General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If you are the member of a privileged group AND call yourself progressive [View all]patrice
(47,992 posts)exchange.
Though all privileges, meeting these criteria, are privilege, not all privileges are identical, some are greater, some less.
There are a couple of important variables here:
- any advantage could vary from conventionally recognized cultural advantages, to more idiosyncratic situational advantages;
- anything taken can vary in value from less to great and can vary from the most concrete, like goods or possessions, to more ephemeral phenomena, like emotional balance, self concept, or even intellectual property.
The reason the specific variables in the two sets identified just above are important is because they determine, for want of a better term, the degree of a given privilege.
And the reason that's important is because it means that recognizing privilege can be difficult if no advantage is identified or if the advantage that is most relevant to the taking is identified in-validly and/or if nothing is identified as having been taken or if what is taken is invalidly identified.
I think a problem we are having in discussing the kind of topics in this thread is that there is an underlying assumption that all of this is the same for everyone, or ought to be, when, though there are commonalities, the variances I mention above can be just as individually significant.
I propose that the first step to dealing with the problems that arise from these faulty assumptions would be that if one claims the autonomous value of how these variable factors manifest in one's own experience, that claim cannot rationally exist as a singularity, because to do so is a contradiction of one's own claim, to say individual experience is the determiner here and then deny other individual experiences that vary "too much" in comparison exclusively to one's own criteria, negates the whole foundation for the discourse which is the putative objective of any claims.
Yes, there is a collectivity to claims about privilege, or lack thereof, but those collectivities, unless they are THE end in and of themselves, are comprised of individuals, who are making claims about the validity of their individual experiences of greater and lesser degrees of privilege in themselves and in others, so if the basis is the independent value of that individual fact, then unless that's ALL individuals it's a taking also and, therefore, a privilege.
This is one of the foundational principles of what is referred to as Diversity, which may be a missing concept here.