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Lord Morgue
00:07 / 05.12.04
Maybe I don't want to be used as an example. Go find someone else to put in the stocks and throw fruit at, you insecure little freak.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
01:44 / 05.12.04
You appear not to be following how moderation works on Barbelith, Morgue. Try here

Private message a moderator in the relevant forum and talk to them about the issues raised and try and persuade them otherwise. If that doesn't work, bring it to the attention of the board in the Policy. Remember the moderators are doing all of us a favour, so be polite above all! Explain your case, avoid personal attacks and see what everyone else thinks.

If the consensus is against you, RETIRE GRACEFULLY.

Or, better yet, show everyone how it should be done. All the tools you'll need are over at HowToMakeYourOwnBoard.

Actions have consequences. You posted it, other people responded to it, it became part of the dialogue of the thread. If I were you I would be delighted that, albeit accidentally, you managed to say something of interest. If it's really important to you, we could replace it with, say:

(Lord Morgue ranted drunkenly here about how poor people live in luxury and breed like vermin, while he works hard for his money)

And then move to delete my immediate response and your subsequent contributions to this thread as offtopic. Please PM me or another moderator with your thoughts on this rather than continuing to rot the thread.
 
 
Lord Morgue
06:45 / 05.12.04
Y'know, I like the Barb, but as long as people like you are running the place, it's never going to reach its potential. You confuse moderation with domination, and don't care if the community goes to hell, as long as you're top of the pecking order.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:13 / 05.12.04
Please PM me or another moderator with your thoughts on this rather than continuing to rot the thread.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
00:55 / 27.12.04
. We don't practice what we preach. For the truly poor, we exist within the mid-to-higher echelons of this cheating idle rich Fly refers to. We are the bad guys, who exist having taken advantage of unfair trade laws, historical oppression, etc. So, yeah, we're complicit - but it's not enough to 'recognise our complicity' in the situation many cultures, communities and individuals find themselves in. If we say that we understand our complicity but don't even attempt to make the effort to change some of what we're complicit in, we're not just complicit, we're hypocrites.

Anyone wanna engage with this? I admit, I'm curious...
 
 
No star here laces
02:30 / 28.12.04
I wanna engage with it, but am slightly scared to.

I think there's a real problem here in breaching the gap between theory and practice.

Before I return to what I mean by that, I'd first say that I totally concur. Even if we all gave half our income to charity we'd still be hypocrites. In fact by simply paying taxes, purchasing our goods at supermarkets at sale price and having our salaries paid into a bank account we are complicit. These structures are not separable from the inequalities they generate.

On the other hand, such purism hardly seems constructive. We can beat ourselves up about this, but it doesn't alleviate any poverty.

But then, actually, the idea that occupying a privileged position means one cannot have a moral stance on the existence of that privilege is actually a non-sequitur. To that extent, I'm glad that class rhetoric is largely absent from political debate these days. Help from the middle classes is still help.

So I suppose it depends what your question really is. If it's "what should we do to help?", the answer is "fuck knows".

However, I do know that if the only way to help people is by martyrdom and sacrifice it's a) unlikely to happen and b) unsustainable.

Which is what I mean by the reality gap. Morally it feels like we should be donating all worldly possessions to charity etc. In reality, will simply saving up lots of cash and going on holiday to deprived areas of the world and helping build their tourist industry actually do more? Quite possibly...

It's the classic problem of consequentialist thinking...
 
 
diz
18:26 / 28.12.04
Thinking about it, there are surely only two positions one can hold if one opposes the redistribution of wealth in principle:

a) Material inequality does not currently exist in the world to any serious extent.

OR

b) The material inequality that exists in the world today is on balance a good thing.

The first position regards a wilful disregard for the facts; I confess I find that slightly more forgiveable than any mentality that gives rise to the second position.

the second position sounds slightly less horrible if you unpack the phrase "on balance" a little. many libertarians would argue that, while inequalities of wealth are bad, all proposed remedies which involve state intervention and the forcible redistribution of wealth are worse and are more likely to lead to universal poverty rather than universal prosperity. in other words, current inequalities are "a good thing" only in relative terms.

i think that that's a position which is within the realm of reason and an issue on which sane people of good conscience can disagree.

We don't practice what we preach. For the truly poor, we exist within the mid-to-higher echelons of this cheating idle rich Fly refers to. We are the bad guys, who exist having taken advantage of unfair trade laws, historical oppression, etc. So, yeah, we're complicit - but it's not enough to 'recognise our complicity' in the situation many cultures, communities and individuals find themselves in. If we say that we understand our complicity but don't even attempt to make the effort to change some of what we're complicit in, we're not just complicit, we're hypocrites.

so... what do you propose we do? i don't believe in the value of class guilt for the sake of class guilt. each of us is just as trapped by history and economics as anyone else. i have had the immense good fortune of being born and raised in a time and place where i can live a comfortable life, but i am not in any real sense able to voluntarily abdicate my position of privelege in such a way that would make an appreciable impact on the global situation. if i were to live in a cardboard box under the freeway near my office and donate all the money i don't need for food to charity, my total contribution would be a tiny drop in the ocean of poverty.

of course, one could argue that if i could convince everyone else to do the same, no one would be poor. however, we know that's just not going to happen because people just don't work that way. no ad campaign, no religious injunction, no persuasive argument is ever going to convince people to give up their worldly possessions and work hard every day to lift the Third World out of poverty out of the goodness of their hearts. people in large numbers behave in quantifiable, predictable ways, and i can guarantee you that the "live in a box for the betterment of the world" movement is not going to be a big seller.

poverty/inequality is a systemic issue. it's the inevitable consequence of our current economic and technological systems.

a sense of guilt and hypocrisy, or, alternately, rage against the really elite, are the illusions we cling to to feed our own egos on this issue. they allow us to believe that we (or some authority figure) are in control of the situation, that people are poor because of our actions or our failures to act, that our senses of "justice" and "fairness" have some sort of absolute meaning.

i'm increasingly growing to believe that this sort of well-intentioned hand-wringing is basically a unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility that the only real answer to the question "what can we do about poverty and inequality?" is, ultimately, "nothing."

the simple fact is that our economic system creates wealth and creates poverty, and that system is like an organism unto itself, in which we are merely cells. it has immune defenses and other systems to preserve its own integrity, and multiple levels of redundancy and feedback systems which would prevent us from radically altering it, much as our own bodies have defenses to protect themselves against radical genetic re-coding which might be fatal (that is to say, against cancer). we can all serve in our own small ways to push that evolution in a direction which we think is healthier in the long term, but whether or not those efforts succeed largely depend on how adaptive those changes would be for the social organism as a whole.

i mean, i'm sorry. maybe that's too pessimistic for many people (including myself, often enough) but it seems to me that the wonders made possible by the industrial revolutions and the sense of empowerment engendered by the advent of participatory democracy have nurtured a dangerous delusional sense of our own omnipotence. i think the basic presumption that we can "do something" about the broader, sweeping trends of history and social evolution is probably deeply flawed and in need of serious questioning. honestly, for the most part, we're not driving the bus, we're just along for the ride.
 
 
Rev. Orr
20:09 / 28.12.04
Wow. You do realise that that entire post can be read as 'Dude. Fatalism. It's the ultimate moral cop-out clause.', don't you? Does the complexity of modern 'Western' society and the relative powerlessness of the individual really obviate any responsibility to work towards its improvement?

It's easy to point out that I can't change the world overnight on my own (or even in a mighty power team-up with the Legion of Flyboy). One fat, bearded freak in East London deciding that global inequality is bad, yunno, won't solve all the problems that I perceive for the reasons that you list. Does that mean that, for example, the cancellation of any debt held by a 'First-World' nation or institution over a developing nation is a meaningless action or not a worthwhile goal because in and of itself it fails to change everything?

The structures and economics that you describe, the societal organism, did not arrive overnight and neither can or will any replacement. The Industrial Revolution was not a Matrix-style reality shift. Thousands of farm-hands did not turn up to work one morning to be told that they had been relocated to Manchester to work in cotton-mills. Equally, the U.N. is not going to sign a resolution dividing the worlds wealth on a per capita basis next Tuesday and promise not to do it again. If an aim or desire is only attainable incrementally, that does not invalidate its worth. The staggering levels of inequality are uncomfortable and can look insurmountable and it's certainly true that the first steps towards remedying this can be perceived as gesture. That's because they are first steps. You don't climb Everest by standing at the bottom and saying 'Well, building a lift is totally impractical. I think I'll go home.'
 
 
King of Town
15:28 / 06.01.05
I should also point out that anyone who doesn't believe that the redistribution of wealth as a socially responsible principle is a good idea is, in my view, either wilfully ignorant or a fuck.

By itself, I don't 'believe that the redistribution of wealth [is] a socially responsible principle' If all you do is tax the rich and give to the poor then you've done is teach the poor that they needn’t ever work because then they’d just be penalized with taxes. We seem to be married to the idea that there is only so much wealth to go around and only so many jobs to be had. If all the jobless were to start looking for jobs at once, it might be a little problem for them, but when more people are employed, there are more bigger consumers and thus more jobs to go around.

So instead of just handing out charity, the poor should have to work for their welfare check or in some way show how they’re contributing toward society and working toward becoming a gainfully employed citizen rather than a layabout. If every person were working productively then society as a whole would be richer. If everyone were miles above the subsistence level, then couldn’t everyone consider themselves rich? It doesn’t have to be a relative term like my ice-cream is really rich only because some other ice-cream is bland.

On a side note, in my part of the U.S. internet access doesn’t denote privilege. I went to the library to use the internet for a few months when I had no access of my own. Any bum off the streets can do that.
 
 
Lurid Archive
18:15 / 06.01.05
So instead of just handing out charity, the poor should have to work for their welfare check or in some way show how they’re contributing toward society and working toward becoming a gainfully employed citizen rather than a layabout. If every person were working productively then society as a whole would be richer.

"Society as a whole" is a phrase that should set all lefty alarm bells ringing, when deployed in this way. Income inequality in that least socialist of western economies, the US, would leave one sceptical that this kind of tough love is any more than a propoganda tool. Paul Krugman wrote about this, with respect to the '80s, performing a quick "Krugman calculation" that 70 percent of the rise in average family income has gone to the top 1 percent of families. And there is evidence that strong welfare states enable ecomonic mobility.

You can dispute the numbers, of course, (as Krugman says, it can't be long before the US census bureau is denounced as a radical left wing front) but I find it reasonably intuitive that the absence, or patchiness, of a social safety net will tend to enhance the prospects of those who don't need it.
 
 
diz
14:04 / 07.01.05
On a side note, in my part of the U.S. internet access doesn’t denote privilege. I went to the library to use the internet for a few months when I had no access of my own. Any bum off the streets can do that.

"any bum" that had the good fortune to live in a First World country with enough wealth and a sufficiently developed infrastructure to be able to provide well-stocked libraries with internet access to "any bum" who walks in off the streets.

that's exactly what privilege is: the fact that you think of something which would be an aspirational goal for most of the globe as a baseline.
 
 
King of Town
17:44 / 07.01.05
Diz: You're right. Compared to the globe, My whole country is priveleged, and particularly Salt Lake City Metro area. So we've succeeded in spreading the wealth of internet access and made it locally not a privelege anymore. Maybe the rest of the globe can take notes and do likewise.

LS: I'm not sure how your commens apply to what I said. I agree wholeheartedly with welfare in general, but I disagree with encouraging people to not work. My point was that welfare should not be reduced, but restructured in a way that enables people to no longer need it.
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:56 / 08.01.05
So we've succeeded in spreading the wealth of internet access and made it locally not a privelege anymore.

In the same way that, since homeless people all have access to money, you have succeeded in making wealth "locally not a privelege anymore"? Right.

Now, and it is hard to believe that anyone would find this at all surprising, internet access correlates with socio-economic class and race. You might explain this a minor corollary to educational and economic disparities, and I would have some sympathy for that point of view, except that the internet also provides access to information and services that make the effects of its distribution quite unique in conferring a variety of advantages. Libraries certainly do make a difference, but their existence does not eliminate privilege, just as welfare does not eliminate privilege due to wealth.

I agree wholeheartedly with welfare in general, but I disagree with encouraging people to not work.

Its hard for me to reconcile those two, to be honest. Essentially, you are asking the reader to accept that welfare encourages people not to work, which is partly at odds with the way I understand advanced economies to work. That is, no one claims that there is full employment, even potentially, so the encouragement to get people to work, by deploying various sanctions against them, often seems like a case of blaming the victim. Certainly, there is no sense in which getting people to work for benefits can have any economic advantage for the nation, and such schemes have to rely on moral and psychological justications. (Unless, of course, you are suggesting that government directly create jobs by raising its levels of taxation and investment, and give some of the subsequent employment to those currently without jobs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suspect you meant nothing of the sort.)

Moreover, it isn't the way I understand welfare to work (mostly from the UK, rather than the US). People don't generally like being on it, the level of benefits is a fairly strong disincentive in itself and there are already requirements to be actively seeking work. So I probably jumped the gun and assumed that your original statements were very much about cutting benefits, since they don't really seem coherent to me otherwise, especially when combined with your judgemental language. My response to the statement about "society as a whole", however, stands. The point is that the welfare you are criticising for encouraging "layabouts" already helps "society as a whole". And there is evidence that a more generous package than one the US offers might help more. On the other hand, my point about income distribution and growth was meant to highlight the inadequacy of appeals to the work ethic. That is, such appeals are ideological in nature and have nothing to do with commual benefits.
 
 
alas
13:56 / 08.01.05
If all you do is tax the rich and give to the poor then you've done is teach the poor that they needn’t ever work because then they’d just be penalized with taxes.

You know, I'm beginning to understand this gospel of Work as the Way, the Truth, and the Light; No One Comes to Wealth But By Work!

I'm very concerned, now, for the plight of wealthy children. I think their parents hate them. I'm beginning to think that the abuse and neglect that goes on in wealthy homes may be the root of a looming national crisis! Maybe we should start having social workers visit the homes of wealthy people, and take their children away from them, before it's too late.

For instance, wouldn't it be so much better for rich kids to go to urban schools? I don't get why they're always so keen to send them to private schools.

See, because then they'd really have to work to be educated, instead of getting their educations handed to them on high-tech platters by well-trained teachers. . . . Why they're just being trained to be lazy! See, if they had to worry every day about getting shot on their way to school, about where the money for their family's electricity bill is going to come from--should they skip food every other day this month?

After all, I'm sure as the poor are contemplating this question, they're thinking: I would get a really well-paying job and invest all my lunch money in the stock market, but then I'd have to worry about capital gains taxes!

See, if rich kids went to these urban schools, they'd see how easy poor people really have it in this country!

WAIT! It's a conspiracy! That's why we keep rich people locked up in those gated communities--we don't want the secret to get out. Poor people have it so easy, I mean: they pretty much get work shoved in their faces, whereas rich people, see, they have to work really hard to understand work, and sometimes they just can't quite make it: they watch their maids doing their housecleaning, they think one time they actually saw a garbage man come by at 6 am, but it's pretty hard to understand just how easy it is for the poor.

Oh, and it's especially great in the U.S. if the car breaks down, because then mom'll have to walk four miles, on four lane roads with no side walks, one day a week, because the bus doesn't run on Saturday in the midsize city where the family lives, to get to her job, which pays $5.35/hour. Unfortunately, her kids are also at home that day, so that's an extra two hours she can't be at home. See there! Those poor kids are learning self-reliance! They should be grateful! Rich kids are almost never left alone like that to struggle on their own. They're being horribly neglected by not being neglected!

See, that's what rich kids should be experiencing. I'm just so concerned that they're becoming lazy. Thank god for welfare-to-work programs! Do you think we could start a "trust fund"-to-work program, for kids who may never have to pay a "death tax" (that's the brilliant name that a republican strategist came up with for "estate taxes" that EVERY INDUSTRIAL COUNTRY HAS. I'm sure that strategist had NO IDEA he was hurting rich people by keeping them further and further from work!)

Under these conditions, how will these rich people stay wealthy? Man, I had NO IDEA the Republicans in the U.S. are ACTUALLY working for the poor! It's brilliant!
 
 
King of Town
03:26 / 09.01.05
"Society as a whole" is a phrase that should set all lefty alarm bells ringing, when deployed in this way.

I think I just realized what you meant here. It was rather slow of me to not realize right away. I imagine most conservatives include the incredibly rich in 'society as a whole' but in my mind they're kind of seperate. When I say 'society as a whole' I mean middle-class and below. The rich wouldn't notice a huge difference in a small growth of their wealth, but the rest of us would in ours.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:08 / 11.01.05
I've just read this thread in one go, and a lot of half-thoughts stirred in my brane as I did so which I hope will come back to me as I reread it and continue to engage with all of you. In the meantime there were three things I wanted to say. The first is connected to Lord Morque's drunken post about how he is 'privileged' to work in a job he hates: I think it raises an important point. On the one hand, yes, it's important to recognize that all of us posting here are probably in the top, like, two per cent income bracket globally speaking, and that certain things we take for granted are not ecologically or socially viable. On the other hand, though - and this is something that my girlfriend, tangent (who was a lesbian socialist feminist separatist in the 1970s) (hello tangent) has said to me enough times for it to start sticking - it's also important to recognize that most of us, despite our relative affluence and comfort, do not own the means of production and are therefore in the same structural position vis-a-vis global capitalism as less affluent and comfortable people.

The second thing is related to the above. Marx said that the capitalist has to pay the proletarian enough wages for the prole to be able to reproduce his [sic] labour. That means that the wage-worker has to be able to afford to house himself and keep himself nourished and well enough to continue showing up to work (in the classic origin of the family, private property and the state type scenario, he also has to be able to afford enough leisure time between himself and his wife to do the domestic labour, which is part of reproducing the waged labour). But anyway, Marx saw leisure activities as part of that reproduction of labour: he said that the French worker must be able to afford wine, the English worker to afford beer. So these things are not luxuries, to Marx, but part of the subjugation of the proletariat. One of the things I would like this thread to do - and I think this is the really genuinely valuable impulse in Nick's original post - is to break down the binary between 'necessity' and 'luxury'. People need art, love, leisure activities, wine, beer, X-boxes, travelling theatre companies, music, dance, sport, games, the possibility of learning and communicating with others, creating and sharing cultural artefacts. These are not luxuries (or privileges) to be added on to a certain 'base' level of survival - shurely the most basic grasp of post-structuralism should prevent us from thinking there is an absolute (moral) division between 'needs' and 'desires'?

In some ways the idea I'm about to formulate is disingenous and possibly dangerous, and I'd love some of you to engage with it, but... I've started doing something which I think is like what Nick means by 'broadening privilege'. That is, instead of thinking that it is somehow morally reprehensible of me to spend money on clothes or CDs or DVDs, I ask myself (maybe in a sort of Kantian way) whether I would deny music or personal adornment or art/drama in general, to people with less wealth or 'advantage' than me. And in general, I wouldn't. (Obviously this isn't an absolute argument either, since there's something just viscerally disgusting about, say, spending a thousand quid on a suit to wear to lecture on global inequality. But I think there's something to it, and if I rephrase Nick's first post in terms of shifting the definition of necessity/luxury, then I totally agree.)

I would, however, be very wary of using the word 'privilege' here. In its etymology, the word means something like 'outside of the law' (Haus, correct me here?) - priv as in deprived and lege as in legal. So technically, talking about how privileged you are refers to the ways in which the law is applied to you.

There was a good example in the 'marriage' thread a long time ago, when one poster insisted that legal marriage did not entail sexual monogamy, since ze was legally married to hir primary partner but their relationship was polyamorous, and they both had other sexual partners. Now, in my own life the category of 'marriage' has arisen twice: once when I was going to marry a friend's brother so that he could stay in the UK and not have to do military service in Algeria, and once when I was trying to get tangent into UK as my same-sex partner, on the grounds that our relationship was 'akin to marriage'. In both those cases, if the Home Office had found that I, my friend's brother or tangent had been having sex with someone else (and they were legally entitled to do all sorts of intrusive stuff in order to find out whether or not this was the case), the marriage would have been declared legally invalid and brother/tangent would have been deported. So, in terms of the law, the poster on the marriage thread is privileged due to being in a citizen, heterosexual relationship: the strict terms of the law are not, in practice, applied to hir, and hir marriage - despite being just as invalid according to the terms of the legal contract as mine would have been - is protected by law and custom. (Ze is, of course, doubly privileged in relation to me and tangent, who had to prove that we were akin to marriage, so we could be held to a strict legal definition of 'marriage' and punished for deviating from it, but at the same time we wouldn't have got any of the benefits of marriage in terms of next-of-kin, inheritance, visitation, etc, rights. Apart from the right to be in the same country, which is a pretty big one, I do admit...)

Similarly with stop-and-search laws in the UK, which are not applied in practice to white people: this is a very technical and correct occurrence of white privilege. Because you are white, certain laws are just not applied to you. I think that's a more accurate and useful way to think of 'privilege' than the half-guilty, half-religous, muddled bundle of 'advantage, wealth, luxury' that's haunting this thread.
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:24 / 11.01.05
But surely you wouldn't underdstand *white privilege* as exclusively the province of preferential legal arrangements? Heterosexual privilege would not disappear simply if the institution of marriage was abolished and male privilege exists despite the lack of any legal underpinning I can think of OTTOMH.

Or, to turn it on its head, the proposed UK law to restrict hate speach against Muslims (not sure of the details here) wouldn't constitute a privilege. Or if it did, it is one that needs to be taken in the context of considerations other than the legal. Or would you just not use the word "privilege" in any of these cases?
 
 
Cat Chant
10:58 / 11.01.05
But surely you wouldn't understand *white privilege* as exclusively the province of preferential legal arrangements? Heterosexual privilege would not disappear simply if the institution of marriage was abolished and male privilege exists despite the lack of any legal underpinning I can think of OTTOMH

It's not so much the legal arrangements as the application of those arrangements. Or, I suppose, a combination of the two. If white people were not preferentially treated by the law - both by the ways the laws are written and by the ways the laws are applied - then in what would white privilege consist? (That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical one.) There would (or might - it's such a hypothetical situation that it's hard to tell) still be racism, but would there still be white privilege as such?

What I see as the problem that this thread is crystallizing is that the term 'privilege' is being used in three ways. Firstly, there's the luxury/necessity divide, where 'privilege' is synonymous with 'access to luxuries', and I don't think that's useful at all, for the reasons I sketched above. Secondly, there's 'privilege' in its etymological sense, to designate the way in which certain groups are not subject to the law in the same way as others (alas's post about the state's duty to intervene in wealthy families gets at this too: child protection agencies and so on are historically a mechanism for legitimating state intervention in families of lower socio-economic class and/or of oppressed races/ethnicities). And thirdly there's 'male privilege' or 'white privilege', which seems to mean something like power.

So the problematic thing, for me, is the use of the term 'privilege' to blur these three very distinct things - they're related, but calling them all by the same name obscures rather than illuminates the specific mechanics of that relation. I would argue for using 'privilege' to designate the relation to the law of a certain group, and find other terms to articulate/express the mechanisms (wealth distribution, cultural normativity, 'power', etc) by which certain groups are differentially positioned to the law in this way. Certainly in very recent history male power has been legally underpinned, and in some ways it still is (for example, in the subordinate legal status of part-time and temporary jobs [no holiday pay/pension entitlement etc], which are disproportionately held by women). I don't mean that privilege is legally enshrined - the stop-and-search example should show that. There's nothing in the law that makes stop-and-search into a racist practice: white privilege, or exemption from the strict application of the law, does that.

But thanks, Poster Formerly Known As Lurid (sorry, forgot new name) - I'm going to keep thinking about that and come back to it later.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:51 / 11.01.05
I would, however, be very wary of using the word 'privilege' here. In its etymology, the word means something like 'outside of the law' (Haus, correct me here?) - priv as in deprived and lege as in legal. So technically, talking about how privileged you are refers to the ways in which the law is applied to you.

Sort of... "privus" can mean "deprived", but in most cases it just means "private" or "individual". "Deprive" is fromt he cognate "privo, -are". "Privilegium" originally has the meaning of the application of the law to an individual - a law in favour of or against an individual - but subsequently shrank in meaning to a law in favour of an individual - a prerogative. So, it is the privilege of a gentleman to be allowed to carry a sword, it's the prvilege of a scholar to pasture goats on the quad, and so on - a specific law that applies to a specific person (or more generally kind of person).

So, it's kind of how you describe it, but etymologically in negative. Functionally, that doesn't make a whole lot of difference, though. In both cases, the law functions in a particular way around an individual, either by applying or not applying - so, you could say that a white person had the privilege of being able to walk through London without being stopped and searched..

Of course, that isn't a law - it's the choice not to apply a law to certain people, which is where Sperduta/Archive's point becomes interesting - there's no written-down law entitling white people to evade stopping and searching - it just happens. Does this make it different from the written-down privilege of heterosexual couples (from the same country, anyway) to have their union accepted and ratified uncritically with a legally binding statement?

On prohibitions against hate speech against Muslims - this is an according-to-Hoyle privilege, as it is a legal entitlement (to be protected by law from having your religious sensibilities offended) applied to a specific group (Muslims), as long as it is not extended to all forms of religion, at which point it ceases to be a privilege and becomes - what? - a right? A universal protection?

On Deva's problems with affluence being tied up in the privilege debate... I dunno. Isn't affluence a way of creating privilege groups, and a way to maintain them? Like, the law may not enshrine the rights of the (comparatively) wealthy to have better housing, better quality water, better healthcare and better policing, but they do nonetheless have that. As such, a purely Marxist approach, where I in my office chair, my boss and a homeless person in Dharfur are all at the same level because none of us control the means of production seems to me to be incomplete...
 
 
Pingle!Pop
12:22 / 11.01.05
It's not so much the legal arrangements as the application of those arrangements. Or, I suppose, a combination of the two. If white people were not preferentially treated by the law - both by the ways the laws are written and by the ways the laws are applied - then in what would white privilege consist? (That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical one.) There would (or might - it's such a hypothetical situation that it's hard to tell) still be racism, but would there still be white privilege as such?

But surely the existence of racism, whether laws which in practice disadvantage people from certain ethnic groups or not, still means that those who aren't affected by it are privileged?

I'd consider privilege to simply be a matter of one's position in relation to others. If one is better off than others - whether it be by having access to money which others don't have, by being able to safely ignore aspects of the law, by being able to kiss one's partner in public without fear of violence - then one is privileged in these respects relative to those who are unable to enjoy such "luxuries".

This doesn't at all mean that having such privilege is a bad thing (though in my lefty mind, the fact that privileges exist, and therefore there are those who are underprivileged, certainly is). For example, I am priveleged compared to those in Abu Ghraib prison by being reasonably assured of not having my basic human rights broached. I am privileged compared to most of the world by having enough to eat and somewhere warm and safe to stay at night.

And this is why I think that "privilege", as it's currently defined, is a perfectly reasonable term, and needn't denote circumstances of which one should feel guilty. I think that all three of your examples above are linked by the fact that they are all examples of certain people being in particular positions which are advantageous compared to the positions held by others - 'access to luxuries' (which others don't have), not [being] subject to the law (which, as you say, others are) and 'male privilege' or 'white privilege' (in oversimplified terms, a series of advantages over others who aren't in similar social positions). I don't see why "privilege" should mean only the relation to the law of a certain group any more than the word "advantage" should only relate to certain situations.
 
 
alas
19:29 / 21.06.07
I wanted to find a place to link this interesting discussion of the overuse/misuse/ of theoretical approaches, such as the privileged/oppressed dichotomy from a blog I really enjoyed called The Unapologetic Mexican (Where Manifest Destiny Goes to Die!)

Here's a snippet:

A NOTE ON THEORY. I wrote, before, on how I was feeling tired of the dynamic that seems to have taken over some blog discourse. The reign of Theory—as in Privilege vs. Not-Privilege, "Internet Race Theory" as I jokingly called it, or Feminist theory, or whatever it happens to be. And I don't mean a wide net, a flexible application of a theoretical area of questioning; I mean one or two soundbytes that seek to litmus test each and every argument offered or thought explored, and consequently validate or invalidate ideas, and draw lines around groups of people.
Do you remember the scene in Good Will Hunting, when the main character (Matt Damon) is able to shut down the cat from Harvard in the bar, because Harvard Dood is (essentially) speaking out of his ass a book? Reciting dusty passages that enthrall every first time reader and make them believe that they have found Truth, when really, they are just being first exposed to a new frame?
A reminder: a theory is a frame. There are many. They have usefulness, but then again, they can exhaust their own usefulness. And when you find yourself reducing everything and anything to an area defined by one body of theoretical terms, you have exhausted the usefulness. Maybe it's a personal call.

He then goes on to critique what he sees as a misapplication of a privilege argument against his own work. I'm interested in how people are thinking of privilege these days on the 'lith...
 
  

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