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One comment I wanted to make about this the last time this came up... "Privilege" is a loaded word. It's a word that some people take great offense to, but it's a word that cannot rationally be ignored. Success can be a pretty fragile phenomenon. I never fully appreciated the benefit of privilege until relatively recently. I was an unfocused teenager who slacked in college, but stumbled onto a good career anyway (so far, fingers crossed). I would like to ascribe it to turning myself around and working hard, but the fact of the matter is that privilege played a huge role. I got to work at a cool startup right out of high school, because I lived in the sort of relatively nice neighborhood where well-connected people launching startups from their basements might live. I never had to worry about credit checks for jobs because my parents had kept me on a small line of credit all through college to build up my history. When I quit my job to go to grad school, I never worried about running short of money just as finals were rolling around--daddy could always front me a couple of hundred to get me through the rest of the month. This is not trust-fund level privilege, just something pretty much any engineer or the like could provide for his (or her) family, but I'm pretty sure without it I would be working some below-median job today. So... before you decry the article, remember that success, for most people, is at the margins. Think about how you got to where you are, and ask yourself: if people just found me 5% less credible because of my gender, race, etc, would life really have turned out identically? PS) I was reminded of how uneven things can subtly be a couple of days ago during the SOPA hearings. One of the posts that made it to the front page of reddit was a photo of some woman giving testimony, where the photo had been edited to look like it was an x-ray shot through her shirt. I thought to myself how interesting that was. Not that it was so insanely offensive in and of itself, but rather because I've never seen something like that pop up on the front page when a man says something dumb on TV. |