Before the word “privilege” was recently coined as the prefix to words like “white,” “male,” or “able-bodied,” before the word “privilege” had any political connotation, there was already a whispering of the word “undeserved” as privilege’s prefix. There was already a simpering attached to “privilege,” such that whenever anyone claimed to have a privilege, he or she was bowing the head just a bit, acknowledging, even if not explicitly or consciously, a kind of shameful failure: one had received what one had not earned. One was therefor on the spot, to be watched closely: would the privilege be sufficiently appreciated? Would enough gratitude be shown? Would the gift be misused in any way?
Would the freely given gift be paid back?
Of course, “privilege,” by definition, is undeserved. As is a gift. If a so-called privilege is deserved or earned, it cannot be a privilege. But the context, style, and attitude with which the word has been so often expressed connoted (and still connotes) however subtly, a significant but unvoiced disapproval, disappointment at the recipient of said privilege. (I am still speaking here, of the word’s use in a non-political context).
When the word “privilege” is deployed, what would otherwise be the gifts of love are tainted with accusation, a lack of confidence in the receiver.
With this taint comes the ruination of gratitude. For “gratitude,” even though there is nothing wrong with the word, and at its basic level it connotes only positive things, is, by its popular usage, another of those simpering words. “We should be truly grateful” is so often delivered with a tone of “we don’t deserve this; it should not have been given to us. How worthy the giver therefor, and unworthy are we. Rejoice now, in your gift!” The message may even be, “I give you this from sheer love and/or generosity. But to whom much is given, much will be expected. And you have probably gotten more than you can live up to. I have bestowed failure upon you, and debt. And it is all your fault.”
Such is the way adults often teach children to be grateful, and provoke instead ingratitude. For how much of a gift or a privilege is that thing which is immediately a reminder of one’s unworthiness?
Now to the more recent, political meanings of “privilege.”
Privilege, in one sense, is quite real. Certain dominant groups have things in part or in whole because they were stolen from others. For example, white people in North America stole massive amounts of land from Indigenous people. A man in a corporation may get a promotion he is worthy of, but which a female colleague was more worthy of, and was passed over for sexist reasons.
But I often hear certain things described as “privileges” which are actually rights. For example, take the fact that people who are white will not be pulled over by the police simply because they are white. Things like this are sometimes referred to as “white privilege,” as if not being harassed by cops was some kind of gift one was not worthy of, as if a truly responsible white person would contrive somehow to be abused by the cops. Isn’t not being harassed by the police a right? The injustice in this example is not that white people are not going to be harassed on the basis of their race, but that people of colour are harassed on a racial basis. The issue is not white privilege, but white supremacy. If a white person takes the rhetoric of privilege to heart, he or she will feel guilty simply for not being victimized.
Does the rhetoric of privilege make any sense? I don’t think so. With this mentality, any good thing you have (such as your rights being respected) that somebody somewhere does not have becomes of itself a moral failure. No wonder, then, that some people are eager to claim the status of victim for themselves whether they are victims or not. No, if there is any guilt to be felt in the example of racially motivated police harassment, it is in the performance of the white supremacy, or the failure to oppose it. I suspect those who use the rhetoric of privilege would agree with this, but the rhetoric itself implies a subtle shift: it broadens the scope of accusation to include things which simply are not moral failures.
There are psychological machinations at work here, and rather than simply disapprove of this rhetoric of privilege, perhaps we need to understand where it comes from. A capitalist culture prioritizes property rights (first and foremost, of those with the most property) more than any other. Along with this comes the old work ethic of personal worthiness: I am wealthy because I earned it. You, on the other hand, deserve your poverty. A person who may be unmoved by protestations of human rights violations (such as police harassment) either denying they exist or being unconcerned enough to do anything about them, might have a bit of a fire set under his or her ass if, on the other hand, someone says, “you have something you haven’t earned.” The accusation of “white privilege” is very effective at this. The rhetoric of privilege has an emotional force to it. The person who does not feel responsible for the police harassment, or who may be unmoved by the statement, “it is your responsibility to help me defend my rights” may well be galled and/or morally intimidated by language which says, “you are a freeloader, one who reaps where he has not sown. You are, in the moral sphere, a thief, a bum.” Whether this person is then wracked by guilt and becomes an ally, or defiantly berates “woke culture,” he or she has at least been forced into some attempt at self-justification.
And the accusation of “Privilege” is a secular equivalent to some conceptions of original sin. You needn’t actually sin through your own choices to be guilty—neither a sin of omission, nor commission. You need only to belong to a privileged group, one which you may never have had any choice about belonging to. The problem with certain kinds of privilege is that one is born to them—given what the historical and cultural context is–and cannot give them away. The accuser is smug in the knowledge of pinning on you a crime you are surely guilty of but did not commit. One can decide not to engage in racism, one can decide to fight it, and one can be justly judged on the basis of whether one does or not. But one cannot give up “white privilege.”
Some measure of so-called “white fragility” (though I think not most of it) can be explained by this mind-fucking rhetoric: few things are more exasperating than an accusation that in one sense is irrefutable, but which points to an offense that is either not a real offense, or one that one could not help committing. How many preachers over the centuries, for example, have angrily furrowed their brows at their congregations and accused them in effect of not being pre-lapsarian? People have enough to feel genuinely guilty about without the volume being turned up on the survivor’s guilt, which is a psychological, not a moral category.
So you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Those who put you in this rhetorical bind are probably trying to replicate for you in a small way their own experiences as members of marginalized groups. Now, one may choose to commend this action as morally salutary or deplore it as small minded and dishonest. But let us at least see clearly how the mechanism works.
A focus on “privilege” in its political context takes righteous anger and undercuts it by resentment; the legitimate and righteous complaint made by a genuine victim is twisted into sounding like the whining of a failure. “You have stolen from me” becomes the voice of Envy as in Marlowe’s Faustus: “I am lean with watching others eat.”
In response, the victimizer (for example, white supremacy again) rubs his hands with glee: “Oh look! Resentment! Didn’t Nietzsche speak of this? For shame!” This development parallels on a cultural level what often happens on a political one: a violent and oppressive group fails to respond to peaceful demands for change; some of the oppressed eventually take up violence against the oppressor, and the latter in a fit of moral ecstasy decries the heavily provoked violence which is actually much smaller than the unprovoked violence of the oppressive group itself. Thus do the champions of the “anti-woke” make full use of the small-mindedness of privilege rhetoric to once again make the relatively innocent David look like the wicked Goliath. We have seen the term “politically correct” deployed for the last thirty years to make any attempt at equality and justice for the marginalized look like some kind of tyranny on the part of a terrifying liberalism that has had everything its own way. But nothing has been more politically correct than not being politically correct.
The reader will have concluded that I do not at all care for the rhetoric of “privilege.” It muddies the waters. It makes silly accusations while overlooking very clear and serious ones which the accusers must understand better than anyone. But I suspect much of the root of this rhetoric is the persistent and truculent attitudes of dominant and exploitative groups resisting change. So much injustice has not been properly addressed or resolved, or in many cases admitted. By and large the rhetoric of privilege is an angry attempt, made by thwarted and abused people, to get a little revenge against systems far too slow to stop their own much larger injustices.