in the way some here in the UK bandy the term around.

I am privileged because of a financially stable upbringing, parents who emphasized the value of a good education, native English speaking, and a whole host of other reasons. I suspect my privilege is top 1% in the world.

However, I am frequently told to 'check my privilege' on account of being white and male. I resent those things being held against me because I perceive sexism and racism in the UK have reached a bit of an equilibrium where no ethnicity or gender has an overall advantage (not to say they are treated the same but different pros and cons). That's certainly not true of other countries, but I think privilege is context specific.

The final thing I'd say is, privilege to what end? I have enormous financial privilege, but negligible privilege in the pursuit of happiness. I have no science too back this up, but I suspect I am for instance in one of the highest suicide risk demographics in the world.

Toska2
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by Toska2 »

I would add to Did's list:

-born with "drive"
- healthy
-at an economic time that it was easy to earn and store wealth (no child labor, paper money, jobs available)

Did
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by Did »

@ egg Sorry to hear the happiness observation. I wonder where EREs fit on the happiness spectrum. All the legal training / risk analysis / requirement for perfectionism doesn't bloody help let me tell you ! (In my case). Never been happier having pulled the pin though. (Ie quit)

henrik
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by henrik »

Interesting, I've usually considered native English skills a hindrance rather than a privilege, because native English speakers rarely have the need or motivation to learn any other languages:)

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Ego
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by Ego »

I consider myself privileged that I inherited the DNA and have had experiences that allow me to find ways to consider myself privileged.

Yesterday I met a young woman who has all the standard characteristics of extreme privilege yet finds ways to consider herself cursed.

Go figure.

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Egg
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by Egg »

Did wrote:@ egg Sorry to hear the happiness observation. I wonder where EREs fit on the happiness spectrum. All the legal training / risk analysis / requirement for perfectionism doesn't bloody help let me tell you ! (In my case). Never been happier having pulled the pin though. (Ie quit)
I may have been unclear in my post. There's nothing to be sorry about, certainly. I don't mean to imply that I lack some sort of "happiness privilege", merely that my financial advantages don't make much difference there either way. I think material wealth is only ever a life goal for people, as in ERE, for the freedom and security it brings (potentially other things too, but in any case not as an end in itself). Definining privilege as access to material wealth, without considering other factors then, is quite narrow, and potentially unhelpful if it is used to insist the privileged self-flagellate and have to account for themselves to others in a way the un-privileged do not.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying that anyone in this thread has equated privilage solely with material privilege, by the way, just making observations based on the fact that that is the way in which the term is usually understood.

IlliniDave
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by IlliniDave »

To a certain extent. By virtue of where I was born, I have a birthright to US citizenship which means I can live, work, and vote here, something my ancestors sacrificed much for. I see luck is the intersection of opportunity and preparation. I am fortunate that I live in a place of abundant opportunity. The hard work and sacrifice that went into the preparation and exploitation of opportunity was not handed to me on a Sterling sivler platter, despite what some of my progressive friends and acquaintances allege. So it's a mixed bag. With the same amount of native ability I could have been born at a different time and/or in a different place and had an entirely different outcome to my life with the same effort and sacrifice on my part. Whether better or worse is a matter of speculation, but imagining it being worse is pretty easy.

Dragline
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by Dragline »

Sure, for most of the reasons stated above. And by the fact that we have access to something called "the internet" that lots of people still are not able to use. But I prefer the term "lucky", as the p-word contains all kinds of baggage about fairness/unfairness and what people "deserve".

Most people on earth are lucky when compared with those who have the worst lots in life. Of course, you can nearly always identify someone with a better lot, too, but that really just a choice of viewpoint one makes either consciously or unconsciously.

The default unconscious choice for most is to claim victimhood and see others as "more privileged", as its a better genetic survival strategy. But its essentially just primitive mammalian envy of what others have or are perceived to have (Rover is content until he sees that dog has a bigger bone than his and it pisses him off enough to fight for it). The seeds of consumerism (and a lot of middle-class politics and scapegoating) built right in.

The conscious alternative looks more like this: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/10/ ... -optimism/

I think a person can only achieve happiness or contentment when they train themselves to stop making such comparisons and/or attaching any meaning to them.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I would ditto Did's list with United States rather than Australia. Within the context of all those givens and, perhaps, my unique generational (Gen X on the cusp of Baby Boomer) perspective, I can't at this juncture in my own life experience decide whether being female lends me more or less privilege. Sexism is inherently different than many other -isms because unless I were to join some very edge dwelling micro-minority group of non-child-bearing lesbian separatists, I can't sensibly claim to belong to the tribe of my own gender. A change in gender-policy that positively affects my daughter might negatively affect my son. I think that I have and could continue to benefit from both a certain amount of female-positive affirmative action, but also feminine privilege. Because I had no brothers and a very supportive, engaged father and a very ambitious (although cuckoo-bananas) mother, I was given erector sets and dolls, cute little dresses and encouragement to excel at math, etc, etc, etc, , and my early marriage was with a man who was raised in an even more feminist setting. So, it wasn't until I was in my 40s and the failure of my conceived-as-egalitarian-marriage resulted in my experience of being in relationship with older men and men from less feminist cultures that I suddenly became aware of a wider reality that led to a sudden personal realization along the lines of "Oh, he REALLY thinks that I am like a baby." Now, I see it everywhere. So, I think that both the advantage and disadvantage of being a female member of the most privileged 1% is that you are granted or assumed to have less personal responsibility. IOW, I think what would happen to me if I woke up tomorrow totally broke-azz on a cot in a homeless shelter would be somewhat different than what would happen to my exact male peer, in that in addition to being able to immediately derive benefit from my inherent cultural capital and personal resources, I would be almost guaranteed that somebody would attempt to "rescue" me because my presence in that context would be like a highly discomforting sign of the coming apocalypse. Like if you saw June Cleaver by the side of the road with one broken heel, a smudge of dirt on her cheek, trying to hitch a ride.

EdithKeeler
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by EdithKeeler »

Do you think you had certain advantages by virtue of birth, opportunities or coincidence that has made your life better?

Absolutely, for all the reasons previously mentioned.

But I often think about the "roads not taken," things that could have made a huge difference had they gone differently or if I'd made a different choice, and I wonder where that "privilege" comes in and where my own personal "stuff" comes in. Like sure, born in the US, good middle class family, but parents divorced, and things went a little weird. However, because of decisions I made--stayed away from drugs, have always been a "worker" type, working since the age of 15, big reader, chose to go to really good college and was able to get in, etc. But what made me make those decisions that others didn't make? A friend from high school with an ostensibly identical background--her parents divorced around the same time, she got into drugs, a series of bad decisions around men, etc. and even did a stint in jail for drugs. White, middle class privilege gone a different way.

I wonder about those "accidents of fate," getting the good teacher in the third grade versus the bad teacher, or being able to start school almost a year earlier because of the date my birthday fell. Ending up being friends with someone in high school who I also competed with, if only in my head.

I read "The Other Wes Moore," and I highly recommend it. True story of 2 guys growing up in the same neighborhood, similar backgrounds, with significantly different outcomes.

I have a lawyer friend who had a pretty bad alcohol and drug problem, and sometimes it still rears its ugly head. He has three sons who, despite their dad's erratic life, have turned out really well. My friend comments to me all the time about it, what luck, and then brings up a buddy who has three kids too, all of who are in or have been in prison.

In other words, you can have the privilege in the world, but you can still screw it up...

OldPro
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by OldPro »

"might help us realize how good we have it."

Living in Canada, I see people every day who do not realize how good they have it. That applies to many things. Healthcare for example. It is human nature to take for granted that which you have always had and never had reason to compare. That is why I think foreign travel is one of the best things anyone can do in their lives. I can see how good Canadians have it compared to people in other countries I have lived in or visited. Someone who has never travelled, does not have that same perspective.

But what comes first to my mind when you write about what, 'might help us to realize how good we have it' is a saying I came across many years ago. https://winterlyrics.files.wordpress.co ... teful3.jpg I'm sure many people have heard or read it but you can't really understand it unless you have no shoes.

So in a sense, you cannot realize what privileges you have unless you lose those privileges. That may be the only real way to realize how good we have it.

cmonkey
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by cmonkey »

fiby41 wrote:A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.
I don't know how personality manifests, whether through environment, DNA or both, but I feel privileged to be an INTJ, especially as I work through some of the shortcomings of this personality type. I feel it lends quite a bit of advantage during this part of history.

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GandK
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by GandK »

Generally, yes, as many have stated eloquently above.

When I was a teenager (1991) I had an opportunity to spend a few weeks in Cuba, which Americans almost never got to do back then. At an incredibly impressionable age, I saw poverty, oppression and Communism writ large. I've never thought of myself as anything but fortunate since. I wish all 17-year-olds could do the same.

That said, gratitude for macro advantages can be a challenge for a lot of people because those advantages are hard to apply in micro situations like daily interactions. Few people walk around being mindful about world inequality. They think about what they're doing, or what they're going to do next. And in a group of Americans, being an American isn't much of an advantage. I usually find that my most effective social advantage is "whatever I have that people in my immediate vicinity do not have." Which could be anything.

@7w5: I'm also on the fence about whether being female is a plus or a minus. I've likely benefited, as I was a very attractive young woman who went into a male-dominated field. I absolutely traded on my looks in my twenties, and on the fact that people always underestimated the intelligence and ability of someone who looked the way that I did. I don't think most women benefit from being a woman, though. You pretty much have to be either conventionally attractive, at/near your reproductive peak, or be a new mother in a situation that values motherhood to leverage being female. And those three scenarios do not cover most women. They also overlap one another to a great degree.

BPA
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by BPA »

chenda wrote:Yes very much so, almost entirely through luck of the draw at birth.
I agree! My first lesson in privilege was my father telling me when I was ten years old that he would never hire a woman, someone who was black, or anyone who was First Nations. Of course, he didn't use those words to describe them. He was responsible for hiring for well-paying jobs in the steel industry that didn't require anything past a tenth grade education.

He wasn't a nice man.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

GandK said: I don't think most women benefit from being a woman, though. You pretty much have to be either conventionally attractive, at/near your reproductive peak, or be a new mother in a situation that values motherhood to leverage being female. And those three scenarios do not cover most women. They also overlap one another to a great degree.
I agree that these are reasons for which a woman might derive benefit for being a woman, but I disagree that they are the only ones. For instance, imagine the character of Aunt Bea from the Andy Griffith Show on the side of the road with a flat tire. She fits none of your categories, but I would say it would be highly likely that somebody would stop to help her out because she seems highly conventionally feminine, even if utterly lacking in sexual/romantic appeal or reproductive ability. Also, you are highly underestimating the desire for variety, relative attractiveness and/or the ambient depravity of the male of our species if you think that only conventionally attractive females get P.O.P. , the second "P" only sometimes stands for "pretty."

George the original one
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by George the original one »

Yes, privileged like a king, but not burdened like a king!

Hankaroundtheworld
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Re: Do you consider yourself privileged?

Post by Hankaroundtheworld »

My first reaction to this would be similar to others so far, and I still feel that way. However, when traveling around the world, I also have seen many people that perhaps live on the edge of being "poor" or have less opportunities in education, etc.. , but still are happy nevertheless, and they might feel privileged because of having a nice family/friends or to have just enough food on the table, etc.. Life itself has no real goal (unless you are religious), and as such "feeling being privileged" might not hold so much value, because towards what? I am inclined to say "to reach one's potential", but that is still a very western view to the world, and many cultures have a different perspective to that. So, as a quick conclusion, perhaps the best privilege/skill is your attitude to daily life, enjoying the small things and be happy with life in general (whatever it brings). Of course, I left out the obvious situations that are not so good, like getting born in a country where this is war ongoing, or wrong values (like people being against homosexuality, what if you are born like that in that country...) . Just some thoughts.

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