IBARW: overlapping meanings of "privilege"

[redbird]

It is International Blog Against Racism Week. I don't have a lot relevant to add right now, so I'm reposting (with slight revision) a comment I left in truepenny's journal:

As far as I can tell, there are at least two things going on here and called privilege. One is the things that in a better world, everyone would have: it should not be a privilege to decide whether, or who, to marry, or to say no to sexual advances, or to be able to choose your religious practices or lack thereof. And one person having those rights doesn't take them away from someone else.

The other is the things that really are part of oppression, because they involve some people getting stuff at the expense of another. If group A has the socially accepted right to interrupt group B, and not vice versa, A has something taken from B. If women, or black people, or members of some other group are only considered for a class of powerful, well-paid, or otherwise desirable jobs after all the white men have had a chance to apply, the privileged group is getting those jobs at the expense of the less-privileged.

There are important places where the two kinds of privilege overlap. It should not be a privilege to walk down the street without being harassed, or to have the law enforcement system treat you as innocent until proven guilty. Nor should it be a privilege to have the police help you if you're the victim of a crime. However, if law and/or custom say that whenever there's a dispute between an X and a Y, the X's testimony will be taken as true, that both hurts Y's and helps X's.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Very well said.

[sanguinity]

I think most of your examples in the first group are actually examples of the overlap: cases where yes, it is reasonable for everyone to have that privilege, but where the group that currently has the privilege is also getting some extra benefit directly from the harm of keeping others from participating in the privilege.

Marriage has long been a way of declaring some couples superior to others; while it's practical to extend marriage to a far larger set of relationships, the current system of restricting it benefits many married couples by keeping the "integrity" of the superiority-marking-system intact. Progressives like to model marriage as if couple-ranking is not a benefit, yet enjoy their personal position in the couple-ranking system, and get shirty if you challenge the social status they get from being married. (Progressives might be fine with LGBT couples getting married, but they're not fine with people they consider their social inferiors getting married, and they similarly sign on to using unmarried status as a self-evident indicator that some people/relationships are inherently inferior.)

Saying no to sexual advances, similarly, is something that could reasonably be extended to everyone; however, restricting it to a few benefits the people who aren't restricted at the direct expense of people who are restricted. People who aren't restricted don't have to ask for what they want; they can just take it from people who are restricted in their ability to say no.

And again with religious practices: it's reasonable to give everyone the freedom to choose a religion or lack thereof, but the current system of restricting those freedoms to some groups directly benefits other groups. F'rex, it frees them to shape secular conventions to dovetail perfectly with their own personal religious practices, at the direct expense of other groups. Part of what is nice about being Christian in a Christian-dominant society comes as a direct benefit from harming people who are not Christian.

In actual practice, I'm not sure you can find things for which the two aspects of privilege don't overlap.

That all said, I very much like your conception of there being two aspects of privilege -- nice things that could be distributed to everyone while still retaining portions of what makes them nice to have, and things that feel nice as a direct result of other people not getting them. One ought be able to attack the one while leaving the other intact. However, in actual practice, people who want to preserve a niceness that derives from how it harms others are often fond of emphasizing how their privileges are a part of the first group (conceptually harmless to others). Consequently, I'm leery of providing further cover for such people by declaring a given privilege-giving structure to be a member of only the first group. In actual practice, I think all privileges overlap the two, and that people need to deal with that head-on.