wingedbeast | Two Quick Measures of Privilege

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Nobody likes to believe themselves privileged. You say someone's privileged and they think you mean that they've had an easy life. "Of course I haven't had an easy life, I work for a living."

But, that's not privilege, not the ease of your life, but the difficulties of other lives that you don't have to deal with. Short of actually getting to know each and every difficulty that you don't experience, there are a few ways to tell if, in a specific demographic dynamic, you have some privilege.

How readily can you forget other demographics exist?

How few descriptors does it take to make it clear that your demographic is the one being discussed?

These are two ways of looking at how easily you can view yourself as the "default human" and how easily other people can be identified, unintentionally, as the aberrations.

There are specifics to be considered. But, in the general, I think these two are helpful measures.

If I'm wrong, if you have better ones, please comment.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

amarie24

These are actually great! (And I've been meaning to post comments all over your blog, haha, but school and cleaning house, amiright? :P). Perfect, really.

I would also add something that I've been talking about over at my blog: How often to you think about what you look like to other people? How often do you realize that you're within another's gaze?

So, for example, black people always know that we're within the White Gaze. Every time we get "Oh, you speak so well!" or "Well yeah, but where are you FROM?" These kinds of microaggressions continually reinforce what what people think of us, what they expect of us-that we are not intelligent (intelligence, unfortunately, is linked to how well you speak the King's English) and that we are not truly citizens of this country (Hence why saying "Orange County" isn't enough, and that's also called a microinvalidation).

But white people are almost never aware that they are within black people's gaze...hence why they fear our gaze so much, because they can imagine that what we think of them isn't anymore pleasant than what we think of us and we actually have a factual basis for it.

And the question of the gaze is true across other privilege boards as well. How often are men aware of the Female Gaze on them, for example?

From:

wingedbeast

That sounds like a good measure.

An imperfect measure, because I am swimming in privilege as white, male, and heterosexual, but I have *some* awareness of how I look, but that, itself, is less about lacking for privilege and more about lacking for self-confidence in the social arena.

So, as a privilege test, that has some potential for false-negatives. But, that's me nitpicking. It probably has less potential for false negatives than my set.

As to commenting all over my blog, please do. Go blog wild.

From:

amarie24

-nods- Oh, absolutely you can have false negatives there.

But the key is that you have SOME idea. I, uhh...probably don't need to tell you, but a lot of your fellow white, male cishet brethren have ABSOLUTELY NO idea...and don't care to have any. It's unfortunately not uncommon. : /

From:

wingedbeast

Any privileged set you can imagine.

But, one of the things about privilege is how comfortable it is. If there's an uncomfortable suggestion, then there's got to be some way to comfortably refute it.

Here are some little tests you can take. Oops, you *are* privileged, aren't you?