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​​You’re So Privileged, I Bet You Think This Article Is About You

photograph of high school students taking exam

Back in 2014, I remember coming across the Buzzfeed quiz “How Privileged are You?” and answering each question, line by line, to see what my privilege score would be. I remember feeling uncomfortable about the quiz then, but only now do I have the tools to articulate why.

It wasn’t that I was relatively privileged with a well-to-do upbringing and white skin. It wasn’t even necessarily the oppression Olympics, though I did at the time wonder how I compared to others.

The problem was that a numerical score that adds up different experiences doesn’t actually track how privilege and oppression work.

Unfortunately, these kinds of numerical privilege tests have stuck around and periodically re-circulate when conversations about privilege re-enter mainstream discussion. You may have also encountered or participated in a privilege walk, which asks participants to stand in a line and take a step forward or backward in response to each statement instead of tallying a numerical score – those who move to the back are less privileged; those who move forward are more privileged.

What kinds of statements are included on these tests?

  •     “I am white.”
  •     “A stranger has never asked to touch my hair, or asked if it is real.”
  •     “I never had to ‘come out.’”
  •     “I have never been denied an opportunity because of my gender.”
  •     “I don’t have any student loans.”
  •     “My parents are still married.”
  •     “I have never been shamed for my body type.”

There are a number of other statements that target different identities and experiences. Most fall into broad categories like white experiences, class-relative experiences, Black experiences, trans experiences, non-Christian experiences, etc. These are all good experiences to be aware of.

But privilege doesn’t function in this piecemeal, additive way. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term intersectionality points out that, for example, Black women’s oppression isn’t the combination of the oppression of Black men and the oppression of white women. Black women are a distinct social class with distinct experiences.

The combination of different axes of oppression is not reducible to the sum of its parts.

Our social categories that shape how we view and treat ourselves and others tend to be more specific than we sometimes think. We respond very differently to an attractive white trans woman than to a fat brown Hispanic trans man. Both are trans; both have very different experiences.

A second issue is that some of the items on these tests seem to relate to how well your life has gone rather than how much your life has been impacted by structural inequalities. Take the statement “my parents are still married.” While divorce is more common in some social groups than others due to structural features, it is not uncommon for highly privileged people to have divorced parents.

If we want to preserve the political function of privilege, it needs to remain a concept that tracks experiences with various structural advantages or disadvantages. The immensely privileged can still have terrible lives through bad luck. Those who lack privilege can live quite good lives as well.

Structural inequalities and interpersonal bigotry can and do make life harder in specific ways for marginalized people, and privilege (or lack thereof) does influence how your life goes for you. But lacking privilege is not the same as having a life full of hardship.

A third issue is that it’s unclear what to do with your score. People often compare themselves with others along axes of privilege in ways that are unhelpful. Sometimes this is done in self-aggrandizing and misleading ways to gain clout on social media (though most often, privileged users will bandy about the one marginalized person that agrees with them just to win a debate). Perhaps more often, people who score as more privileged might feel as if their problems don’t matter or don’t matter as much as those who score as less privileged. Sometimes this is right – when the problems are relatively trivial – but other times this isn’t true.

While we will need to make triage decisions at the level of which political projects to take up and which features of structural oppression are most pressing, comparison at the level of individuals can cause a number of problems. Trauma is still valid even if someone else has it worse.

An aggregate number also does not provide any actionable political guidance.

Scoring individualizes privilege instead of looking at the underlying social structures.

It can promote a kind of navel-gazing about our own experiences instead of group conversations about the problems that specifically affect us and what we can do about them. The way out of oppressive structures is not by finding the most marginalized person and placing the burden of liberation on them; it’s by working together.

Fourth, when we have conversations about privilege, there are a number of reactions that the privileged have when their relative structural advantage is pointed out: “Why are you trying to make me feel guilty?” “My life hasn’t been easy.” “I’ve experienced [insert unrelated hardship], so I know what oppression is like.” “But we’ve overcome [insert kind of oppression].” “I’ve never heard of that, so it can’t be real.” “The real problem is [insert unrelated issue].” “Well, [other marginalized group] also oppresses [marginalized group under discussion], so any oppression I participate in shouldn’t be called out.”

These various kinds of denial, outrage, and misdirection are often used by the privileged to recenter themselves in conversations. That tendency will not be affected by the kind of icebreaker you use to talk about privilege, whether it be the Buzzfeed quiz or a privilege walk.

However, some of these responses are (willful or otherwise) misunderstandings of what privilege is. It’s not personal virtue. It’s not how your life has gone on the whole. It’s a particular set of experiences that arise when people in well-specified social groups interact with social and structural advantages or disadvantages.

Privilege tests can sometimes feed into these misconceptions about privilege by obscuring intersectionality, making it sound as if privilege = how well your life has gone, and encouraging unhelpful comparisons. For these and other reasons, some people have already moved away from the privilege quiz/privilege walk model.

I don’t think that getting rid of privilege tests will solve the problems we have in discussing oppression. But we don’t need to aggravate these problems with a teaching resource that could be easily replaced with better materials. Conversations about privilege will always be hard, because people who are privileged do not directly experience what it’s like to live under structural oppression, and people who are oppressed often internalize oppressive narratives.

I hope that we can all replace these petty blame games and denials of privilege with solidarity and community. The fight isn’t between the privileged and the marginalized; it’s between the people who support systems of oppression and the people who want to dismantle them.

If you’re privileged, use that privilege to help.

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Life Imitates Art (and So Does the News)

image of movie opening title sequence

There is an old saw that life imitates art. But what exactly does it mean? Is it not the other way around – that art imitates life?

Many answers have been given to this question, but here’s one that I find plausible: life imitates art insofar as it reveals truths about us and our world. Such truths are not true because we find them corroborated by personal experience or the annals of history. The truths of art are true because they frame how we understand ourselves and our history in the first place. We might say, then, that life imitates art insofar as the truths of art help us make sense of life. They help us make sense of our human condition and what we value in it.

Take Homer’s Odyssey. According to one classicist, the great epic poem tells us “something true about life…It’s about homecoming…It’s about the bonds that connect family members over many years despite time and distance.” This is platitudinous, but nonetheless correct. The poem still speaks to us today partly because it transfigures our conceptions of what home and family are. That is, the poem compels us to understand homes and families differently, including our own. And we can appreciate such truths even when we have never left home, much less been to war.

If life imitates art, then so does the news. And there is one little-known artwork that seems to ring especially true given the current state of our union. The work I have in mind is “Stars in My Crown” (1950), a small-budget western film directed by Jacques Tourneur. The film tells the story of Walesburg, a small, predominantly white town in the postbellum South. Their story is strikingly similar to ours. Or we could say that our story imitates theirs.

Like our country right now, Walesburg is sick in body and soul. The town is not only plagued by an epidemic, but also struggling with the scourge of racism. The nature of these ills, as well as the town’s responses to them, are telling.

The racial troubles start – at least in the film – one lazy afternoon. An orphan named John Kenyon is fishing with his dear friend, a former slave named “Uncle” Famous Prill. John is a wide-eyed and well-mannered boy who is deeply loyal to Famous, and with good reason. Famous is a humble old man with a heart of gold. He has long been a guiding light in the community. As John tell us: “I don’t guess there was a boy or man in Walesburg who hadn’t had him for a teacher.”

While John and Famous are sitting along the creek beside their fishing rods, Lon Backett pulls up on his buckboard. Lon runs the general store, as well as a small mining operation outside of town. He wants to speak with Famous because the mica vein his workers have been mining runs under Famous’s property, and Lon wants to buy him out.

Lon makes several offers, but Famous graciously declines each one: “I got a long-tailed coat for Sundays. A house, got a bed, And I gets my vittles three times every God’s day, don’t I? Mr. Backett, what does I want with $16?” Lon drives off in a huff.

A few minutes later, Parson Josiah Gray comes along. The three discuss what had just transpired. They try to calm Famous down, assuring him that he is entitled to his land. After all, he is a free man under the law. But Famous knows better: “just saying a good thing don’t make it so.” The parson gets it. He acknowledges that no matter what assurances he gives, Famous will not have it easy: “I guess Lon Backett will have to kick up an almighty big stink before he learns his lesson.” This is a terrible understatement. Lon’s “stink” will nearly cost Famous his life.

While Lon drums up hostilities against Famous, the citizens of Walesburg start falling deathly ill with “slow fever.” Typhoid. Eventually they will discover that it is from the contaminated school well. Until then, the town goes into a lockdown. School closes and the church is shuttered. The graveyard begins to fill. The doctor and parson work double-time to serve the sickly and dead. (It is only then, by the way, that the doctor becomes integrated into the community. He was an educated elite from the big city and with a disdain for small town life. Townspeople sensed it, and for a long while they distrusted him. Sound familiar?)

During the epidemic, the threats against Famous intensify. Lon’s men are out of work and angry. One night they tear up his corn crop, destroy his winter food stores, and set loose his livestock. They come back another night as Night Riders, clad in white hoods and brandishing torches. They leave a burning cross in front of the porch and pin on Famous himself a note demanding that he give up his land or suffer the consequences.

When the note reaches Parson Gray the next day, he storms into the saloon where Lon and his clansmen hang: “Haven’t you seen one poisoned well spread grief and trouble through half the town? Don’t you realize the poison in that well was catlap compared to this?” The men are unmoved. If the parson wants a fight, they will give it to him.

Later that night the lynch mob surrounds the home of Famous, rope in hand, and orders him to come out. The parson intervenes. He asks that he be permitted to read Famous’s will before the dreadful deed is done. As the parson reads the will, he names each of the hooded men one by one. Famous intends to bequeath something to each of them: a razor for Bill Cole, who had wanted a beard since he was “knee-high to a hop toad,” an axe for Matt Gibson, his dog to Justin Briley, and even the mica vein for Lon Backett, since he seems to want it “powerful bad.” The men realize that they cannot go through with their plans. Not against Famous.

The film closes with a scene from church the next Sunday. The parson and his flock are singing:

“I am thinking today of that beautiful land
I shall reach when the sun goeth down;
When thro’ wonderful grace by my Savior I stand,
Will there be any stars in my crown?”

The camera pans the room, showing many of the townsfolk we have come to know. Most of them have been regularly attending services, but some have come for the first time. Everyone in the town seems to be there, celebrating together. The camera trains on Lon, with his hands piously clasped as he pours himself into the hymn. He looks as though he has, finally, learned his lesson and is now praying that there may still be stars in his crown.

This wholesome final scene has all the trappings of a feel-good Hollywood ending. A community looks healed and the credits will soon scroll. But then, just behind Lon through a church window, we catch a quick glimpse of Uncle Famous walking down the road, alone. The shot is easily missed. It is a subtle indication that the devastating effects of the peculiar institution continue, and often in ways that go unnoticed by those not suffering from them. The joyous churchgoers are unaware. And to the extent that we viewers believed everything in the town to be turning out alright, we, too, were complicit in the self-deception.

Today we face a similar situation. Coronavirus vaccinations promise an end to this terrible pandemic. Yet while our body politic has a path to health, there is no easy inoculation for the racism that has been poisoning our collective soul. And while most of us acknowledge the difficulties of combating racism, “Stars in My Crown” presents those difficulties in an especially perspicacious way.

First, the film shows how deep-rooted racism is often sustained because it advances the interests of the rich and powerful. This is not to say that racism is reducible to economic or class warfare. The point is rather that racist beliefs and practices are often reinforced because they serve the privileged. Lon Backett foments racial tensions in Walesburg because it advances his business interests. In America today there are many such people who sow racial division for their own gain. The billionaire businessman Charles Koch recently confessed that he and his political associates had “screwed up by being so partisan.” Koch seems well-intentioned. He seems to believe in equality and justice for all. But he and his Koch Network (now named, and not without irony: Stand Together) have invested millions of dollars in the very political messaging that has helped bring racial tensions in America to a fever pitch. This is hardly a new problem. And it persists because those who stand to benefit from systemic racism, however well-intentioned they may be, are easily blinded to the unjust reality they help create.

The film also shows the complexities of the human heart and how it so readily accommodates brotherly love, racial resentment, and economic anxiety. The Night Riders are undeniably racist, and their hate is further stoked by fears that without mining work they will be unable to feed their families. Yet however much racial hate they have, and however much that hate is exacerbated by worries about money, their enmity is nevertheless counterbalanced by a love and respect for Famous. “Sinners also love those that love them” (Luke 6:32). This is a complicated psychology, but not an uncommon one. What makes it complicated is that we cannot easily determine root causes. What is the real reason behind the Night Riders acting as they did, and what was mere pretense? Was their economic anxiety heightened by racial resentment? Or vice versa? Was their brother-love genuine, or just racism suffering from weakness of will? These very sorts of questions are being intensely debated right now (see, for example, here, here, and here).

Above all, the film reminds us how easily we ourselves are prone to overlook these challenges. When “Stars in My Crown” first debuted, The New York Times praised it: “The true spirit of Christmas – Peace on Earth, Goodwill Toward Men – is reflected both in word and deed in the heartwarming Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture.’” How far from the truth. The film does not warm our hearts, but rather warns us about our hearts. The film enjoins us, Ta-Nehisi Coates does, to “resist the common urge…toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice.”

Now some readers might be saying to themselves: “I’ve read Coates, and I’ve thought quite a bit about these issues. I doubt that I really need to watch some B-western made nearly a century ago by an aristocratic Frenchman.” This may very well be true. Or it may not be. As Famous tells us in the film, just saying a good thing don’t make it so. We may think we understand what’s going on around us and in the news, and yet we may also be poorly mistaken.

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“OK Boomer” and the Generational Divide

photograph of unsmiling girl giving thumbs up

Millennials and members of Generation Z, fed up with condemnatory think-pieces (which deride everything about young people, from their taste for expensive brunch food to their role in the death of the napkin industry), have a new retort to combat dismissive baby boomers. “OK boomer,” a pithy and dismissive response to any patronizing or out-of-touch statement made by an older person, has become common parlance both online and off. The meme started on Twitter sometime in 2018, but it recently garnered attention from mainstream news sources when nineteen year-old college student Peter Kuli released a remix of Jonathan William’s song “OK Boomer,” which mainly consists of Williams repeating the song’s title interspersed with a few lines poking fun at baby boomers, on the social media app Tik Tok. The song includes lyrics like, “You’re all old and racist / All about that fakeness / I’m tryna pay my bills / But I’m all on the waitlist,” and “The way you wear that MAGA hat / Lookin’ like a facist.”

Baby boomers are generally taking the meme as an ageist attack against their generation. The language they use to describe the meme is violent and martial; economist Tyler Cowen called it “the latest linguistic weapon of generational warfare,” and Meghan Gerhardt, the founder of a movement aimed at promoting harmony between generations in the workplace called Gentelligence, called it “a pre-emptive strike against baby boomers [launched] using the most powerful weapons in [Generation X’s] arsenal—social messaging platforms TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.” Some have taken their resentment to almost cartoonish extremes. Bob Lonsberry, a conservative radio show host, called it “the n-word of ageism” on Twitter. He received a significant amount of backlash, and, of course, many people responded to the original (and now deleted) Tweet with “OK boomer.”

Many think pieces about “OK boomer” (because this meme, of course, has become yet another source for countless condescending think pieces about the follies of young people) have elevated what might have been laughed off as a harmless joke to a serious issue with moral weight. It’s worth considering whether or not young people are actually fostering generational divide by propagating this meme, and if so, what the moral ramifications of that could be. While the notion that strict demarcations divide us into “generations” has been called into question, the idea that a shared set of values, or the memory of a transformative cultural event, binds us to other people in our age group persists. Whether or not it actually exists in a quantifiable sense, many of us still perceive a difference between the young and the old.

The controversy around this meme is based in large part on a question of privilege. Baby boomers who dislike the meme argue that young people who use the meme are truly the ones who are privileged, or have at the very least inherited privileges from their parents that they are incapable of acknowledging. In an article for The Guardian, Bhaskar Sunkara implies that young people ought to turn their attention towards the truly privileged, the “capitalists, [and] the politicians who serve them,” rather than their parents. This statement, however, implies that there is no overlap between the two groups, that capitalists cannot be baby boomers or that those born in the post-World War II era have not in large part created our current economic situation.

At the same time, many argue that this meme attacks those from the baby boomer generation who were marginalized or underprivileged. This becomes evident when the idea of discrimination in the workplace enters the picture. Gerhardt writes about the harm that ageist sentiments can inflict in the workplace, claiming that,

“Generational difference is one of the final frontiers where identity-based stereotypes, prejudice and putdowns are allowed to not only run rampant […] As a new generation comes of age, it’s an ideal time for all of us to become aware of the harm this does—and the potential to be found in generations respecting and learning from each other instead.”

She argues we should value generational difference and the new perspectives it gives us, both in and out of the workplace. This criticism, that we gain more from solidarity between generations than division, is certainly valuable.

Another criticism of this meme claims that it relies too heavily on a white middle-class perspective; children of the poor and people of color, as some on Twitter have pointed out, can hardly subscribe to the idea that their parents have it easy or are in possession of socioeconomic advantages that their children lack. “Okay Boomer,” in other words, is a meme that primarily speaks to the anger of white teenagers that feel locked out from privileges and economic prosperity their parents enjoyed. However, as evident in the song that made this meme so popular, “Okay Boomer” is not a putdown for baby boomers in general. Rather, it attacks the most vocal and powerful group within that demographic; the wealthy, the white, and the conservative. It is within this context that the meme is most often used, and its older critics almost invariably come from this demographic.

Even more central to this story than privilege is the idea of voice; whose voices are valued in our society, who is allowed a platform, who is allowed to criticize whom. Both sides feel dismissed and undervalued, and both perceive the other as holding the power to speak and be heard. “OK boomer” is, in its most common and widely proliferated use, a way of dismissing a privileged voice from an assumed non-privileged position, but we should still be aware of how our assumptions and how voice can shape the way we perceive generational difference.

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So I am a racist. What do I do now?

This post originally appeared on October 27, 2015.

Like most human beings, I grew up imbibing racist stereotypes. Since I am Italian, those stereotypes were to some extent different from the kind of stereotypes I would have acquired had I grown up in the United States. For instance, I thought all people “of color” were exotic and more beautiful than “Whites”. This positive, and yet still damaging, stereotype included Black women and men, and Asian men, who in the American dating market are known to be greatly disadvantaged.

My personal attitude was to some extent reflective of Italian culture. The fascination with women of color, for instance, is fairly widespread among Italian men, as you would expect given Italy’s colonial past and its relatively racially homogenous present.

When I started visiting the US academically more ten years ago, I grew accustomed to a much more sophisticated discussion about race, and went through an awkward and often painful process of realization of how implicitly racist I was. I learned that asking “Where are you really from?” to a Seattle native of Korean descent was racist, or at the very least racially insensitive. I realized the tricky undertones of many expressions that I deemed simply descriptive, such as “Black music”. And I found out, much to my surprise, that even my aesthetic appreciation for non-Caucasian people was highly suspicious.

I also discovered that Black women are supposed to be bossy, angry, and dependent on welfare, and that Black men are supposed to be criminals and absent fathers; that East-Asian men are supposed to be unattractive and effeminate, and all Asian women submissive; that Asians in general are good at science… Some of these stereotypes were somewhat in line with my own culture’s, if not necessarily my own, but some were a complete surprise, and that surprise, that sense of “I would never think that” gave me an unwarranted sense of reassurance. When taking the IAT, I even compared positively to White Americans with regard to implicit bias toward Native Americans. So I thought: now that I know all this stuff about race, and given that I am a committed anti-racist, I’ll get rid of all the bad stuff, and I’ll stop being racist!

But, in fact, it didn’t go quite like that… When walking in segregated New Haven, seeing hooded Black men walking behind me made me nervous. I was very aware and ashamed of my own nervousness, but I was nervous nonetheless. Later on, when living in the United Kingdom, I found myself mistaking Black men for store employees. These are only two of the most unnerving instances of my implicit racism surfacing to my uncomfortable consciousness.

And it doesn’t even stop at race: I have become aware of many other forms of discrimination, over the years, and that has greatly increased my capacity at catching myself being implicitly homophobic or transphobic, fattist, ableist, and so forth. But, in fact, it seems to have only increased my awareness, not my ability to be less biased.

Philosopher Robin Zheng, whose research is on moral responsibility and implicit bias, has reassured me that I am not alone. Empirical research confirms that fighting implicit bias require a lot more than just informing people about the reality of discrimination.

This research wouldn’t be surprising to those familiar with more general work on implicit reasoning. For those who are not, I find useful an ancient metaphor from the Buddhist tradition popularized by Jonathan Haidt in his acclaimed pop-psychology book The Happiness Hypothesis. The metaphor describes the human mind as composed by an elephant and its rider. According to Haidt, the elephant roughly corresponds to what has been called System I in dual-processing accounts of reasoning: a system that is old in evolutionary terms, and shared with other animals. This system is comprised of a set of autonomous subsystems that include both innate input modules and domain-specific knowledge acquired by a domain-general learning mechanism. System I is fast, automatic and operates under the level of consciousness. The rider roughly corresponds to System II: a system that is evolutionarily recent and distinctively human. System II permits abstract reasoning and hypothetical thinking, and is slower, controlled and conscious. “The rider evolved to serve the elephant,” says Haidt, and while it may sometimes override it, trick it into obedience, “it cannot order the elephant around against its will” (The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 17).

This tension between the rider and the elephant has many different manifestations, but one that is particularly relevant to the discussion of the implicit biases is the case of mental intrusions. If we are explicitly asked to not think about a white bear, all we can think of is, you guessed it, a white bear. This ironic process of mental control is the consequence of automatic and controlled processes firing at each other: the request of not thinking a certain thought activates System II, which attempts to suppress the thought. System I activates automatic monitoring of one’s progress, which in this case means continuously checking whether one is not thinking about a white bear. That move turns out to be obviously counterproductive, since it reintroduces the thought that one is supposed to ban. But “because controlled processes tire quickly, eventually the inexhaustible automatic processes run unopposed, conjuring up herds of white bears” (The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 20). Dan Wegner, who first studied ironic process in a lab setting, has shown that it affects also people who try to repress unendorsed stereotypes.

While there is interesting research addressing more productive and effective ways of fighting implicit bias and stereotyping, I want to conclude with a remark about the implications of this empirical literature for microaggressions, a topic that has gained much attention recently.

I largely disagree with Haidt’s criticisms of trigger and content warnings in academic settings, for reasons well-articulated by Regina Rini and Kate Manne. But I do share his attention to underlying psychological mechanisms, and I worry that they are sometimes neglected in the political commentary.

Committed anti-racists are unlikely to engage in overtly prejudiced behavior. However, they may still find themselves inadvertently engaging in microaggressions such as those I described at the beginning of the post: inappropriate jokes or questions, or bona fide mistakes stemming from deeply-ingrained stereotypes. The elephant acts against the rider’s wishes, or even awareness: when something that has been internalized as a threat (such as a hooded Black man) appears in view, the elephant doesn’t hesitate, and kicks the rider in the shins, making it jump. The rider will take one or two seconds to realize that there is in fact no threat, and that will be too late: the jump was visible, the offense taken, the harm done. Not fully understanding how powerful these unconscious mechanisms are affects not only our moral assessment of the perpetrators (which can be also self-assessment). It also produces condemnatory reactions that, while appropriate in theory, are not necessarily fertile in practice, such as a certain relatively widespread paralyzing White guilt of well-intentioned liberals, who go around admitting their White privilege without knowing exactly what to do about it. Realizing that some of the mechanisms motivating our behavior are outside of our direct control allows us to focus on indirect ways to modify our behavior, and to shift from a sterile admission of White privilege to a more proactive commitment to changing the institutional injustice that gives rise to it. You can’t order the elephant at will, but you can change the environment it is raised in.

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The Empty Chair: White Male Privilege at DePauw

To understand some of the problems with DePauw’s campus climate, one need look no further than who is participating in the discussion. I learned this lesson firsthand as a sophomore, when I attended a film screening on white privilege at the Prindle Institute. As a white man, I thought it would be important to learn about my own privilege. I hoped that others like me would do the same.

Continue reading “The Empty Chair: White Male Privilege at DePauw”