[pwang]

> I see people complaining frequently about the use of the word "privilege" as though it's some kind of pejorative being used against them

If the people using this term didn't want it to be taken as a pejorative, perhaps they could have chosen a less loaded term, that didn't already have a legacy usage with negative connotation.

"Asymmetrically advantage", "special powers" etc. all would be fine. But when you tell someone they're "privileged", it's very hard for the average speaker of English who doesn't have 100+ hrs of reading feminist literature to not be somewhat offended. The vernacular implication of the term is that someone who is privileged "had it easy", or the effort they've put into achieving their position and status is somewhat invalidated because they had "natural advantages".

My observation is that one of the core dysfunctions of discussions about diversity in tech is that people don't properly respect how impossible it is to go from talking about ensembles and populations, to talking about the behaviors of individuals. Those are two entirely different regimes of theory. We might come up with all manner of fancy terms and bodies of theory to talk about systemic cycles of oppression, vicious cycles of privilege, etc. etc. But to use any of that theoretical framework to talk about the motivations or actions of a single individual is certainly fraught with error and presumption.

Physicists recognize that you can't go from a thermodynamical description of an ensemble of atoms to individual particle trajectories without explicitly having a statistical model of the distribution of particles. But people are so quick to jump down each others' throats with accusations and assumptions about "you're blind to X!" and "you're assuming Y!". It's really just kind of sad. Just as "heat" is a bulk property of a body of particles and is pretty much meaningless when talking about a single particle, I think that a concept like "privilege" is meaningful when talking about a particular demographic versus another demographic. But to say that any given individual "is privileged" because of the color of their skin or their parents' tax bracket is assuming too much, and informs nothing. Individual variance within the distribution is just too high. The Asian immigrant kid with the perfect SAT and lawyers for parents might have taken up coding to escape his parents yelling and fighting every night. Is that more or less privilege than the black girl in a middle class suburb with a huge supportive extended family? What does "privilege" even mean when regarded in such individualized context? What are the broad patterns of systemic inequality that is affecting each of these individuals, and how can you possibly demonstrate that they are the dominant (or even significant) factors in the trajectories of these two lives?

[jfarmer]

It doesn't require that one has "100+ hrs of reading feminist literature." I don't have that many hours. Indeed, I don't know if I've read anything that could be classified as "feminist literature" at all, but the idea of privilege or of being privileged is fine with me.

Louis CK has lots of good material on this. Here's one about being white: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY Here's another about women: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4LkrQCyIz8 Here's a bit he did on Leno that's good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=derzWWYf3-w

Here are a few things worth reading:

    http://brown-betty.livejournal.com/305643.html
    http://nymbp.org/reference/WhitePrivilege.pdf
    http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-03-08_146
    http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
    http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/

I don't know whether you consider these things "feminist literature," but regardless it's less than 1 or 2 hours of reading total. My challenge to you is to read and watch all that, digest it, and then come back to comment. If you find yourself compiling a list of objections as you read, I'd also challenge you to pause and really try to understand what the author was trying to say before jumping to conclusions (as you say).

If you think the way people ("feminists" as you say) talk about privilege is counterproductive, I encourage you to read the above if you haven't and come up with a better way of explaining it! I'd love to read it, myself.