Privilege Wars

~ Clarissa

I’m hearing that a fresh round of privilege wars is raging on. People are going on and on, whining with abandon, “No, I’m totally more pathetic than you!” They are snatching the losership tiara from each other’s sweaty fingers, taking mortal offense to any suggestion that they are not the most pitiful, pathetic, forlorn rejects on the planet.

Freaks.

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Published by Clarissa

52 thoughts on “Privilege Wars”

  3. Where do you find those people? Some feminist site?
    I read a few chosen blogs and have no idea where those wars are raging, so don’t get the reference.

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    1. Check your privilege – 19 million results on Google. It is basically everywhere in both the blogsphere and the mainstream media . Those of you who have never checked their privilege online, should really start, because this way you can also fight in this great war.

      For example I got 43 points in this superb quiz: http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/how-privileged-are-you. I beat all of those in the privilege war who got more.

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      1. This would be a harmless entertainment (and maybe occasionally even useful for alerting some people of their blind spots) if it was not used in certain circles to silence the opponents and bolster one’s self-esteem without better reasons. Which is unscientific (i.e. normalizes the idea that one is only allowed to have opinions on something one has personally experienced… but then again, science is a patriarchal construct 🙂 ) and anti-[social mobility] (upward mobility increases one’s “privilege” and requires one to shut the **** up proportionally).

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        1. My friend and I just spent a while laughing at the silly academics who fight over which one of them is more proletarian. 🙂 This tells me they’ve never seen a proletarian.

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        2. Their privilege list is a conformity list. If a religion is provided for you and conventional family setting is provided for you, you are supposed to admit you are privileged. It seems, from the list, that people are venting at not being deemed comfortably middle class. Of course, I HAVE been the only person in the room of my color and indeed, it seemed, the only person of my race in a whole town, for a few weeks. As for taking mental health drugs or worrying about if I can pay the rent, one can choose not to, on the first count and the second question may evaluate one’s level of anxiety rather than whether the rent is objectively payable.

          Most of the questions have to do with trying to evaluate the degree to which one stands out from the crowd, which is attributed as negative. Too bad we cannot all be bland and blended in.

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          1. I’ve been the only person of my race at a huge stadium during a reggae concert in Cuba. Everybody was so happy to see me that they asked me on the stage to perform with the band. I can’t say I felt very underprivileged in that moment. Or overprivileged. Which one is it supposed to be? I forgot.

            But you are totally right. The list is based on bizarre projections concocted by people with very limited imagination.

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      3. I tried to check my privilege at Heathrow T3 but was informed by the airline that I would need to separate it into separate baggage and pay several hundred pounds extra in haulage fees.

        So actually, no, I will not be checking my privilege. 🙂

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      1. Why am I not surprised to find Laurie Penny in the middle of this …

        She was more likeable when she was a relatively harmless Warren Ellis groupie.

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          1. I concur — it’s probably not the most brilliant of ideas to draw inspiration for journalism from a comic book character who shoots people in the guts with a bowel disruptor gun … 🙂

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  6. Wow. I’ve just found a privilege checking website with this question:

    Country:
    – United States/Canada
    – China – Rural/shop
    – India
    – Africa
    – Europe – Meh (UK, Germany, …)
    – China – Urban
    – Latin America
    – Europe – Shit (Greece, Ukraine, Poland, …)
    – Japan/Australia
    – Middle East
    – Europe – Top (Norway, Netherlands, Sweden…)
    – Europe – Low (France, Spain, Italy, …)

    What a cute little pc liberal…

    Link: http://www.checkmyprivilege.com/quiz

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      1. Okay, but who has time and money for that? I checked the creator on a domain checking site, and he is most likely from the shit part of Europe, as he has a Slavic surname. 😎 What is 4chan?

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      1. By the way, as an “affluent”/”rich” person in an “other” line of work of a multi-cultural background, I am extremely oppressed with an oppression score of -320, whatever that means.

        Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some new politicians to buy — I’m really looking forward to this new Congress, it’s like the Americans have decided to buy new nappies for the body politic, with results that will soon follow. 🙂

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  7. One day I will go all military style on them, which is easy enough to do. Those are some nasty critters. Mike had someone take over the running of the IWW from him by proclaiming they had come to end his white, male privilege (for doing all the work out of his own initiative). They said they were more deserving as they were mentally ill and female and physically ill and from a different nationality and some other stuff.

    Predictably, once they got the reins of power, they much of their initial interest.

    So what can we say to those sorts of people?

    Hey lady or man, or whatever you are unsure you happen to be, you’ve sure got a lot of mental illness to go around, but we’ve had enough of it, and also of your crazy nationality, whatever that is, and your fucked up physical state. Fix it up now, or I will stamp you out like a bug.

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  8. This is too funny:

    “Having been a lonely, anxious, horny young person who hated herself”

    It’s probably just bad writing, but it implies that castration would be a solution.

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  9. I was targeted by privilege-minded recently, they said my writing wasn’t accessible. I took it too literally and thought that they meant that I needed to upload it differently so it could be read by software for the blind or dyslexic. Nope, actually, it’s because I use big words and use too many dead white men’s ideas. :-/

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    1. I’ve had those sorts of problems with them for many years. I always misinterpreted them to mean something more intellectual and astute than they were capable of meaning. I had this problem on the left and right of politics, which was really because I didn’t undestand Western culture.

      Anyway, I think people need to get over their ideas that they need some kind of equal starting point or what is known as level playing field to make headway. We all succeed and fail one way or another. There’s always uneven weather and cross currents.

      I do consider it definitively middle-class and middle-brow when people start demanding that reality be squared up for them so that they compete evenly with everybody else in life. Let’s be a tad more aristocratic for a moment and imagine that life isn’t primarily about competition. Let’s also be a bit more low class and military minded and consider that bad weather and cross winds are really interesting phenomena, which up the stakes of life and death.

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      1. Here’s the thing that gets me- a lot of my work, online and in school, revolves around my personal experiences in life, so I’m really insulted by the idea that I need to dumb down how I interpret my own lived experiences for the benefit of someone else.

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        1. In the end I found I could never dumb my own down enough. I had to deal with this confusing issue in the nineties when everyone seemed to believe that language conveyed objective truths or if it didn’t you, the writer, were a hysteric. Now we seem to have moved away fro such a nonsensical and superstitious position, which privileged the reader way too much.

          The cost of this evolution away from belief in the potency of LOGOS is that people will aim to talk to those who are already similar in terms of intellect, knowledge and possibly background, compared to in the recent past. The high will talk to the high and the low to the low and the spiritual middle class will talk to the spiritual middle class.

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    4. I LIKE SESQUIPEDALIAN ORTHOGRAPHY AND I CANNOT EQUIVOCATE
      YOU OTHER CORRESPONDENTS CANNOT REPUDIATE
      WHEN A JOURNALIST PENS FORTH A BOUILLABAISSE OF PROLIXITY
      MY ERUDITION GETS SPRUNG

      🙂

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  10. I am feeling constrained today because I am trying to review a collection of poems by a Chicana, who is in part using Chicana identity to female identity to sell the collection. I don’t think it is a very good collection but I feel constrained criticizing it because I know by experience I will be told by English speakers that I just must not understand Hispanic culture. I cannot figure out how to get out of this vise. There is a similar one I get into, commenting on racial formation in Brazil, Brazilians always say whatever I say must be wrong because I am American and Americans always misread race in Brazil, cannot understand it. I must be privileged and therefore can never understand, and so on.

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  11. I have so much privilege that it verges on being a disability, as a result my point of view is never listened to.

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    1. This has resulted in me seeing everybody with less privilege than me as having a special credibility privilege.

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