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How much class privilege do you have?

  
  

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Janean Patience
09:58 / 06.11.07
Should I be proud to be white

Race isn't even on there, is it? Or sex? Or geographical location, another overridingly important factor?
 
 
This Sunday
10:09 / 06.11.07
Way x-post, but to clarify, I think I'm using 'pride' as interchangeable with 'grateful' or 'satisfied.' A feeling of self-respect and personal worth, as my dictionary has it.

Should I be proud to be white, or proud that I had the right vocabulary to get into an elite university ahead of potentially more deserving candidates?

Vocab? Yes. Talking the talk's a good skill, it's something to be proud of, in any instance. Race? I don't think the quiz is necessarily scoring for race. It's an implicit factor in many of the step-forward points, to a strong degree, but not totally, not necessarily. There should be a question of race (or, further, pretended race - passing gets you far, if you can pull it off, and I'm willing to forgive kids that one) if they could pull it off functionally, and there should be a clause regarding not stepping all over people because of your privilege.

Take your benefits where you can get them, but in a sense, the quiz steers clear of specifically-race-based privilege, and even so, I'm proud of my genetic stock, excluding a few not-so-great individuals, shouldn't you be proud of your heritage* and where it's put you?** Not so much, proud of the state of the system you're in, no, but proud of where and how you stand in the system? It's not like White people can, as a whole, improve the situation by becoming magickally nonwhite, and nonwhites passing only get a leg up sometimes, and it only gets one so far if anywhere at all. Stupid one-drop laws would make me, um, African American, too, and Chinese off my Grandmother, but not even that White heritage assures any of the things listed in the first post.

*So long as 'pride' doesn't come to mean 'certainty/suspicion of superiority,' be proud when you can?

** This is why we have 'thank our ancestors' and 'my grandparents were cool' threads, I would imagine.
 
 
This Sunday
10:12 / 06.11.07
And I'll leave that post there, to possibly feel stupid about when I'm fully sober, but in the meantime, I'll just add: It's a very careful selection of points, that game. Major factors like race, sex, build, religion, or sexuality are nothing more than intuitable in any of the points, if that.
 
 
Quantum
10:23 / 06.11.07
The obvious answer to the question "why slip from privilege to class?" is that it's a lot easier to make it clear that you're not too posh than it is to deny that you're privileged.

Doesn't that assume that people are keen to be (seen to be) working class, like a sort of socialist one upmanship? What's wrong with poor posh people?

I generally take issue with the idea that your parents define your class, and I think there's plenty of privileges I have that are unrelated to stuff on that list. Like accent (which I think Petey mentioned), that's an advantage I have which is largely independent of wealth or IRA funds (what is an IRA anyway?).
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:39 / 06.11.07
I'm proud of my genetic stock

I don't see why, flatscan.
 
 
Jack Fear
10:42 / 06.11.07
Decadent: I certainly wouldn't use "proud" and "grateful" as synonyms; if anything, gratitude has connotations of humility. We are proud of the things we have achieved for ourselves; we are grateful for the things we have been given.

I am proud of my SAT score; I am grateful for the chance to have taken the test at all.

Then again, I only scored an 8, so I am naturally inclined to humility, having grown up in circumstances rather 'umble.
 
 
Jack Fear
10:49 / 06.11.07
(An 8 on the privilege test, that is, not an 8 on my SAT. If that were the case, I'd be grateful that I'm able to stand upright and speak in full sentences.)

(Not that I'm not grateful for that anyway. I'm easy to please, me.)

(Note: This is blatantly untrue.)
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:51 / 06.11.07
An IRA is an Individual Retirement Account - like a personal pension. You can see why Americans get a bit confused about the Troubles.

I take issue with the idea that your parents define your class, and I think there's plenty of privilege I have that are unrelated to stuff on that list.

Well, you introduced that idea, I think, Quantum - the questions on the quiz seem to be aimed at upbringing, and the advantages parental wealth and education provide, rather than class in the "dad's a welder, mum's third in line to the throne" sense, although it mixes causes and effects. "Did you have a college fund" and "did you have your own TV/phone line" are both ways of asking "do you come from a wealthy family?", essentially.

Certainly there are points of privilege not on the list - I mentioned race as one, above. Speaking of which, DD - I'd suggest we come back to this one when you're sober, in case we lose time talking about something you don't actually seek to espouse, but I think "vocabulary" may have nuances, possibly, that you are not picking up on. For example, I not only had the available words to interact with the elite university, I also had knowledge and coaching of what I ought to be saying. That's not something you are likely to get from wandering around a school library randomly picking books, and it seems awfully unwise to suggest that it doesn't provide a competitive advantage.

I'm not going to touch on the question of whether I am proud of or satisfied with the longer history of my "genetic stock", because I have no idea what you mean, nor what my genetic stock is. Am I proud of possessing the genes controlling my skin colour? No more than I am proud to have ten toes.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:54 / 06.11.07
(Not that I'm not grateful for that anyway. I'm easy to please, me.)

Ten toes pride!
 
 
petunia
11:20 / 06.11.07
23

In a sense I feel a definite pride about this - I'm aware that my grandparents worked fucking hard to bring themselves from pretty crappy conditions to a position where they could get an education, as well as give their kids an education. My parents have worked really hard to bring me and my sister up in increasingly nice conditions, while making sure we stay aware of our position as privileged individuals. I am proud of the effort these people have made, which in turn makes me grateful to be in the position I hold.

So what do people feel is the benefit of exercises like this? I often read/hear that the presumed meaning of these games is to make people feel all bad and dirty about their inheritance (admittedly, they're usually the same people who mention 'white guilt', so...), but for me an element of awareness of my privileges allows me to understand which of them come at the cost of other people's well-being, and which of them I can 'expand' so as to bring others up to a state of privilege.

Cos surely that's the ideal, isn't it? - that one day everybody gets the (option of a) nice TV, nice Car, college education etc.

I suppose it's the tricky difference between 'privilege' as a closed club which limits its access to those it likes and 'privilege' as a progress towards a healthier and better enabled society (as a whole) - the difference between 'I was privileged enough to read the first edition of X' and 'I am one of the privileged few allowed to read X'.

Or am I just trying to justify the awkward feeling I get from scoring 23?
 
 
Jack Fear
11:28 / 06.11.07
Haus: Because of your comment, I Googled "ten toes pride" and now I kind of hate you. (Not so much for Tatchell's piece, which seems to me fairly sensible, but for the unbridled asshattery running amuck in the comments.)
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:45 / 06.11.07

Cos surely that's the ideal, isn't it? - that one day everybody gets the (option of a) nice TV

Martin Luther King's slightly less well-known "I have a Bravia" speech.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:00 / 06.11.07
Sorry. Frivolous. I honestly don't know whether the aim should be for everyone to have a nice TV or car - I think a good thing would be for as few people to have cars as possible, nice or unnice - but yes, I think you're right that the aim is probably for people to think about how they might not be standing on a level playing field in terms of what they have achieved so far. One useful consequence of that is probably that it helps to stop people thinking along the lines of a notional "they" being entirely the authors of their own misfortunes - chippy Muslims, lazy dolies, and so on - when considering differentials of well-being. Does that lead inevitably to a desire to better the lot of their fellow man? Probably not, but it's a good thought-starter on social justice generally, and I imagine in its classroom/workplace incarnation is intended to highlight it in ways which avoid hot buttons - race, gender - which might need their own dedicated training sessions.
 
 
jentacular dreams
12:14 / 06.11.07
For example, I not only had the available words to interact with the elite university, I also had knowledge and coaching of what I ought to be saying. That's not something you are likely to get from wandering around a school library randomly picking books.

Everything I know I learned from Raffles, the gentleman thief.

That half truth aside, I score 10. Lower than I thought I would, but I can't help feeling I mis-scored (up) on a few of them. Most of my pocket money went on books for example, so I bought myself a new one about 3 times a year. And I did live in a single family house, though for a number of years I would be in a room with one parent or the other, never both. So it's not the most comprehensive or accurate test.

I can't help but wonder whether Evil Scientist shares my problem with: The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively. With a lab coat it can go either way realy....
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:27 / 06.11.07
I was having a conversation about class with a friend recently, which was similar to this post. I was trying to protest that I wasn't *that* middle class, or at least I didn't grow up very middle class - my score on the test is a 3, btw. (This was in the context of, "you middle class liberals mean well, but you mostly talk out of your arse".)

She more or less took the position that scoring anything above a zero on the test above - the questions are surprisingly similar to the ones she used - made one middle class. Thats a bit binary, maybe, but I do have a lot of sympathy for the view that more time should be spent examining privilege and less time denying it. That said, I did spend time denying it....which was probably a mistake, but the ugly flip side to denying the existence of privilege is using lack of privilege as a way to dismiss the opinions of others. So I tend to be conflicted about these discussions since I think they can be valuable, but am wary of the potential for them to descend into "my victimhood is bigger than yours" competitions.

Also, when it comes to class it is important to remember that there are two competing uses of it; this has already been touched upon above. One is class as culture, and the privilege of class consisting of impression, prejudice and mores. I think - I'm stealing this from Walter Benn Michaels, actually - that the class as culture can serve an ideological purpose in that it avoids discussion of class as economics and so one can happily oppose class privilege without the smallest commitment to changing the primary and economic mechanism that keeps the privilege in place.
 
 
Evil Scientist
13:10 / 06.11.07
I can't help but wonder whether Evil Scientist shares my problem with: The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively. With a lab coat it can go either way realy....

S'true, and everyone judges a man with a robot army.

No-one appreciates the struggle of the lonely mad genius.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
13:11 / 06.11.07
9

My parents are both from working class backgrounds (dad's a peasant boy and mum's a fisherman's daughter), but I've always seen myself and my family as middle class. Then again, I ask myself, is there much of working class in Norway these days, or when I grew up in the 80's? If working class is defined as wage labour, sure, most people are/were working class, but materially and relatively to the rest of the world we'd almost all be middle to upper class. Again, it's weird taking that test, because nearly all the questions pertaining to education don't make any sense where I'm from. Schooling, including college, is free and universal, so is healthcare (except dentistry for some reason).

So class, what is it we are talking about here? There's the economics v culture split, but should we maybe slice that pie/define class more in terms of local contexts? (I for one don't think it makes all that much sense to talk of class as culture without being very careful to specify and define exactly what we mean by class in a particular place and time. Or is it enough, for this particular conversation, to define class as all those factors which confer privilege by sorting and ranking individuals into hierarchical groupings?)

For me and my cohort, indeed my parents as well, (primary) education was overwhelmingly the same everywhere, so that did relatively little to differentiate the classes. Access to libraries, art galleries and such has much more to do with geographical location in Norway (which may or may not correspond to big socioeconomic divides). Speaking of geography, I've always felt privileged to grow up on a farm, living practically inside a forest, with easy access to the coast and the sea and all of nature around us. London and the UK is so different in that sense. Rights of passage for instance. In Norway I have allemannsrett, which is the right to free passage across all non-agricultural land (about 95% of the country), including the right to walk across private fields, forests and the like as long as it does not cause any harm or inconvene the owners or users of that land. I can take a bath on a privately owned beach as long as I'm not causing the owners inconvenience (an increasingly contentious term, I might add). Anyway, the point is, there's a heap of actions and positions that can constitute privilege, and with it, class.

Is class as a conceptual resource going the way of left and right in politics - ie increasingly difficult to accurately use with any precise and easily shared content?

##

Sorry about the rambling.
 
 
Quantum
13:11 / 06.11.07
I take issue with the idea that your parents define your class, and I think there's plenty of privileges I have that are unrelated to stuff on that list.

Well, you introduced that idea, I think, Quantum

The test does seem more to do with wealth and literacy than class, although it's touted as a social class scoring game. It seems to be a device to remind people that not everyone has a new car and trust fund, not everyone can read, not everyone gets a hotel holiday etc.
It makes me think how much wealthier most americans are than most foreign folk.
 
 
Dead Megatron
13:43 / 06.11.07
If you count the cruises as "general traveling vacations in a fancy/expensive touristy place" and heat bills as "general electricy bills" (I live in the tropics, mind you), I got a 100% score.

Way, way too high, if you ask me. And a bit unfair, considering I don't remember doing anything to deserve such good luck (not in this incarnation, at least).

That makes me feel grateful and a bit guilty at the same time*. I wish I could share my privileges with everybody in the planet. Or, at the very least, with everybody in my country, which has way too many people scoring 0% in that test.

* as for pride, I'm not proud of myself for having such privileges, but I am proud of my father** for working so hard as to achieve so much, considering that at the time I was born, he was unemployed and we were living in a rental. Real Estate is good business, it seems.

** my mother had a career of her own too, but it was not as nearly as profitable. She's retired now.
 
 
Dead Megatron
13:44 / 06.11.07
It makes me think how much wealthier most americans are than most foreign folk.

A fucking lot...
 
 
jentacular dreams
13:46 / 06.11.07
It seems to be a device to remind people that not everyone has a new car and trust fund, not everyone can read, not everyone gets a hotel holiday etc.

So plus two for ability to read and access the internet?
 
 
Saturn's nod
13:47 / 06.11.07
It's made me think about exactly what the advantageous effects might be of music lessons, or shelves of books no matter how random or useless, or the artworks of talented relatives on the walls around the house. I suppose any context in which one gets potentially helpful input and attention from an adult might provide extra social learning and perhaps an opportunity to develop confidence, perhaps also the opportunity to develop social networks? And any expression of the importance of literacy or art appreciation sets a person ahead?

It seems to me that a lot of us might have been raised by folks who favoured the literacy and cultural parts of the privileges listed? I think those might be the more distributable parts of privilege, rather than the items which are more directly about material wealth.
 
 
petunia
13:52 / 06.11.07
I honestly don't know whether the aim should be for everyone to have a nice TV or car

Sorry, I was lazy in the way I phrased that; I was using car/tv/college as signifiers of affluence, which tends to lead to a greater quality of life. I was trying to avoid the even lazier term (in my view) that is 'progress'.

I was guessing that the aim is that everybody has equal opportunity to the products/processes/institutions that will enable them to live their lives in a healthy and fulfilling manner. I suppose 'quality of life' would work as a better signifier than 'Stuff To Own'...
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
14:02 / 06.11.07
I got 15, though I'm not sure I answered them all correctly as there were some I didn't understand.
 
 
Quantum
14:37 / 06.11.07
I suppose any context in which one gets potentially helpful input and attention from an adult might provide extra social learning and perhaps an opportunity to develop confidence

..which is why I counted one for 'Were read children's books by a parent' even though it was actually my Mum telling me Norse creation myths from memory- I think it's to highlight people with parents who work in the evenings or long hours or two jobs and aren't there when you go to bed, rather than access to childrens books.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
14:48 / 06.11.07
Is class as a conceptual resource going the way of left and right in politics - ie increasingly difficult to accurately use with any precise and easily shared content?

Or regularly proclaimed as being irrelevant and increasingly difficult to accurately us, particularly by high-profile people with access to political power, while in reality remaining highly salient starting-points for various forms of analysis?
 
 
Closed for Business Time
15:41 / 06.11.07
I take it you're referring to class, and not the left-right concepts?

If so, yes, I too think class is regularly proclaimed etc. That in itself doesn't make them highly salient starting points for analysis tho. I mean, if there's a very wide spread in the usage and meanings of class across discourses, what value has it? Class in a sociological monograph on IT wage labour in 21st century Belgium will surely mean something different than class used as an othering term by teenagers in a Botswana secondary school. Not to mention, how is class distinct from other concepts that deal with groups and their differences? Class and privilege, does one necessarily follow from the other?

However, your point stands. It surely must be important to see who says what about the merits of talking in terms of class, and if someone like me - educated white male with a job - says class isn't what it's been trumped up to be, that doesn't make it so, and warrants scrutiny to see if that claim is made in order to defuse or manipulate a conflict where I, or people like me in some significant way, might stand to lose privilege.

My point being, either way the merits and demerits of class as conversational and analytical resource needs justification, IMHO.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
16:12 / 06.11.07
I'm referring to both class and left-right politics. It seems to be de rigeur nowadays for "mainstream" politicians and theorists of the right/centre-right to claim that:

a) we've reached an "end of history" situation in which left and right are now meaningless, and
b) that there's no such thing as class, or that everyone is now middle class.

Both of which claims, I'd suggest, are utter rubbish.

Class is pretty evidently a bit difficult to pin down; I don't think, though, that it's much more so than it's ever been, and looking at figures of those who define themselves as working class within the UK, they've not decreased very much either.

Basically, my responses to the assertions I've outlined above would be along the lines of:

a) the claims that left and right are no longer meaningful are essentially an attempt to discredit the validity of arguments that clearly do belong to the left, and to obscure the fact that the "common sense" arguments being put forward by the politician or theorist in question are, in fact, right wing, and similarly that
b) the claims that "class" is a meaningless concept are used to obscure the fact that class differences and factors related to them have very significant effects on people's future prospects, and to justify a refusal to address socioeconomic differences.

I think my score on the test above comes in just short of Haus', and I'm aware that a significant portion of my privilege stems directly from this fact, and that it would be much more difficult to be in the position I am now if it weren't the case.
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
16:33 / 06.11.07
18, which is something of a surprise, esp. as the US-centric questions don't apply to me.

If one were to revise the quiz, it might be a good idea (given, esp. in the UK, the rise in numbers of people entering tertiary education) to differentiate between different types of University. Attending State colleges in the US is (broadly) a very different thing from attending Ivy League schools, just as attending Russell Group universities in the UK is (again broadly) a very different thing from attending an ex-polytechnic.
 
 
This Sunday
18:23 / 06.11.07
So, the warm autumnal light of day, I have discovered some things I wish to amend, clarify, and comment on:

One, when I'm drunk I type 'pride' to mean both personal and 'to be proud for.' And 'contented' might be better than 'pride' if I didn't like the sound of pride, so much.

Two, I'm still proud of my six steps on this thing, proud, myself, and proud for/of my mom, my grandparents, and everybody else that made it possible for me to even by that far along before I got going myself.

Three, I'm pretty sure labeling anything 'humble' negates the humility; at least, it does so for me.

Four, I think, in general, the cultural steps are easier to provide, pass on, or introduce kids/people to, the new car, new clothes, and college tuition are harder to manage/less common, and I want to know how this plays into my feeling that I may have known more poor and lower-middle-class people that were literate and concerned about learning/awareness as kids, than upper-middle-class and rich folks... and if I've just made that up in my head, arranging the data subconsciously to fit a pattern I prefer. The other end of that being, I know a lot more poor/lower-mid people who burnt out, caved in, or tried to (or did) make themselves dead by mid-teens, while even when they get that far, those raised wealthier seem to be floated along regardless. (So annoyingly classist I don't think I actually believe it objectively, and hope it isn't true.)

There is a fifth realization, but it's almost threadrot: I can still make links while inebriated enough to babble online about genetics, and Wow! Kyle is a tiny little town. And too many of the kids I grew up with are dead.
 
 
My Mom Thinks I'm Cool
18:57 / 06.11.07
I got a 13, I think.

I'd be interested to see one of you guys make a more UK centric test. Then again, even taking the test here in the US some of the questions didn't seem to fit very well.

Not too long ago I encountered someone who asked me this kind of stuff. I think we were talking about goals and mine were my usual kinds of goals (going to lots of places, having lots of interesting jobs) and hers were all about making more money, no matter what, even if it meant doing a job she hated and living in a place she hated.

Her claim was that if I didn't care more about making money than anything else, it was because I was upper class and had never been without money. She then asked questions about my upbringing - specifically, whether my parents paid for me to go to college (they did not, I got a scholarship and worked nights/summers to pay for the rest. apparently, that doesn't prove anything one way or another.)
 
 
Glenn Close But No Cigar
20:30 / 06.11.07
I'd be interested to see one of you guys make a more UK centric test

Here goes nothing:

Father went to fee-paying school (+1 for public school)
Mother went to fee-paying school (+1 for public school)
Father went to University (+1 for Russell Group, + 2 for Oxbridge)
Mother went to University (+1 for Russell Group, + 2 for Oxbridge)
Have any relative who works in the Professions in the expanded sense. May include Doctor, Lawyer, Clergy, Academic, Accountant, but also Architect, TV Producer, Senior Rank in armed forces etc.
Had more than 50 books in childhod home (inc. works from 'the canon')
Had more than 500 books in childhood home (inc. works from 'the canon')
Were read books by a parent as a child
Parents expressed marked preference for BBC broadcasting output over commercial broadcasting output
Childhood diet consisted largely of fresh, non-processed food
Had lessons (ballets, cub scouts, choir, sporting activity etc) before aged 18
Had more than one type of lesson before aged 18
Media representation of people like you, although it may be mocking (Nathan Barley etc) nevertheless does not threaten the dominance / security of your group.
Tuition costs etc for University covered by parents
Funds available for private tuition before 18, whether undergone or not
Parents read broadsheet newspaper
Parents inherited majority of their furniture (thanks, Alan Clarke!)
Went on overseas holidays as a child
Went on non-package overseas holidays as a child
Parents speak at least one foreign language
Original art in childhood home
Parents took you to museums etc when you were growing up
Extended family is geographically spread-out (i.e. grandparents, uncles / aunties etc do not all live in the same small local area)
Parents lived in a non local authority housing
Parents lived in non ex-local authority housing
Parents owned own home
If heritage is not gentile white / Jewish, grew up in an area in which you were a distinct ethnic minority
Parents employed domestic staff (nannies / cleaners etc)
If parents clothed you in second-hand / hand me down clothes, this was the result of an ethical / aesthetic decision rather than being forced by economic circumstance

...feel free to criticise / add other factors.
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
22:44 / 06.11.07
10, assuming we count homeschooling as "lessons." I think the test is kind of wonky and misleading though--I can think of a lot of things which I have experienced which I would strongly identify as privilege advantages which aren't on there.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
23:04 / 06.11.07
Parents expressed marked preference for BBC broadcasting output over commercial broadcasting output

That one's slightly unfair, given that there wasn't really legal independent radio when I was a kid.

Actually, telly. Did you have colour telly as a kid? I mean, if you were a kid of telly-watching age after colour telly became prevalent. Or when did you get a video?

It's weird, the class/money thing, too. I'm about as middle-class as you can get, by virtue of my dad being a vicar. We had NO money, but we had a really nice, big house provided by the church, which we couldn't afford to heat. The amount of space we actually occupied in that house could have easily been in a much smaller place. But because he was the rector, he got to live in that big fucking house that he didn't need and couldn't actually deal with. He died when I was 12, which meant my mum had his clergy pension- still not huge, but she could get a mortgage on a small house with it- in Somerset. So I have an enormous amount of privilege, yes... but still spent my secondary school years as the poorest kid in the class.

Class/privilege/money- all very different, though obviously related, things.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
05:38 / 07.11.07
*cough* twenty *cough*

I wonder how my parents would have scored. Significantly lower than me, I'm sure, but I wonder how relevant the questions are for the fifties and sixties.
 
  

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