this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2025
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I think that in other contexts, they present privilege as a property of groups rather than of individuals. So, for example, white people as a whole have white privilege and so any particular white person has it because of his race, not because of anything he personally has or has not experienced.
They also present it as something that the privileged groups have unfairly, at the expense of other groups. "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." If privilege is simply the state of not having your life made worse, why would it feel different from equality? Why would anyone want to dismantle it?
I don’t really understand how these ideas are in conflict with the meme here. You could be living a perfect life in a material sense but still be miserable if you are clinically depressed.
Privilege takes many forms. Some are just not being subject to oppression or violence that these other groups face, but some can also be benefiting from the oppression of those groups.
For example, having class privilege can mean benefiting from cheap labor to fulfill your desires. If a billionaire was deprived of all or most of the labor of the people who support their lavish lifestyle, I have to imagine this could cause them considerable distress, at least temporarily. In that case, I think it’s fairly easy to see how equality could feel like oppression.
Another example is that some people just like having a higher social status in society. It feels natural and empowering for them to be “above” other people in some sense. When this is upended, it feels bad.
But again, none of this implies that these people are living good lives in the current system. It just means they either benefit from it or aren’t harmed by it in some way, small or large. For most people, I think the benefits are small and may even be outweighed by other benefits they would receive in a more equal society. But there are those who would lose more, and they tend to be the loudest opponents of equality. They also tend to be wealthy and influential in the media and they influence many other people to adopt their viewpoints, even when those viewpoints aren’t in those people’s best interests.
All that said, this seems to be a common and recurring issue, so it may be that the concept of privilege needs reframing to avoid triggering people who don’t understand what it means. I am open to suggestions but we also need to be careful not to minimize or erase the struggles of oppressed people in our language.
Some groups take shit for existing, and some individuals are not in those groups.
Do you need a diagram?