Shouldn't think so, at least not of necessity. I lived next to a small apple orchard for a while as a kid, and in a tumbledown hovel with chipboard walls at that; the trees belonged to the same farmer who rented us the place, who certainly wasn't any more a member of any elite anywhere than we ourselves were.
Yeah, it was a real privilege for a kid and his single mom to be living well below the poverty line in a three-room shack that any half-awake inspector would've immediately condemned - not least for the black mold that ate up one whole wall of the third room so we had to seal it off with plastic - because it happened to sit on a hill next to a tiny patch of half-gone-to-seed apple trees that produced maybe as much as a half bushel in a season, the whole being owned by a former truck farmer whose income consisted in no inconsiderable part of the pitiful rent he got for the place, and who barely afforded the property taxes that left unpaid would've had the lot of us indigent.
I understand that the rhetoric of privilege isn't intended as personal attack, or at least that that's not its ostensible intent. I wish more people who favored it understood that, however intended, personal attack is the way it comes across, and that makes it unhelpful - indeed, actively harmful, if the purpose is to promote sympathy, among those not so predisposed, for those philosophies in whose service the rhetoric is invariably deployed.
The fact that your life sucked in many other ways is irrelevant. Having fresh fruit growing on plants near your house which you can eat is a privilege that most people do not have.
I'm not saying, "your life was privileged, and you suck." I'm saying, "your situation of having fresh-off-the-tree apples was an unusual privilege." Am I wrong, or do you just object to the one word, and want me to know a bunch of other things about how you lived too?
To reiterate from my prior comment, I understand exactly what you're saying. The problem I have is that you're not listening to what I'm saying - which, again, is that it doesn't matter what you're saying, because when you use this rhetoric to express it, you piss people off even if in spite of yourself, and the rhetoric is therefore actively inimical to the purpose in whose service you employ it.
It's not that complicated or controversial a point, or at least I wouldn't have thought so - that, when attempting to communicate, the intent with which you speak is irrelevant to the effect your words produce in your interlocutor. Unless your intent is actually to piss people off - and I see no reason to suspect that it is - then using a rhetorical structure which consistently produces that effect is counterproductive. If your intent is to inspire sympathy for the contention that there's something "elite" about having access to fresh apples, regardless of any surrounding circumstance, then using a rhetorical structure which consistently antagonizes people, and thus is much more likely to depress the tendency to sympathy among the already unconvinced than to inspire it, is counterproductive as well. And arguing that those whom you so anger and antagonize, are in the wrong to feel so, only compounds the error.
It's not that I fail to understand the concept - I expect I should do, considering I deployed it often enough myself back in my doctrinaire-progressive youth. And it's not that I fail to grasp that your intent is not to give insult - even if my own experience could not inform me on the other side of the question, mere charity would require I not so presume.
The problem I have is, quite simply, that the rhetoric you are using, in any case save when talking to someone who already agrees with you in every meaningful particular, does not work. Outside that very specific internecine context, the only thing it achieves is to make people angry, and that helps nothing and nobody as far as I can see.
I understand your point. I don't agree with it. I don't think the meaning of the word "privilege" has become so narrowly defined that it automatically provokes outrage like this.
If, in fact, "privilege" does in fact trigger this massive anger you say it does, then I totally agree that its use is counterproductive. I just don't see it.
Substitute "tenement apartment" for "shack" and "slumlord" for "former truck farmer", then subtract "living near formerly productive fruit trees". You now have a story that describes many times more people than your original.
The politics of privilege basically says that unless you have had the worst life that it is possible to have, you have to yield to anyone that had anything worse off than you. Since the word "elitism" is what brought all that into the conversation, perhaps it was a poor choice.
While at previous times in history, it might have been a mark of elite privilege to not have to pick your own fresh produce, that is no longer the case. Now, having fruit trees and a garden in your backyard means you are lucky enough to have direct control over a portion of your food supply, and can therefore choose to grow food with flavor and nutrition, rather than superior shelf life, visual appeal, and transportability--which are the characteristics that the grocery store will choose for you.
The apples that grew in my (rented) backyard as a kid were sour, with a woody texture, and were usually covered in wasps or ants. But they certainly did taste better than store-bought Red Delicious. The ants added a lemony flavor. I never thought to try the wasps.