> I don't understand "check your privilege" to mean "renounce your
> privilege". I understand it to mean "consider whether your viewpoint on x
> is informed by your privilege".
>
Yes, that's how I've always taken it. I kinda hate the word and concept of privilege--and/though I haven't read the article Shag links to--because of the heirarchies and status-evaluating it creates, and CYP has sometimes come to take on a rhetorical, argument-ending purpose, but the impulse behind it is really solid and necessary: if you are going to be in solidarity with, or form alliances with, or be in political actions with, people of different genders, races, sexualities, and abilities, you should actually listen to and learn from the perspectives of the people you are in alliance with, and that's probably impossible without some basic acknowledgment of your differing status and subject position. And yes, for me, as for most of the people in this conversation, that means examining the ways it which you have it better than others and don't have to endure basic, or not so basic, indignities and prejudices.
I don't really like reckoning with that stuff, because most of the time I don't feel anything like privileged and it pisses me off to think that *this* is privilege, but if you are serious about doing politics with other people, the least you can do is evaluate your subject position and not be defensive about or protective of it.
In other words, STFU and listen.