Privilege (social inequality)
||The neutrality of this article is disputed. (July 2014)|
Privilege is the sociological concept that some groups of people have advantages relative to other groups. The term is commonly used in the context of social inequality, particularly with regards to race, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability and social class. Specific elements of privilege may be financial or material such as access to housing, education, and jobs, as well as others that are emotional or psychological, such as a sense of personal self-confidence and comfortableness, or having a sense of belonging or worth in society. It began as an academic concept, but has since become popular outside of academia.
Substantial analysis of privilege and specific social groups has been published and has included a variety of perspectives. Some commentators have addressed limitations in the term, such as its inability to distinguish between concepts of "spared injustice" and "unjust enrichment," and its tendency to conflate disparate groups.
The concept of privilege dates back to 1910 when American sociologist and historian W. E. B. Du Bois published the essay The Souls of White Folks, in which he wrote that although African Americans were observant about white Americans and conscious of racial discrimination, white Americans did not think much about African Americans, nor about the effects of racial discrimination. In 1935, Du Bois wrote about what he called the "wages of whiteness," which he described as including courtesy and deference, unimpeded admittance to all public functions, lenient treatment in court, and access to the best schools.
In 1988, American academic and professor Peggy McIntosh published the essay White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies, in which she documented forty-six privileges which she, as a white person, experienced in the United States. For example: "I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me," and "I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection." McIntosh described white privilege as an "invisible package of unearned assets" which white people do not want to acknowledge, and which leads to them being confident, comfortable and oblivious about racial issues, while non-white people become unconfident, uncomfortable and alienated. McIntosh's essay has been credited for stimulating academic interest in privilege, which has been extensively studied in the decades since.
Historically, academic study of social inequality focused mainly on the ways in which minority groups were discriminated against, and ignored the privileges accorded to dominant social groups. That changed in the late 1980s, when researchers began studying the concept of privilege.
Privilege, as understood and described by researchers, is a function of multiple variables of varying importance, such as race, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship, religion, physical ability, health, level of education, and others. Race, gender and social class are generally felt by sociologists to be the most determinative of a person's overall level of privilege. Privilege theory argues that each individual is embedded in a matrix of categories and contexts, and will be in some ways privileged and other ways disadvantaged, with privileged attributes lessening disadvantage and membership in a disadvantaged group lessening the benefits of privilege. For example a white lesbian university professor benefits from racial and educational privilege, but is disadvantaged due to her gender and sexual orientation. Some attributes of privilege are ordinarily fairly visible, such as race and gender, and others, such as citizenship status and birth order, are not. Some such as social class are relatively stable and others, such as age, wealth, religion and attractiveness, will or may change over time. Some attributes of privilege are at least partly determined by the individual, such as level of education, whereas others such as race or class background are entirely involuntary.
In the context of the theory, privileged people are considered to be "the norm", and, as such, gain invisibility and ease in society, with others being cast as inferior variants. Privileged people see themselves reflected throughout society both in mass media and face-to-face in their encounters with teachers, workplace managers and other authorities, which researchers argue leads to a sense of entitlement and the assumption that the privileged person will succeed in life, as well as protecting the privileged person from worry that they may face discrimination from people in positions of authority.
Awareness of privilege
Some academics highlight a pattern where those who benefit from a type of privilege are unwilling to acknowledge it. American sociologist Michael S. Kimmel describes the state of having privilege as being "like running with the wind at your back," unaware of invisible sustenance, support and propulsion. The argument may follow that such a denial constitutes a further injustice against those who do not benefit from the same form of privilege. One writer has referred to such denial as a form of "microaggression" or microinvalidation that negates the experiences of people who don't have privilege and minimizes the impediments they face.
McIntosh wrote that most people are reluctant to acknowledge their privilege and instead look for ways to justify or minimize privilege's effects, sometimes by maintaining that the power of privileged people was fully earned and is therefore justified, and sometimes by acknowledging individual acts of unearned dominance but denying that privilege is institutionalized and embedded throughout society. She wrote that those who believe privilege is systemic may nonetheless deny having personally benefited from it, and may oppose efforts to dismantle it. Part of the reason privileged people resist acknowledging their privilege, researchers say, is because doing so would require them to acknowledge that whatever success they have achieved did not result solely through their own efforts, but was at least partly due to a system that has developed to support them. The concept of privilege calls into question the idea that society is a meritocracy, which researchers have argued is particularly unsettling for Americans for whom belief that they live in a meritocracy is a deeply held cultural value, and one that researchers commonly characterize as a myth.
Kimmel wrote that when people with privilege don't feel personally powerful, arguments that they have benefited from unearned advantages seem unpersuasive.
In 2014, Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang wrote Checking My Privilege, an article in which he condemned classmates who told him to "check his privilege" for attributing his success in life to "some invisible patron saint of white maleness," and "for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth," and which was afterwards widely debated. McIntosh afterwards told the New Yorker that Fortgang was resisting seeing himself systematically, and argued that everybody has a combination of unearned advantage and unearned disadvantage, and should aim to try to see themselves in the context of societal patterns of discrimination and oppression.
The concept of privilege has been criticized for crudely ignoring relative differences among groups. For example, researchers have argued that in American culture there are status differences among Asian Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans and Cambodians, and among African-Americans, black immigrants from the Caribbean and black immigrants from Africa.
Some scholars who believe that privilege exists and is systemic nonetheless criticize the label itself, saying that the word privilege implies luxuries rather than rights, and arguing that some benefits of privilege such as unimpeded access to education and housing would be better understood as the latter.
- Horizontal inequality
- Ingroups and outgroups — parallels the group dynamics between privileged and marginalized groups
- Twine, France Winddance (2013). Geographies of Privilege. Routledge. pp. 8–10. ISBN 0415519616.
- Kimmel, Michael S. (2009). Privilege: A Reader. Westview Press. pp. 1, 5, 13–26. ISBN 0813344263.
- Freeman, Hadley (4 June 2013). "Check your privilege! Whatever that means". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
- Blum, Lawrence (2008). "'White privilege': A mild critique". Theory and Research in Education (SAGE Publications) (6(3)). doi:10.1177/1477878508095586. Retrieved 23 October 2014.
- Sullivan, Shannon (2006). Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Indiana University Press. pp. 121–123. ISBN 0253218489.
- Reiland, Rabaka (2007). W.E.B. Du Bois and the Problems of the Twenty-First Century: An Essay on Africana Critical Theory. Lexington Books. p. 3. ISBN 0739116827.
- Appelrouth, Scott (2007). Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory: Text and Readings. 304-305: SAGE Publications. ISBN 076192793X.
- Kincheloe, Joe L. (2008). Critical Pedagogy Primer. Peter Lang International Academic Publishers. pp. 60–62. ISBN 1433101823.
- O'Brien, Jodi A. (2008). Encyclopedia of Gender and Society. SAGE Publications. p. 418. ISBN 1412909163.
- Casella, Eleanor C. (2005). The Archaeology of Plural and Changing Identities: Beyond Identification. Springer. p. 217.
- Garnets, Linda (2002). Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Experiences. Columbia University Press. p. 391. ISBN 0231124139.
- Case, Kim (2013). Deconstructing Privilege: Teaching and Learning as Allies in the Classroom. Routledge. pp. 63–64. ISBN 0415641462.
- Sweet, Holly Barlow (2012). Gender in the Therapy Hour: Voices of Female Clinicians Working with Men (The Routledge Series on Counseling and Psychotherapy with Boys and Men). Routledge. p. 71. ISBN 0415885515.
- Sorrells, Kathryn (2012). Intercultural Communication: Globalization and Social Justice. SAGE Publications. p. 63. ISBN 1412927447.
- Carter, Robert T. (2004). Handbook of Racial-Cultural Psychology and Counseling, Training and Practice. Wiley. p. 432. ISBN 0471386294.
- Sue, Derald Wing (2010). Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. Wiley. pp. 37–39. ISBN 047049140X.
- Khan, Shamus Rahman (2012). Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology). Princeton University Press. pp. 107–108. ISBN 0691156239.
- Halley, Jean (2011). Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 67, 191. ISBN 1442203072.
- McNamee, Stephen J. (2013). The Meritocracy Myth. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 1442219823.
- Bell, Myrtle P. (2011). Diversity in Organizations. Cengage Learning. pp. 232–234. ISBN 1111221308.
- Karsten, Margaret Foegen (2006). Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in the Workplace [3 volumes]: Issues and Challenges for Today's Organizations. Praeger. p. 258. ISBN 0275988023.
- Jackson, Yolanda Kaye. Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology. SAGE Publications. p. 471.
- Fortgang, Tal (2 April 2014). "Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege". The Princeton Tory. Retrieved 24 June 2014.
- Rothman, Joshua (13 May 2014). "The Origins of Privilege". The New Yorker. Retrieved 24 June 2014.