The Politics of Privilege: the Opposite of Privilege is Not the Absence of Privilege.

a video about the politics of privilege
the problem in 21st century is not that people use the concept of privilege it's not even that they overuse the concept of privilege let's admit it to ourselves term is getting worn out it's getting tired the problem is they proceed in an unexamined way to contrast privilege to something that is presumed to be it's counter posed opposite and what is the opposite of privilege I have never driven a car in my whole entire life never once I have had the privilege of living downtown I have had the privilege of being a pedestrian where I could walk from my apartment to the gym is it such a great privilege for one thing you have to pay higher rent to be downtown for another thing you can see YouTube videos here on this channel of me walking in the freezing cold at 6 o'clock in the morning from my home to the gym it's not always so easy or enjoyable being a pedestrian nevertheless I'm completely willing to admit I have had the privilege of refusing to own a car the privilege of refusing to drive a car how you do not think of myself as morally superior to those who drive cars and I can also recognize there are some jobs or if I have been hired for the job it would have been necessary for me to drive a car very briefly I applied for jobs at branded factories so that is being a baker but in reality it's at a huge scale or it's a factory process you're operating machines it's not like being a baker in your own kitchen when I applied to work in bread factories you might say I was completely aware that if I got the job if we're off of the job and I accepted the job I absolutely would need to own a car so yeah there's an element of luck and there's element of privilege in being able to refuse a car i have never murdered anyone in my entire life it may be said that i have had a privileged life because i have never been in the sort of circumstances that really would require me to kill someone and you know i've lived in some the world like Cambodia and Laos where you can meet and talk to people who grew up in circumstances of ongoing civil war tribalism mercenary work where it really was normal for people to have committed murder killings multiple times in their life growing up let's not digress into details but yes compared to say a member of a northeast Cambodian tribal group who lived through the Cambodian Civil War period I have had the privilege of never having to engage in any kind of acts of killing murder civil war neither in self-defence nor in a mercenary fashion or you know neither working for the Communist Party nor against the Communist Party in Colombo in Cambodia the reaction multiple communist parties fighting against each other it's even more more complex than that sure just being born into a civilization with a high level of stability peace order and good government I have had the privilege of never really being cornered into that type of violence but what are we killed for posing to this privilege I've had the privilege of being a pedestrian had the privilege of ever owning a car in Victoria British Columbia Canada City I used to live in there were a whole lot of kids who received a car as their high school graduation gift their kids you started driving a car during high school they received like a BMW this is quite common in Victoria very expensive car is there a graduation gift and then they're driving a luxury vehicle you know from the end of high school forward okay we both have privilege what about someone who chooses to have dramatically lower rent by not renting an apartment downtown they rent an apartment in the suburbs they may pay half as much in rent as I pay but they then take on the responsibility in the annoyance of owning a car or paying for insurance on the car or having to pay for parking everyone likes to complain about paying for parking they live a very different life they pay half as much rent they probably have a larger apartment you know they live in kind of better conditions in various ways they don't steel with the noise and crowding of being downtown a downtown part of the city Victoria um they can't walk from their apartment to a gym maybe they have to drive but they also have the privileges and advantages of driving a car okay the problem is we can't simply counterpose privilege to the opposite of privilege because there is no opposite of privilege the only thing that people are employing and normally without being aware of it is that they have some kind of unchallenged cultural assumption about what's normal what's default but that isn't itself in fact just another set of privileges it's just a more familiar set of privileges to them to their specific subjective standpoint northeastern Cambodia there are a lot of people who grow up inheriting rights land they inherit a plot of land to grow rice on and the plot of land they inherit seems to be the same size as everyone else's plot of rice right and so their rice farmers they live among rice farmers the land is divided up into little squares and it seems like everyone has a kind of equal amount of privilege I'll tell you why in just a second it's very easy for those people in their small town ignorance to look at university educated people in the big city and complain oh they have all the privilege those big city people who are going and getting a university education they have privilege whereas we don't in reality there are just two different set of privileges here there are many ways in which someone in the big city in Cambodia who goes to university and then probably can't get any better job than being a small town schoolteacher you know teaching children in a small town school um that person probably is a much more difficult and uncertain life compared to the rice farmer and let's not forget inheriting the ownership of farmland that is privileged in the most fundamental medieval sense of the word privilege this is privilege in a sense that hasn't changed since you know the era of aristocrats and serfs as opposed to landowners now very briefly in Kim Odia the you step of communist government the communist government fell apart when communism was failing one of the stages of its failure was that the land that they had taken away from everyone to centralize under the ownership the Communist Party they distributed they privatized land ownership and they distributed to people more or less equally yeah you could put a footnote in here you'd add a lot of details and of course there were a lot of conflicts that grew out of it but nevertheless you can go to many villages in Cambodia still today rural Cambodia where the land was divided up into a bunch of squares and kind of each family got a plot of rice land the fact that they may perceive that as a default common or normal privilege doesn't mean it's not a privilege it's merely a type of privilege they are more familiar with Australia mining corporations I met a guy who was a safety engineer in a mining corporation and so you can imagine his job is a set of highly technical skills checking that the air pressure is okay with this hose checking that the water pressure is okay with this hose checking the particulate matter in the air air quality checking the certain types of machines and devices are working properly mechanically that they're still reliable if you have a scale that measures weight is the scale accurate he works against a checklist of these things day by day and these jobs if you look at it step by step each thing on the checklist each one of those jobs could be done by a high school dropout with no university education this guy I met he had the privilege of going to university I think he got a master's degree in mechanical engineering if not he got a master's degree in one of those practical sciences and the bane of his existence was that these Australian mining corporations would hire people who were high school dropouts with no education people hadn't been through any of the struggle made the effort he made they would hire them just because their father or grandfather was an employee at the same mine was an employee of the same mining corporation 40 years ago apparently this is common in Australia according to this guy there are a lot of companies that will that will hire people not based on merit not based on education but because of who their parents or grandparents were so this is again privileged in a very medieval and feudal sense this is an inherited title right and he complained to me that these kids grow up aware that they are guaranteed a high-paying job for life so he said they're incredibly lazy in school they drop out of high school as soon as they can at age 16 to go and work in the mine he said that most of them are arrogant alcoholics they start drinking and being reckless because they know from their childhood because their father had this job therefore they're guaranteed a good job to mine and of course I think also he's aware although he had the privilege of going to university and learning the kind of aspects of physics and chemistry and theoretical science that lurk behind the safety procedures there's a level on which technically any high school dropout can do the same job that he does anyone can be trained in two days or less to you know use a little device to measure particulate matter in the air and then write it down and then they're told okay if the value is above this amount make a phone call and inform this person the actual procedures they have to follow do not require an advance your first education but both sides both sides each each receives the other is privileged the high school dropout has resentment against the university boy oh you think you're better than me because you got an education you went to university you had all this privilege going and studying physics and chemistry and mechanical engineering and a university in the big city and the other side that kind of thing from his perspective yeah he went to university he probably has student debt he probably had to live in a tiny apartment as a student for years doing this boring repetitive work learning chemistry or whatever he had to work he feels he had to work really hard to get this job as opposed to this kid who has privilege you dropped at a high school you didn't suffer through years of education that I suffered through your into this job just because of who your father or grandfather was each side perceives the other as having privilege and the fundamental point of trying to get across here is that is correct all right the opposite of privilege is just a different set of privileges whatever it is you perceive as no privilege at all it's just a set of privileges that's more exotic to you that you are less familiar with subjectively okay so the ultimate absurdity this comes down to is meat eaters complaining that vegans have privilege and again there's no point denying it the same way that a pedestrian has certain privileges okay I choose to rent an apartment downtown and pay more rent so I can walk to the gym instead of having to drive a car to go to the gym someone else pays half as much rent but they have to drive a car to go to the gym and then they have to pay for parking so it's different in terms of the costs involved likewise yes there is a set of privileges involved in choosing to eat a vegan diet but there's also an unbelievable number of privileges involved in eating a beef base diet or a fish based ahead you have the privilege of buying this product wrapped in plastic that's been rendered unto you by this unbelievable corporate and government structure that includes you know all the safety and quality control so on and so forth you get to you you have the ultimate you know amassing of first world privilege in making meat something you can you know so easily access and consume and let's face it guys at the end of the day eating meat is actually more expensive I mean it's harder for me to say that even about car ownership if I had accepted a job working at a bakery where I needed to get up in the morning and drive my car to the bakery at 3:00 a.m. because bakeries open really early I couldn't really look at and say well gee owning a car is a privilege I wouldn't have the option of living without a car the cost of owning a car is necessary for the money that I earned that's true for many jobs and that's why I don't feel morally superior to people who do own cars or people who do drive cars but it's a matter of fact it's more expensive to eat beef it's more expensive to eat shrimp it's more expensive to eat cheese and it's cheaper to eat gentles it's cheaper need a diet that eliminates those things so ultimately yes in that case you can simply measure which privilege is more economically inefficient okay guys I think this is a great example of a kind of rhetorical device that's currently like dominance in discussions of 21st century politics it's a big deal on the left it's a big deal on the right also and it fundamentally cannot last I think just a few years from now people will look back and joke remember what everyone was talking about privilege the fundamental thing you have to practice in order to defuse meaningless hostile counterproductive conversations about privilege is this you have to remind people that the opposite of privilege is not the absence of privilege it's just a different set of slightly less familiar privileges that also deserve to be examined analyzed and understood