Privilege or Not? Why does it matter?

Parents Forum
161

I think people balk at the word "privelege " because they feel there is something in the word suggesting that they didnt earn what they have. Let’s face it – we all work hard as parents to ensure that our kids get the best we can provide and our kids kill themselves in high school to have the best opportunities available. Nobody is saying because you enjoy privilege that you didn’t work hard. Just that while you were working, you didn’t have to worry about some of the stuff other kids did.

I am wHite and have had some very uncomfortable conversations with African American women (primarily ), and while I love to think about the many things we have in common and the things that draw us together, I would be very remiss to not acknowledge the ways in which our experiences differ. It is really humbling and it has taken me a while to really “get it”, (which required their patience, btw…)And I am still learning. …

162

I can’t tell you what it would look like for you. I’ve been to our state capitol and had meetings with the Governor’s staff. I’ve written letters to my state representatives. I’ve volunteered on commissions and public committees. I’ve spoken at public meetings. I’ve had meetings with local and state elected officials. I’ve been an advocate for individuals, and I’ve taught them how to advocate for themselves. If you can’t find time in your day to make an effort to create change, what do you expect an 18-year-old college student to do?

The assumption that seems to be made during these exercises is that people are guilty of being oblivious to the lives of others. Yet how much do the people conducting them know about the personal experiences of the students?

Is the white kid who was removed from his home because his drug addled father beat him every day privileged? What about the teens whose stepdad handed them pickaxes and shovels after school and made them dig him a wine cellar, then beat them if they quit earlier than he wanted? Or the brothers whose parents locked them in a closet on weekends so they could go party and left them to survive by eating their own feces? Would the younger of the two gain steps because he was adopted by the foster family they were placed with (because he was younger and less likely to be permanently scarred)? Would the elder brother lose steps because he was left with this family while his brother’s adoption was finalized and they wouldn’t adopt him no matter how much he, or anyone else, asked?

People really have no concept of the struggles other people go through. I’m a college student myself and the parent of a college student, so I have personal experience with the exercise. Trying to make people uncomfortable under the assumption that you’re teaching them something – and that they won’t know unless you tell them – is misguided at best. Good educators don’t publicly embarrass their students.

163

I think I understand why the word “privilege” is grating for me. I have no qualms with telling my child that he is privileged because his parents are comfortable middle-class and can pay for his college. Or he’s privileged because his parents are educated and can help him with homework and make him push his boundaries in academics. While many families don’t have this through no fault of their own, both privileges are inherently good things to have. It’s good to be able to not go into debt to pay for your education and it’s good to have two educated and supportive parents.

Being white is not good in itself, it’s completely neutral. The word “privilege” implies for me that being white or male is somehow better than being black or female. Granted, English is not my first language so I may be wrong when talking about subtle shades of meaning.

164

I think people balk at the word privilege for the same reason some people of color dislike conversations about affirmative action- embedded in the discussion is the implication that the person has gotten where they have not because of their merits but because of the conditions of their birth.

Being born white, or rich or pretty or into a stable family definitely carries advantage. The question is how do we recognize this without making someone responsible for the actions of their entire race, gender, or class?

Before someone jumps on my comments, I understand that being born a person of color can carry some inherent disadvantages affirmative action is meant to balance out, but I hope you can understand what I’m saying. White privilege is real. The affirmative action bump is real. How do we acknowledge this without holding it over people and making them feel less because of the advantages they experience?

165

OP described this as a “diversity/privilege workshop” for a college first year, likely during orientation.

When I google the term in quotes I get a link to program that includes stuff that seems very worthwhile to me. OP doesn’t want to describe her D’s program specifically, so perhaps we can discuss this particular one, that says, among other things -

and

https://msw.usc.edu/mswusc-blog/diversity-workshop-guide-to-discussing-identity-power-and-privilege/

166

I have various experience with this sort of “trainings” - both first and second-hand (my kids, my husband, even my parents). I am yet to see or hear about a single one of them being reasonable and productive. They are toothless and annoying at best and rude and embarrassing at worst. Most of them don’t take into account what sort of audience they are working with (which is quite important in this case).

What I think kids in colleges need to be told is just simply to respect people for who they are, for their achievement, to be kind to people around them, to listen and to be polite. All the simple regular stuff little kids are told but unfortunately don’t always remember or follow it.

If somebody looks down at the fellow student because they don’t have the same stuff (be it clothing, car, classes/training their parents paid for) - it means arrogance, lack of kindness and good manners. If somebody else looks down at others because they are not “tough” of “macho” or whatever else enough - it boils down to the same thing! Yes, in latter case most likely they had valid reasons why they lack their manners but they are in the same college now - same page, fresh start (of sorts). They are young adults and should leave their childish ideas behind and just behave.

So, I guess, my point is rather than do “diversity” trainings (kids usually pick all they need in that respect from each other), they need “behavior” training.

Also, I totally agree with @austinmshauri that no good ever came from finger pointing and intentional embarrassment of people.

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@CValle said:

The only study on this matter, by Roland Fryer,does not bear out your assertion that law enforcement treats black lives as disposable.

168

I agree Yucca. So many words get thrown out these days simply for shock and awe. I am quite numb to it all.

169

@hebegebe

Just because you know or like only one study doesn’t make it “the only study on this matter.” This “matter” being racial bias in police actions.

University of Toronto:
"In a paper published by the American Psychological Association, entitled “Racial Bias in Judgments of Physical Size and Formidability: From Size to Threat,” researchers say that unarmed black men are disproportionately more likely to be shot and killed by police and that these killings are often accompanied by explanations that cite the physical size of the person shot. “Our findings suggest that people’s stereotypes distort their vision, leading them to literally see black men as larger than white men even when they are exactly the same size,” said Nicholas Rule, an associate professor of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

The Guardian:
“Black males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers last year, according to data collected for The Counted, an effort by the Guardian to record every such death. They were also killed at four times the rate of young white men.Racial disparities persisted in 2016 even as the total number of deaths caused by police fell slightly. In all, 1,091 deaths were recorded for 2016, compared with 1,146 logged in 2015. Several 2015 deaths only came to light last year, suggesting the 2016 number may yet rise.”

A study by a University of California, Davis professor found “evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being black, unarmed, and shot by police is about 3.49 times the probability of being white, unarmed, and shot by police on average.” Additionally, the analysis found that “there is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.”

An independent analysis of Washington Post data on police killings found that, “when factoring in threat level, black Americans who are fatally shot by police are, in fact, less likely to be posing an imminent lethal threat to the officers at the moment they are killed than white Americans fatally shot by police.” According to one of the report’s authors, “The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black. . . . Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”

A report by retired federal and state judges tasked by the San Francisco district attorney’s office to examine police practices in San Francisco found “racial disparities regarding S.F.P.D. stops, searches, and arrests, particularly for Black people.” The judges, working with experts from five law schools, including Stanford Law School, found that “the disparity gap in arrests was found to have been increasing in San Francisco.” (Officers in San Francisco were previously revealed to have traded racist and homophobic text messages, and those working in the prison system had reportedly staged and placed bets on inmate fights.) In San Francisco, “although Black people accounted for less than 15 percent of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42 percent of all non-consent searches following stops.” This proved unwarranted: “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered).” In 2015, whites searched without consent were found to be carrying contraband at nearly two times the rate as blacks who were searched without consent.

Lots more studies on racial bias and policing are referred to in this article:https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/07/data-police-racial-bias

170

This whole THREAD is proof we need education about privilege…

171

With the goal of not getting this thread shut down by letting this turn into a race thread, let me respond only by saying that not only have I previously read some of those studies, but in fact have quoted from some of them to distinguish among the different points made in each. I analyze data for a living and pay attention to the different methods of data gathering, analysis, and valid assertions that can be made as a result.

172

My kid is privileged, and she knows it, yet is frustrated by this exercise.

On the one hand, while she (we) is (are) full pay, she knows her parents have sacrificed and worked nights and weekends to have this position. She also knows others who are fabulously multiple home wealthy. As with many kids in our county, she was born on 3rd base.

Her institution’s president is excellent at PR and effectively communicates his desire to uplift URMs and others. But she’s a bit jaded when he bypasses her in meet-the-students events. When you marginalize the white kids, how interested are you in balancing diversity or bringing people together?

Effectively she has learned that fortunate/unfortunate or privileged/underprivileged is not simply black and white (and I am not referring to race). At every step it is a continuum.

I don’t see where this sensitivity exercise builds friendships. Those would be the true measure of cross-culture-diversity learning.

173

[quote]
I say singling out one group of people and making them “feel badly or guilty” about being raised in a more privileged family/community/ etc. is NOT the way to foster understanding and community/quote

But what, exactly, was said or done to make anyone “feel badly or guilty”?

Can you give an example from the workshop your daughter attended?

174

@wis75 said:

Well, it’s good that nobody is making generalizations based solely on external perceptions.

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@hebegebe

Great. Then you know that the study that you claimed was the “only” study on this issues is not, in fact, the only study on this issue. And you also appreciate that there are many people who believe that Fryer’s analysis is highly flawed and that is suffers from major theoretical and methodological errors.

I don’t intend to debate the validity of the study - just to point out that the assertion that it is the “only” one is incorrect and implied assertion that its findings have been found to be “fact” is also highly debatable.

In fact Snopes did a whole piece on the study - http://www.snopes.com/2016/07/15/harvard-study-officer-involved-shootings/

176

@CValle,

My choice of “only” was misleading, but it reflects my view that Roland sought to measure something quite different from the many prior studies of race and police interactions. Let’s drop this here and pick it back up sometime on the race thread.

177

You are missing the point. The kid with the clothes, the car, the ski trips to Europe, can make others around him or her feel inferior by taking for granted that everyone has this stuff. It’s being sensitive enough to suggest affordable group activities. A former poster here, who was a working class Jewish kid at Williams many years ago, talked about the culture shock of being surrounded by privileged kids. They didn’t mean to make him feel inferior, but they often did.

178

So, what we have learned so far:

[ul][]Some people find the term privilege useful, some people find it grating.
[]Some people find diversity (for lack of a better word) workshops/exercises worthwhile, some people don’t.
[]Some people feel that it’s sensible to simplify discussions by grouping together individuals into various identity groups, some people don’t.
[]Some people feel that current discussions of [insert pretty much any identity label here] in the United States are more fraught and loaded than they should be, some people don’t.[/ul]
Huh. There’s a diversity of opinions. Who’da thunk it?

But I hope that’s a good summary to this point, since I present it in the hope that we’ll stop getting bogged down in a simple repeated restatement of positions, and maybe get to debating issues of real substance (which I feel like we had going pretty well for a while upthread).

179

Struggling to find the right voice to comment on this. As a parent, I want my kids to experience difference in college, both people and experience. They have lived with us their whole lives, and now, because we are upper middle class, we can manage to send them off into this marvelous 4 year experience of private, residential college where the faculty and their peers continue their education before they assume the full responsibilities of adulthood. I want them to really see, and know, the complexity and diversity of human experience, to continue to grow to be empathetic, caring, warm adults. And that means recognizing that, while they have had challenges, they also have fundamental advantages because of the randomness of their birth, in terms of race, and class and educational background. And to be humbled by their good fortune and not consider that it is something “deserved.” If bumping into that difference shocks them, and even embarrasses them on occasion, well then so be it. They will be better parents, co-workers, friends, and community members because of that recognition. I have teenage and 20 something sons, I know they can be absolute idiots sometimes. But I also know they are capable of warmth and generosity of spirit, and that is what I look to their colleges to continue to foster.

180

From The Atlantic last week:

"Here’s the latest, more profound way in which wealthier students have an advantage over lower-income ones: Those enrolled in private and suburban public high schools are being awarded higher grades—critical in the competition for college admission—than their urban public school counterparts with no less talent or potential, new research shows.

It’s not that those students have been getting smarter. Even as their grades were rising, their scores on the SAT college-entrance exam went down, not up. It’s that grade inflation is accelerating in the schools attended by higher-income Americans, who are also much more likely than their lower-income peers to be white, the research, by the College Board, found. This widens their lead in life over students in urban public schools, who are generally racial and ethnic minorities and from families that are far less well-off.

“This is just another systemic disadvantage that we put in front of low-income kids and kids of color,” said Andrew Nichols, the director of higher-education research at The Education Trust, a nonprofit advocacy organization. Nichols was not involved in the research."