Yeah, it was a real privilege for a kid and his single mom to be living well below the poverty line in a three-room shack that any half-awake inspector would've immediately condemned - not least for the black mold that ate up one whole wall of the third room so we had to seal it off with plastic - because it happened to sit on a hill next to a tiny patch of half-gone-to-seed apple trees that produced maybe as much as a half bushel in a season, the whole being owned by a former truck farmer whose income consisted in no inconsiderable part of the pitiful rent he got for the place, and who barely afforded the property taxes that left unpaid would've had the lot of us indigent.
I understand that the rhetoric of privilege isn't intended as personal attack, or at least that that's not its ostensible intent. I wish more people who favored it understood that, however intended, personal attack is the way it comes across, and that makes it unhelpful - indeed, actively harmful, if the purpose is to promote sympathy, among those not so predisposed, for those philosophies in whose service the rhetoric is invariably deployed.
The fact that your life sucked in many other ways is irrelevant. Having fresh fruit growing on plants near your house which you can eat is a privilege that most people do not have.
I'm not saying, "your life was privileged, and you suck." I'm saying, "your situation of having fresh-off-the-tree apples was an unusual privilege." Am I wrong, or do you just object to the one word, and want me to know a bunch of other things about how you lived too?
To reiterate from my prior comment, I understand exactly what you're saying. The problem I have is that you're not listening to what I'm saying - which, again, is that it doesn't matter what you're saying, because when you use this rhetoric to express it, you piss people off even if in spite of yourself, and the rhetoric is therefore actively inimical to the purpose in whose service you employ it.
It's not that complicated or controversial a point, or at least I wouldn't have thought so - that, when attempting to communicate, the intent with which you speak is irrelevant to the effect your words produce in your interlocutor. Unless your intent is actually to piss people off - and I see no reason to suspect that it is - then using a rhetorical structure which consistently produces that effect is counterproductive. If your intent is to inspire sympathy for the contention that there's something "elite" about having access to fresh apples, regardless of any surrounding circumstance, then using a rhetorical structure which consistently antagonizes people, and thus is much more likely to depress the tendency to sympathy among the already unconvinced than to inspire it, is counterproductive as well. And arguing that those whom you so anger and antagonize, are in the wrong to feel so, only compounds the error.
It's not that I fail to understand the concept - I expect I should do, considering I deployed it often enough myself back in my doctrinaire-progressive youth. And it's not that I fail to grasp that your intent is not to give insult - even if my own experience could not inform me on the other side of the question, mere charity would require I not so presume.
The problem I have is, quite simply, that the rhetoric you are using, in any case save when talking to someone who already agrees with you in every meaningful particular, does not work. Outside that very specific internecine context, the only thing it achieves is to make people angry, and that helps nothing and nobody as far as I can see.
I concede that concision isn't my firet skill. That said, if it's obfuscatory, it's not deliberately so, and it sounds as though you took my point regardless.
I understand your point. I don't agree with it. I don't think the meaning of the word "privilege" has become so narrowly defined that it automatically provokes outrage like this.
If, in fact, "privilege" does in fact trigger this massive anger you say it does, then I totally agree that its use is counterproductive. I just don't see it.
I spent a while casting around for something close enough to my point that I could recommend it - rather than, for example, a Marxist critique of privilege theory which decried it for being not antinomian enough. Just as I was beginning to despair of the time I'd have to spend writing a long piece of my own on the subject, I ran across this:
I can't really claim with confidence that the book makes a point I'd be entirely happy with, because I'm only just about to start reading it myself. But this review, and what I'm seeing on its Amazon page, suggest that it's quite close at least to the point I'm trying to make, and so I recommend it sight unseen.
If you don't feel like making the purchase directly, email me at the address in my profile, and I'll gift you a copy in whichever format you prefer. In any case, I'll be interested to hear what you think of it.
The problem isn't that "privilege" has become too narrow, but that it's become too broad.
The word implies an actor. Privilege is, by definition, caused. A benefit of privilege by definition originates in a system of structural inequality, one more or less deliberately designed to benefit some, but not others, based on some criterion such as sex, skin color, sexual preference, or the like - and that's not a possibly tendentious definition of my own invention, but rather the one applied by the proponents of the concept, all the way back to McIntosh's formalization in the late 80s that began the modern popularization of "privilege" in the first place.
A further implication, also original but more clearly elucidated by Maltz Bovy, is that to do other than abandon or at least forswear the benefit of privilege, and work to dismantle the structural inequality that furnishes it, is iniquitous. To say that someone is or has been privileged therefore cannot but at minimum verge upon an accusation that that person lacks virtue. That, I think, is at base what provokes anger in response - and not unreasonably so, because it does constitute an attack on the quality of one's character. Even when leveled at someone who is progressive and does accept the theory of privilege without question, such an attack tends to elicit a defensive response. How much more so, then, from someone who is not, and does not?
And "privilege" remains so freighted, regardless of intent. It's especially pernicious, therefore, to conflate privilege with simple good fortune, which is fundamentally distinct in that good fortune isn't caused. It's just a thing that happens, and happens to work out well for someone. That's what we're talking about here. No system of structural inequality put those trees next to that hovel. You cannot reasonably posit a deliberately unequal allocation of benefit to have brought about that result. The very idea is risible at best, outright nonsense at worst. And, in stating nonetheless that that must be the case, you level the sort of opprobrious allegation I describe above.
It is not reasonable, nor is it acceptable in any conversational context where civility and charity are meant to hold sway, to offer one's interlocutor insult, then become incensed when said interlocutor responds as though insulted. Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend. Voltaire's sarcasm remains a sarcasm, whether you mean it so or otherwise.
Substitute "tenement apartment" for "shack" and "slumlord" for "former truck farmer", then subtract "living near formerly productive fruit trees". You now have a story that describes many times more people than your original.
The politics of privilege basically says that unless you have had the worst life that it is possible to have, you have to yield to anyone that had anything worse off than you. Since the word "elitism" is what brought all that into the conversation, perhaps it was a poor choice.
While at previous times in history, it might have been a mark of elite privilege to not have to pick your own fresh produce, that is no longer the case. Now, having fruit trees and a garden in your backyard means you are lucky enough to have direct control over a portion of your food supply, and can therefore choose to grow food with flavor and nutrition, rather than superior shelf life, visual appeal, and transportability--which are the characteristics that the grocery store will choose for you.
The apples that grew in my (rented) backyard as a kid were sour, with a woody texture, and were usually covered in wasps or ants. But they certainly did taste better than store-bought Red Delicious. The ants added a lemony flavor. I never thought to try the wasps.
