“Privilege,” according to Vanderbilt University’s Power and Privilege Definitions Handout “is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group. Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups.”
Privilege is thus an element in the oppressor-victim dynamic articulated by woke progressive ideology. Those who enjoy unearned benefits are the oppressors, even when the elements of their identity that make them so are baked in, such as in gender and race; they are by virtue of bodies and ancestry automatically enrolled in social groups. As I have noted before on Freedom and Reason, an individual is reduced by this ideology to a personification of a demographic category and this judged on the basis of grouped means.
“In the United States,” the handout tells us, “privilege is granted to people who have membership in one or more of these social identity groups: white people, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, cisgender people, males, Christians, middle or owning class people, middle-aged people, and English-speaking people.” But for Christian part (I am an atheist), I am the apex oppressor, for I am a “member” of all of these social groups.
(Has you ever stopped to consider that, if one cannot earn whiteness, then how are the privileges said to accrue to it is unearned? Race is not an achievable thing; it’s an ascription, one based on socially selected phenotypic characteristics, these characteristics very real. As such, race is not only not unearned, it cannot be abandoned, either. Race is both a social construct and the result of natural history but not a choice. A man cannot shed his race. Nor can he put on another race as if it were costume. Rachel Dolezal, a white women, is not a black woman. She is her body. Nor did she earn her whiteness.)
“Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it,” the handout continues. “People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.”
The author of the handout is abusing words for the sake of a political project, a project that Wesley Yang calls “successor ideology.” The typical definition of privilege is as follows: “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.” When the word is used accurately, one expects it will be invisible to most of those on the list, since it doesn’t in fact exist for them.
I do not enjoy white heterosexual male privilege because I am white heterosexual man. Any privilege I enjoy is because I earned it. But the definition in the handout presupposes privileges are unearned. It sets up a situation where, if I say I earned a privilege, let’s say an advantage in purchasing power compared to some other person, it is something that people like me often believe that is not so. If I deny my privilege, then I am fragile and in denial. It is not enough to be non-racist, we are told; we must be anti-racist. And being anti-racist for a white man is admitting he is privileged because of phenotypic features he inherited from his parents.
Taking privilege as a special right, there is in fact no race privilege in America for whites. There used to be, but all laws and policies granting whites special rights (or immunities) were abolished sixty years ago this July 2. Indeed, white privilege became illegal with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. White people can no longer expect to get preferential treatment on the basis of their race. The vast majority of white Americans never lived at a time when they enjoyed a privilege based on race. The only race privilege that existed after that great law was reserved for nonwhites, in particular blacks, who were granted a special right under affirmative action, and now under DEI, to be given extra consideration in a pool of applicants on the basis of race. That is an example of race privilege.
Do males still have privilege? They certainly did before 1964. Of course, today, males have a privilege when identifying as women, when they, as I have put it, step into oppression. In many places in the West today, a man can enter a female-only space only if he says he is a woman. A man can play on a women’s sports team if he says he is a woman. A man identifying as a woman can in some business firms enjoy rules compelling those he works with to misgender him. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, in some places in society today, a man identifying as a woman will be the most privileged person in the room. This contradiction inheres in the logic of successor ideology.
By “cisgender people” the author of the handout means men and women (and their immature counterparts boys and girls). Because of this privilege, women today can’t even depend on their basic rights being respected, for example the right to feel safe in a female-only space. (Sex-segregation is not an example of privilege, to clarify, but of equity. Nor are age restricted spaces a matter of privilege; rather they are a matter of safeguarding. In these cases, objective differences between groups must be considered if equal treatment under the law is a desirable end.)
In a system based on property rights, property and wealth confer privilege. But this is not an unearned privilege. An employee may be legally barred from entering the executive suite, for example, because executives assert a privilege on the basis of property right. My tenure at my university, which I earned, is a property right. Property rights exist for workers, too. The law grants a working man exclusive domain over his property. For how much longer, I can’t say. Some people have more property than others, and thus will enjoy advantages others do not have. But for those not born with a sliver spoon, this is earned.
If by “unearned” it is meant that a privilege is given to an individual solely on the basis of skin color, a physical attribute he did not accomplish, then I admit that I can’t imagine what it would feel like to be placed on a list of “top white leaders” in a given field or metropolitan area, or be awarded “Outstanding Person of Noncolor” by some organization, or be recognized for being the “first heterosexual white man” in a given occupation or office. It’s such an odd thing, seeing people tribalized and tokenized in such a way. It’s recognition for something they didn’t do—something that cannot help. They did not earn the accolade. I’m glad that can’t happen to me.
Is never having to suffer the virtue signaling of social justice warrior one of those features of white supremacy I hear people constantly talking about? Is it another form of privilege that, as a white man, I am treated as an individual and not a personification of an abstract demographic category? (Of course, I am treated as such. I have white privilege, remember?)
Instead of leaning into racialization, would it not be preferable for blacks to be treated a individuals and not personifications of an abstract democratic category? It’s not a bad feeling to be treated as an individual instead of an aggregate. I’d hate the burden of having to be a “credit to my race” (the Woman of Color of the Year Award is just another way of putting that slight). Too bad other people can’t be privileged in that way.
freedom and reason 