[djsumdog]

People don't have privilege. People toss around that word a lot and it's used incorrectly, as it is here.

Say you walk into a store and are followed or stopped quite often for a receipt check. If you're black in certain parts of the world, this is quite common, but much more rare if you're not black.

The privilege is a result of a system. You cannot say x people have privilege, and likewise people get offended when people yell at them for having privilege saying, "It's not something I choose." Is one person from one ethnic group responsible for all the ills cast upon others? Are we responsible for the debts of our fathers?

Privilege is a result of a system, and it is a system that grants privilege and socialite (and often subconscious) level, and that system of beliefs is what needs to be changed. So fighting against privilege involves changing the narrative of the system we live in. It takes time and it takes diligence and it takes careful and critical thought. It's not as easy as throwing a word or blame around.

[smsm42]

> People don't have privilege.

I don't know. If you have the power to shut down a whole product line for a trans-national corporation with a single complaint, isn't that a kind of privilege? I certainly can't do it, you probably neither. But some people can. If you have a power to decide what is allowed to be spoken and what gets you removed from the platform, who is allowed to speak and who should be met with violence if only they dare to show up - isn't that a kind of privilege? If you can riot, destroy property, assault people and send them to the hospital - with full impunity and vocal support of major parts of the press and community, that would loudly denounce this conduct in everybody else - isn't that a kind of privilege? Some people seem to enjoy it.

[BubRoss]

That's not privilege, that's power.

[smsm42]

And the difference is... ?

[BubRoss]

Privilege is how the system affects you. Power is how you affect the system.

[traderjane]

That sounds like silly word play. It'd be like if I said "Tom has power." To which I guess you might reply, "People don't have power. Societies have power, structures have power, and positions have power... but people don't have power." Okay, sure. But Tom still has power.

We are all responsible for the debts of our fathers, except the bill comes in the form of the physical world we inhabit. Who thinks they exist away from the past, except as rhetorical play about conquering old challenges?

[msbarnett]

> The privilege is a result of a system. You cannot say x people have privilege

This is a distinction without a difference. The Principle of Charity applies and we can easily understand that "You have privilege X" is being used to mean "You are accorded privilege X by the dominant social system in which we both exist".

[waterhouse]

"I’ve postulated before that “privilege” is a classic motte-and-bailey term. The motte, the uncontroversial and attractive definition, is “some people have built-in advantages over other people, and it might be hard for them to realize these advantages even exist”. Under this definition, it’s easy to agree that, let’s say, Aaronson has the privilege of not having to deal with slut-shaming, and Penny has the privilege of not having to deal with the kind of creep-shaming that focuses on male nerds.

The bailey, the sneaky definition used to push a political point once people have agreed to the motte, is that privilege is a one-dimensional axis such that for any two people, one has privilege over the other, and that first person has it better in every single way, and that second person has it worse in every single way.

This is of course the thing everyone swears they don’t mean when they use the word privilege, which is of course how the motte-and-bailey fallacy works. But as soon as they are not being explicitly challenged about the definition, this is the way they revert back to using the word."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/01/untitled/