Don't check your privilege

It’s not a very useful concept

[I haven’t made a post just for my paid subscribers in a while, so here’s one in appreciation.]

2010 was a banner year for culture war labels and catchphrases. I’m not sure exactly what happened then, but 2010 is when “toxic masculinity,” “mansplaining,” and “manspreading” took off. I already wrote about those things elsewhere. “Check your privilege” is another expression that skyrocketed at exactly the same time. Here’s the relevant Google Ngram:

Seriously, what was in the water in 2010?

All those phrases are meant to be conversation stoppers. “Check your privilege” is functionally equivalent to “shut the hell up.” The whole idea of privilege has been a grain of sand in my shell for a while, and I thought I’d check in to see how many layers of nacre have built up.

Telling people to shut up doesn’t generally lead to a productive interaction. Supposedly white people, men, and heterosexuals are privileged when authorities treat them with respect and dignity—cops are more courteous to a white driver than a black one, or landlords and bank officers give more grief to black applicants than white ones. A successful white male is told to check his privilege.

That’s followed by an angry rebuttal along the lines of “I built everything I have with my own two hands and no one helped me,” and “I’m dirt broke but you tell me I’m privileged?” Then the first side accuses the other of White Fragility and moral blindness, and the second side rejoins that the first is simultaneously infantilizing blacks (or women or gays) and unappreciative of the plight of the white (or male or straight) working poor. Then it degenerates into further insults and everyone has a nice time like that.

Is the idea of privilege helpful at all? “Privilege” isn’t some eureka-moment discovery. Like “patriarchy” or “capitalism,” it’s a concept belonging to a broader theory of society and it has value only to the extent that it is illuminating. Privilege is a useful tool only if it can improve our understanding of the allotment of social goods and benefits and to what degree that dispersal is fair or just. If it can’t do that, then the idea of privilege should probably be chucked in the dustbin.

Privilege, attempt 1

The classic meaning of being privileged or underprivileged is a matter of possessing certain benefits or advantages. For example, it is an advantage to acquire wealth, easily procure a car loan, purchase a home in a neighborhood of one’s choosing, and not be pulled over by the police. Of course, merely having such benefits when others lack them tells us nothing at all about who deserves what. You might become wealthy through hard work and merit, gain a car loan because of an excellent and diligently maintained credit score, have the fairly earned resources to live where you want, and not be pulled over because of careful and legal driving habits. All those advantages might be earned or the result of aptitude and effort.

In this sense, having privilege is pretty anodyne and might even be praiseworthy.

Checking his privilege

Privilege, attempt 2

A better idea is that privilege is unearned, that somehow a privileged person is simply lucky to have benefits that others do not—the trust fund baby who never has to work a day in her life, or the child of famous actors who has an easy entrée into the world of celebrity. A lucky trust fund baby might be privileged, but that doesn’t really capture what’s typically meant (post-2010) by white privilege or gender privilege. Those things are supposed to be systematic, with laws and general social norms granting unearned benefits to dominant groups.

People who like the concept of privilege think that’s unjust: dominant social groups shouldn’t be getting better treatment than minority groups. Keeping down the minorities and giving everything to the majority is the whole problem—that’s the opposite of equality and justice for all.

The simple view that giving unearned benefits to majority groups is unjust is straight-out false. Counterexample: demonstrably law-abiding citizens are the dominant group, and they have the benefit of not being sent to prison. The law-abiding may not have done anything, or even intentionally refrained from doing anything, to earn that privilege; they could be wholly ignorant of the laws. Furthermore, law-abidingness could be due to circumstantial luck—perhaps most people haven’t been in a position where they were seriously tempted to break the law. In such cases it’s incorrect to think of the law-abiding as having earned the privilege of not going to prison. They didn’t do anything or even try to do anything. As a result, it’s wrong to conclude that laws granting unearned privileges or benefits (like remaining free) to dominant groups (like the law-abiding) are invariably unjust.

Even a system of granting substantial, life-altering benefits to some persons but not others on the basis of luck might be perfectly fine.