It comes from the latin.

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1416472]

Kinda busy right now - anyone care to drop in an example of each of them?

Comments

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Was this one of your links? http://www.derailingfordummies.com/

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure if I ever had it, but the topic has certainly popped up on my journal a few times.

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

You forgot class privilege, the lack of which is often the #1 reason for white, straight, cisgendered men to deny the existance of any of the privileges they possess: the most vehement denier of privilege is the white, straight, cismale who was born lower-class or underclass, who has raised himself to lower-middle or middle class through his own efforts, and who will loudly yell at every opportunity that his white-straight-cismale privilege didn't get him anything and he worked like a dog for everything he's ever gotten, so clearly the whole theory is bunk.

To which one points out: okay, now imagine that the person born into your exact same situation is a black transwoman lesbian, and imagine how much harder her struggle to get to the exact same place would have been...

Intersectionality is a bitch.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

And the other way round - people who would never make a racially offensive remark are quite happy to say 'Working class people are genetically inferior'. Genetically inferior! In 2009.

[andrewducker]

Well there must be _some_ explanation for their wilful refusal to engage in all the wonderful opportunities that middle-class people take advantage of!

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, well said. I may steal this, do you mind?

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

By all means!

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

Only didn't tick cisgender as I don't know what it is hehe.

[andrewducker]

Time to go googling...

[likeneontubing.livejournal.com]

but it's my day off hehehe

[nameandnature]

I'm not sure arguing about who has privilege in the abstract is useful. It's a bit like arguing about whether "Islam is a religion of peace" in Yvain's example. So I didn't tick that I believe in its existence. Privilege is often treated as a sort of gas that attaches to a person (like Pullman's Dust) and provides a theory of justified dismissal for stuff they say.

That said, I do believe that, say, "women experience more street harassment than men", because the evidence I've seen here on LJ is very convincing. But it seems to me that the concept of privilege isn't just the sum of empirical statements like that one.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

I would tend to agree with you. If I'd noticed this post could have saved a lot of time and typing below as it's sort of what I've been trying to get at!

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

I feel stupid!

[andrewducker]

You're not stupid, you just haven't encountered some stuff before!

[marrog.livejournal.com]

And it's not even that you haven't encountered or understood the privilege itself, you just don't have that frame of reference for it. ________ privilege (in case you haven't looked it up yet) is the term used when a majority/'norm'/culturally dominant section of society have a set of basic, in-built advantages just due to being born white/male/middle class/heterosexual/cisgendered (cisgendered means that you have an unambiguous, societally-approved gender identity, ie: not trans).

The idea of ________ privilege goes hand-in-hand with the idea that you probably don't know you're privileged, or at least probably don't understand the full extent of it. It's often used hand-in-hand with "You're blinded by ..." and is short-hand for (the sometimes-true but always-obnoxious): "You don't get it, you can't get it, and even if I tried to explain you wouldn't get it, so I'm not even going to bother."

*Grins*

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Not chosen to be proportional. I know less about white privilege than the others, so my example isn't as good.

White Privilege: The vast majority of heroes depicted in stories look like you.

Male Privilege: You can take a walk in the evening without having to take careful inventory of what you're wearing. If you're assaulted, you can expect not to be blamed for the assault.

Heterosexual Privilege: When talking about your partner, you don't have to choose between carefully watching your words, and risking being treated weirdly by your coworkers.

Cisgender Privilege: You are likely to be able to walk down the street in the daytime without being openly mocked.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Cisgender Privilege: You are likely to be able to walk down the street in the daytime without being openly mocked.
That's a rubbish choice of cisgender privilege example, might I say. Women, POC and homosexuals are openly mocked in the street all the time. Why I was openly mocked yesteryday. Try again.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

"White Privilege: The vast majority of heroes depicted in stories look like you."

I don't think thats the best example. For one it only really holds true with a kind of Western/Northen state Chauvanism where such a statement holds true (IE. in White dominated cultures). I could be wrong but I suspect that the vast majority of heroes depicted in Asian/Africa/South American stories aren't white.

Related to the above is it not just reflective of the fact that the majority of a state/area/otherwise demarked boundry is much more likley to feature in stories and media in that state... yadda yadda.

For example most Scottish heroes are Scottish...

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

Well, this is from the viewpoint of an Asian guy living in one of the most conservative states in America...

White privilege: I've often heard the Supreme Court is an example of this.
Male privilege: Augusta National, the private golf club for the prestigious Masters tournament, still won't let women in (though they did let non-whites in after Tiger Woods won back in 1997). There was that whole hoopla with that woman protesting during the tournament a couple of years ago.
Heterosexual privilege: In my home state of Arkansas, they just passed a law that banned unmarried couples from adopting children. Obviously, this hurts heterosexual couples some but it hits homosexual couples even harder because same-sex marriages are banned in this Bible Belt state.
Cisgender privilege: It would be very, very difficult for a transgender person to win a public election here in Arkansas.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

I have issues with the notion of priviledge. Largely that it just seems to be dressing up the notion of "us" and "them", the dichotomy between men and women, blacks and whites, gays and straights, in modern terminology. Thus it's an evolution of a discourse of oppression not a way of combatting or addressing such a thing.

Instead of saying "oh your inferior because you are black/gay/female" all it surely says is "Oh your unpriviledged because you are black/gay/female" with the caeveat that "I as a white/straight/male will take that into account". Which sounds, while not as bad as the first sentence, offensive and still as pernicious in terms of social interactions.

Also the very fact that there are nebulous "types" of priviledge (one per marginalised group perhaps?) indicates to me that priviledge may be based on a false premise. That power operates in one direction akin to a chain. I mean I'm with Foucault on that one and reckon that power operates in a network with no true bottom and no true peak. IE. Everyone is privilidged to an extent, sure some groups are more likely to be privilidged then others and there are social issues we should consider in addressing these. Racism, sexism implicit and explicit for two, poverty and inequality as more general examples.

I acknowledge that my knowledge of privelidge, as a concept, is perhaps not the ideological definition and I am essentially addressing perhaps the understanding of the concept rather then the concept itself.

But is it anything more then a buzzword? (I am actually hatching within my brain an experiment of sorts that could be interesting...)

However ultimatly I

[andrewducker]

You seem to think that types of privilege is a heirarchy - as opposed to a recognition of numerous power imbalances. When there is an entrenched power imbalance between two groups then one group is privileged over another. When there are cultural norms and laws that mean that one group has it easier than another, then that group is privileged. People belong to multiple groups, and sometimes the scales will be tilted their way, other times tilted a different way, depending on context and cultural differences.

It _is_ a nebulous thing, but that doesn't make it less real.

[aliiis.livejournal.com]

I am also kinda busy so I'm just going to link you to a pretty instructive thing about white privilege (in a USA context I think, but far from irrelevant here). You might have seen it before but I found it pretty interesting. I was also just talking about this yesterday... hmm!
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

[zz]

I'd not heard of "liberal bubble", but I repeatedly observe that I forget not everyone's as open minded as me/people I know, without putting a name to it.

Although I think a lot of people are only partly in such a set, as a lot of people that are open minded in some areas are narrow minded or exclusionist in others: veggies look down on meaties, politically correct people look down on people with a sense of humour, hippies look down on electricity sucking technology(-lovers), fashionable hippies look down on crusty hippies...

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

Oh that's what that is. I googled it but my google-fu has gone on strike so was left none the wiser.

[darkoshi]

I believe another example of cisgender privilege is being able to use public bathrooms without having to worry about being accused of being in the wrong one.