Look at the brilliant comment reader Stille has left:
Privilege is still a misleading word for these things. Like other beloved concepts of progressive discourse (the word “empowering” comes to mind) it implies a great shadowy force that strongly influences people’s lives. I find such a unified antagonist implausible and sometimes suspect its main purpose is to create a well-defined enemy that people can use in defining themselves as progressives without doing much (if any) actual work. Such a mighty force cannot be opposed by mere humans, after all.
Is that profound, or what?
I have the best commenters ever. The amount of sheer, undiluted brilliance people share on this blog on a daily basis is scary. And not a single chirpy, “OMG Clarissa I adore you, please write more of the same.”
One thing that upsets me, though, is that I have commenters from every continent except Latin America. It is very sad to be ignored by Hispanics given what I do for a living. But I also suspect I have more Europeans commenting than other bloggers.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s a very good comment!
I think, also, that one might try to imagine a world where everybody was totally aware of their “privilege” and compensated for it. As Nietzsche says, one most harshly criticizes something when one imagines its ideal. I think we would have a babbling brook of people speaking moral language all the time, whilst aiming to erase themselves. You wouldn’t be able to have any relationships, any political action, just a regular church service where people confessed their failures on the path to an imaginary state of moral perfection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-criticism
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And a brilliant comment in response to a brilliant comment. 🙂
Yes, this would be like an endless paroxysm of completely narcissistic individuals who are deaf to the world and 100% concentrated on delicious self-flagellation.
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precisely
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OMG Clarissa I adore you, please write more of the same
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And a brilliant burn! 🙂
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Damn it, too late!
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“It is very sad to be ignored by Hispanics given what I do for a living.”
You seriously don’t get any comments from Mexico, Spain, or any of the many Spanish-speaking countries in South America?
I don’t speak Spanish, or I’d write you a nice note.
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I could attempt something in google translate.
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This would make me feel like the semester already started. 🙂
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There is this great commenter from Spain who has moved to the UK. And not a single person in Latin America!
But thank you for the kind thought!
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I took Spanish in Year 8, if it’s any help. Unfortunately all I remember is “Donde estan mis pantelones”.
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“I took Spanish in Year 8, if it’s any help. Unfortunately all I remember is “Donde estan mis pantelones”.”
– I had sworn to myself in my early youth that I’d never hear a man ask me this question. I guess that’s all shot to hell now. 🙂 🙂 🙂
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People say “privilege” and I hear “kulak”. People say “unearned privilege” and I hear “deukalization”. If only some people knew how close they are in their rhetoric to communists…
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Yes, the constant suggestions to examine or check your privilege just reek of the Soviet Union in the 1920s! Everybody was constantly exhorted to do that. Which, as you say, makes the whole thing even more hilarious.
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“Check your privilege” is basically asking to make a self-criticism session.
The entry about it on wikipedia made me laugh, though. Especially this little gem:
“Under some systems of communism (…) Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China”.
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“Check your privilege” is basically asking to make a self-criticism session.”
– Yes! How ridiculous is it that it’s being picked up so in earnest by American Liberals?
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Can we run a poll or something on where people currently reside?
I’d be very interested to see where people pariticipating here are writing from.
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“This would make me feel like the semester already started”
I was asked to pass this along, it’s totally genuine but apparently his printer broke so he couldn’t send it to you himself.
Estimada Sra. Clarissa,
Soy tu lector latinoamericano y no de Iowa en absoluto. Me gustaría darle las gracias por los blogs, y asegúrese de que usted es una inspiración para todos los latinoamericanos Será bloggers. Aquí en mi hacienda bailamos tango, mariachi cantando mientras telenovelas y esperar la ayuda del gobierno de Estados Unidos. Esto es una vergüenza y el cambio al hombro. Cuando empecé a bloguear tal vez podamos compartir los rollos de blog.
Sr Chucko
Feel better now?
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Oh God, this sounds SO familiar. Google Translate has such a distinctive voice. 🙂 🙂
Thank you, this is hilarious.
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“You seriously don’t get any comments from Mexico, Spain, or any of the many Spanish-speaking countries in South America?”
–because of writing in English and not actually having a lot of posts on Latin American topics, you are not coming up in search engines. Example: every time I put up a post with a title that is the name of a Latin American author, even if the post is in English I do get a lot of hits from their country and around. Then some of those people follow. But to follow a blog in English, it would have to be regularly updating in their specific area of interest, I would think.
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“Pivilege” is a bit of a weasel word, and many people use it without really knowing what it means. People say things like “A driving licence is a privilege, not a right”, which is a bit misleading if you think about it, because a privilege is a right, though a right enjoyed by some people and not by others.
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Privileges are not rights. They’re both supposed to grant you something, but rights are a) inalienable outside very, very exceptional circumstances and b) fundamental to the way a society is organized. Privileges, on the other hand, are granted by an external authority that can revoke them relatively easily and don’t usually act as first principles from which the rest of the society’s organization is derived. So a driving license is definitely a privilege, seeing how it’s granted by whatever authority grants them in the US to people who pass a series of tests to that authority’s satisfaction, and can be revoked relatively easily. The right this privilege builds on is, of course, the right to travel.
This is why the usage of “privilege” to describe situations where people’s human rights are being respected annoys me so. To obtain equality, you remove privileges (do note this is a word often accompanied by “unfair”). To obtain a good society, one ensures everybody’s rights are being respected. All the privilege rhetoric does is try to make people feel guilt at the fact that their rights are being respected, instead of anger at the fact that their fellows’ rights aren’t – and guilt is a much more self-indulgent, inefficient emotion than anger tends to be.
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“This is why the usage of ‘privilege’ to describe situations where people’s human rights are being respected annoys me so.”
Yes. And guilt as self-indulgent, yes. Although it sure is painful and disempowering.
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The shamanic solution takes you in the exact opposite direction of identity politics:
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