On Feb 4, 2014, at 8:49 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> oops, *one*-dimensional
Oh, sorry, I should have guessed that.
It certainly is one-dimensional but I think it's something even worse than that: it's diametrically dead wrong. Privilege is not the problem; deprivation is the problem. The problem not that Group X has something that Group Y doesn't; the problem is that Group Y doesn't have it too.
These may sound like algebraic identities but I don't think they are; and they certainly guide practice in different directions.
The giveaway in talk about 'privilege' is that sooner or later the word 'unearned' comes up. Men are listened to more than women, and this 'privilege' is 'unearned'. Now this seems incoherent to me. How could it ever *be* earned?
As to practice: Surely the right approach is not to listen to men less, but to listen to women more? It isn't, actually, a zero-sum game. The implicit assumption that it *is* shows the concept's origin on campus, I think. Only so many A's will be given in this class, and the rest of you poor schmucks will have to suck hind tit.
The discourse of 'privilege' suggests that the A's are distributed unfairly. As critique, this is suffocatingly constricted.