Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.

I'm not doing that privilege meme, because I don't think it's going to show me anything I don't already know--and the purpose of it was to be useful for the people answering the questions. What I want to say is:

Privilege is always relative. By definition. The things everyone gets aren't privilege: they're either basic rights, or they're invisible. (No such meme is going to ask you whether you learned to read, because illiterates aren't filling out LJ memes.)

The places where I find the concept useful and relevant are either those where there is a huge disparity in what people get, or those where what the privileged people have can exist only at the expense of the people without privilege. Clean drinking water may, in some sense, count as a privilege--but my having it does not require other people to drink from polluted ditches. Going to a particular exclusive school may reflect or produce privilege. Knowing you can go to such a school because of who your relatives are is privilege. Being listened to in meetings is not inherently privileged. Getting away with interrupting other people in those meetings, and not being interrupted with equal impunity yourself, is privilege, because it requires there to be people who have to put up with being interrupted, and not reclaim the floor. Being able to marry the person of your choice doesn't have to be a privilege--limiting it to heterosexual couples makes it one, but there isn't a limit on the number of marriage licenses that can be issued. Many people who consider themselves to be decent and fair-minded are willing to share the things that there's an unlimited supply of, but may still defend their privilege when they see themselves losing out if they have to share. I hope I'm not doing that often, but I have no reason to think I'm immune to that temptation.