A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

Reading Casey Given‘s final installment in our Mutual Exchange on the value of privilege theory, I have less confidence than ever that he understands what privilege theory even is.

He continues, perversely, to treat intersectionality as an alternative to privilege theory, when it in fact intersectionality presupposes privilege theory and uses it as a building block. And he continues to refer to oppression as a real thing, despite the fact that privilege is, by definition, nothing more than the relative advantage that not being oppressed confers on you compared to those who are. In Cathy Reisenwitz’s succinct phrase, privilege is nothing more than the fact that “you began the race a few steps ahead” of someone else. You may not like the term “privilege” for that fact, but the fact itself is common-sense reality. And “privilege” happens to be the name for it commonly used by social justice activists.

And, I repeat, it doesn’t matter whether learning the concept of privilege and considering the forms of privilege they have makes people feel bad. Sometimes I feel bad when my bank balance falls to zero and I have no clear idea how long till my next check comes in, but the laws of mathematics don’t depend on how I feel. Given says “heightened awareness of one’s privilege will not end systematic poverty or oppression.” Heightened awareness of the laws of gravitation and ballistics won’t get you to Mars, either, but ignoring them and proceeding as though they don’t exist is one way to guarantee you don’t get there.

Given also treats the privilege framework as “infamous” for “collectiviz[ing] people,” and juxtaposes to it intersectionality as a way “to analyze the numerous axes of privilege and oppression that an individual stands at the intersection of (hence the name)….” But as Given himself suggests here, the very word “intersectionality” implies that something is intersecting; and that something — as he explicitly admits — is axes of privilege and oppression as they intersect in specific individuals. If the practice of intersectionality was created by those using privilege theory as an outgrowth of that theory, and is seen — by both them and Given — as the application of intersecting forms of privilege to individual cases, then it stands to reason that Given’s view of privilege as “collectivist” and at odds with intersectionality reflects his own failure to understand the concept in the first place.

Intersectionality is fully consistent with privilege theory, because privilege itself rightly conceived is not a monolithic identity or an absolute value. A good comparison is the various positive and negative differentials — exhaustion, morale disruption, fuel or ammo depletion, suppression by nearby artillery, etc. — that might be assigned to a combat unit counter in one of those old hex-grid map war games like Avalon Hill and SPI used to make. Applying a specific negative differential doesn’t necessarily mean one combat unit is weaker than another as an absolute value; it just means it’s that much weaker than it otherwise would have been. A black upper-middle class man in the corporate managerial hierarchy may be more privileged in aggregate terms than the white woman working in the mail room, but his race as such reduces his total status differential compared to what it would be if, say, the circumstances were identical except for the woman in the mail room being black or the male executive being white.

In a sense, intersectionality is a remedy. But it’s a remedy, not to the concept of privilege as such, but to the misunderstanding and misapplication of privilege theory entailed in the so-called “identity politics” of the 1970s. To repeat, intersectionality is a remedy, not for privilege theory, but for identity politics. Given seems to confuse the one with the other. There were indeed problems with the method of analysis associated with identity politics in the 1970s. They did treat racial or gender identity as absolute, monolithic forms of oppression that trumped everything else. We see survivals of that today, among radical feminists who trace their ideological roots back to second-wave feminism. Some upper-middle class white feminists from this background argue — seriously! — that they can’t be guilty of class or racial oppression, or in possession of class or racial privilege, or guilty of oppressing sex workers or trans women, because as women they by definition cannot oppress anybody. The concept of intersectionality was created as a remedy for such people’s faulty understanding of privilege; as such, it is not an alternative to privilege theory but its fulfilment.

Given expresses puzzlement that Cathy Reisenwitz, Nathan Goodman and I seem to agree with him on so many of the particulars in his premises, and yet don’t draw the conclusion he does that privilege theory is pernicious. But the reason is that his conclusions don’t follow from his observations, because his observations don’t apply to privilege theory in the way he thinks they do.

In fact I’m equally puzzled, given some things Given says in his latest contribution, that he continues to disagree with us. The “one decent message” behind the idea of checking your privilege, he says, is that individuals should be self-conscious of — and presumably act on — “the oppression that other people have experienced throughout their life” and “the societal advantages and disadvantages they hold when interacting with others.” Well, yes. Being aware of these things, and acting on them, is what privilege theory and intersectionality are.

Given says they’re just “common courtesy” or “good manners.” But guess what? Although the concepts and practices of social justice are dismissed on the cultural Right as novel, radical or exotic (“political correctness,” “thought police,” etc.), in reality they are nothing but moral principles as old as humanity, applied universally and consistently.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

In writing the lead essay for this Mutual Exchange, I sought to make three points about privilege. First, it is an ineffective framework to promote social tolerance since it comes off as attempting to induce guilt in so-called privileged people, which usually results in pushback. Second, it ignores oppression to strangely shame individuals for having “privileges” that ultimately should be human rights for all. Third, it does not lay out a roadmap for social change since heightened awareness of one’s privileges will not end systematic poverty or oppression.

To my surprise, all three respondents to my original essay have agreed with me on several of these points while still rejecting my conclusion that the privilege framework is thereby ineffective. On the first point, Cathy Reisenwitz agrees that privilege “makes white folks feel guilty.” Nathan Goodman acknowledges that “[e]nough people have a knee jerk negative reaction to the phrase [‘check your privilege’]” that he “personally prefer to avoid it.” Kevin Carson likewise admits that many students pushback against privilege exercises because they perceive it as an attempt to make them feel guilty. However, he doesn’t think that privilege taught properly should make them feel this way: “If that is indeed their perception, either someone isn’t teaching properly or, for whatever reason, they aren’t learning properly.”

On my second point, Kevin acknowledges that the ultimate goal of social justice activism should indeed be to extend privileges to everyone so people all genders, races, classes, and abilities feel “welcomed and normal, not ‘othered’” in everyday life. Nathan acknowledges that privilege talk “often becomes muddled” because “basic rights, or at least reasonable expectations for all humans, [are] referred to as ‘privileges.’”

On my third point, Cathy agrees that “whether you call it privilege or oppression or whatever, calling it out alone won’t end it.”

This is much more agreement than I ever expected, which makes it all the more puzzling why the three would still reject my conclusion. Kevin and Nathan do so by positing intersectionality as a means to address the privilege framework’s common problems, “recognizing people and the oppression they experience holistically” as Nathan puts it.

But what would intersectionality in action look like? Since its whole purpose is to analyze the numerous axes of privilege and oppression that an individual stands at the intersection of (hence the name), it seems to me that intersectionality cannot collectivize people like the privilege framework is infamous for doing. After all, discussing the privilege or oppression that one class of people experiences would necessarily result in generalizations that exclude the more marginalized members of the group.

As Kevin aptly put it, the notion of a “‘typical female experience’ may exclude women of color, working class women, trans women,” etc. Intersectionality thus functions to prevent “rich CEOs like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer from passing themselves off as spokespersons for the ‘typical woman,’ and likewise to prevent a similar position of hegemony by an upper-middle class professional ‘black leadership’ within the Civil Rights movement.”

If this is the case, advocates of intersectionality should hold any collectivizing claims of privilege with suspicion. For example, the University of Delaware’s marshmallow exercise that I mentioned would not be appropriate because it makes normative judgments about class without examining the intersectionality of each individual’s identities. A white student may not have any marshmallows in his or her mouth, for example, despite the fact that he or she could come from dire poverty. A lesbian may have the same amount of marshmallows in her mouth as a trans woman, despite the fact that the two experience radically different LGBT intolerance.

In this manner, intersectionality in action would seems to render privilege in theory obsolete. Any attempt to elucidate a privilege hierarchy would ultimately fail since individuals experience oppression in complex and multifarious ways. Thus in this sense, the very theory meant to save privilege theory ends up toppling it. The only solution, then, is to pass judgement on individuals based on their individual circumstances, the intersection of the privileges and oppressions they’ve experienced throughout their life.

I will admit there is one decent message behind the phrase “check your privilege.” At its very heart, it is a call for an individual to be self-conscious of the oppression that other people have experienced throughout their life. Yet, even this function of the privilege framework is not new or revolutionary in any manner. This call to humility has been alive for decades in an old adage: “Before you judge someone walk a mile in their shoes.” There is no question that individuals should be aware of the societal advantages and disadvantages they hold when interacting with others, but that’s just common courtesy.

Privilege theory, on the other hand, turns basic manners into a self-congratulating notion of societal change. But, as I mentioned in my original article, heightened awareness of one’s circumstances can’t end systematic oppression in and of itself. That’s precisely why libertarians should be focusing on oppression instead of privilege, fighting against government policies that put down disenfranchised classes.

Perhaps the biggest shame about the privilege framework is it paints the arch of history in a dark hue. While much more progress needs to be made, we now live arguably the most socially tolerant times in world history. Most of us today work, live, and interact with people of different races, religions, and sexualities on a regular basis. This remarkable fact is the exception, not the norm of human history. The emergence of property rights and the rule of law over the past few centuries has slowly allowed society to progress to a point where people from radically different backgrounds can peacefully cohabitate in the same social space, workplace, neighborhood, or even home without conflict. Instead of being distracted by a divisive privilege framework, libertarians should foremost seek to promote markets’ socially unifying force by fighting against government oppression.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

The critiques of privilege theory, here and elsewhere, mostly boil down to the responses it often elicits from the very people it’s meant to educate. And I’ll agree that one, especially if she’s a libertarian, must look at the actual effects of any proposal, and not just its intentions. Indeed, it’s hard to find a theory as poorly understood, and as thoroughly and pervasively straw-manned, as privilege theory.

So one might take Casey Given’s route and discard the theory as on-net unhelpful. But I believe there are entrenched biases which make people predisposed to seek to ignore oppression and resent any framework, phrase, or person who brings it up. And to blame the clumsy, and clumsily applied, phrase or framework behind “check your privilege” – for the existence and continuation of this problem seems shortsighted at best. We’re shoveling mountains of snow with a plastic spork, it’s true. But it’s the best tool we’ve got.

The problems with privilege theory are real. It makes white folks feel guilty. It collectivizes and categorizes people. It, alone, isn’t enough to create change. But, actually, those are all problems with any acknowledgement of the continued existence of bigotry, regardless of how we frame it or the vocabulary we use. There simply isn’t a way to point out oppression on arbitrary bases without making people feel guilty (at least some of them, some of the time), or collectivizing or categorizing people (otherwise known as recognizing the identities bigots use as a basis for oppression). And no, whether you call it privilege or oppression or whatever, calling it out alone won’t end it.

Oppression is fucking uncomfortable. Realizing that you began the race a few steps ahead of the guy on the corner begging for change is really unpleasant. Anything which threatens the certainty that “everything you have, you earned,” isn’t something most people lean into or enjoy. Everyone is most intimately familiar with their own oppression, and is naturally most sympathetic to it.

That privilege checking would be violently misunderstood and maligned isn’t evidence that it’s not useful. But it is evidence that it’s really hard work.

The question is, then, do the benefits of acknowledging bigotry justify the discomfort it creates?

Well, it obviously depends on what you value. If recognizing truth is your thing, then it has utility there. As Kevin Carson eloquently put it:

Privilege is an important concept to understand because it has a useful explanatory function, and correctly perceiving the world we operate in is necessary for operating effectively. Those who say “I don’t see race” and “I’m color-blind” have just as dysfunctional a perception of the world as literally color-blind people who can’t tell a red traffic light from a green one.

So privilege helps us correctly identify and acknowledge identity-based oppression. And like most problems, bigotry isn’t fixed by being ignored. Ignoring bigotry has never worked in the past, and it’s not likely to work in the future. For better or worse, fixing problems usually requires some work. And the first step is generally admitting that you have a problem.

So, I’ll admit that the privilege framework is the spork to the flurries of institutional, personal, and governmental asshattery we find ourselves constantly enveloped by, whether we admit or acknowledge or not. But before we throw the spork away and just pretend it’s all just niceness, I’d ask, do you have a better way?

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

After reading Nathan Goodman‘s reply to Casey Given, and his rejoinder to both of us, the striking thing is that Casey seems, by his own admission, to be less clear than we are of what our actual areas of disagreement are. His rejoinder to me at times talks past the points I made and restates his original complaints about privilege in slightly different words. And he actually interprets Nathan’s statement as being in agreement with him.

In reply to my argument that privilege theory wasn’t about guilt or culpability, he cites what he says is a common perception by those who have been through college sensitivity training that it is indeed about “induc[ing] guilt,” and that the intended takeaway is that even someone who didn’t own slaves or “act racist” “should still feel ashamed.” If that is indeed their perception, either someone isn’t teaching properly or, for whatever reason, they aren’t learning properly.

Simply put, it is a bare fact that (among other things) structural racism and patriarchy exist in our society, and that whites and men benefit from it as groups. It should be obvious to anyone, as a matter of simple common sense, that people who are not hindered by such forms of systematic structural oppression in their daily lives have an advantage over those who are, just as someone who doesn’t have a 50 lb. weight shackled to each arm has an advantage over someone who does. And “privilege” is as good a word as any to describe this phenomenon.

The idea that the word “privilege” carries a normative connotation, implies that anyone who isn’t so impeded by daily harassment or shackled to 50 lb. weights is at fault, or implies that anyone should be shackled who isn’t, is just ridiculous. Anyone who actually conveys the impression that this is what privilege means is doing a bad job teaching privilege theory, and alienating the very people who need to understand it in a non-judgemental manner.

The lesson of the marshmallow exercise Casey refers to isn’t that anyone who doesn’t have marshmallows in their mouth should have them “jammed down their throat,” or that they should feel guilty that they don’t have. It’s simply that they’re better off, both for reasons of structural injustice and perhaps for no fault of their own, than those who do have a mouth full of marshmallows.

On the other hand, I think there’s some attempt to encourage this misunderstanding of what privilege actually means, on the part of the cultural Right, as a way of sabotaging social justice activism. And some people may subjectively hear an accurate explanation of privilege as a condemnation of them because of unexamined resentments of social activism itself.

So some people interpret sensitivity training as a demand that they feel guilty for being white, male, straight, cis, etc. I’m a relative newcomer to these concepts — I’ve been actively learning about them for around two years now — but I never interpreted them that way. I interpreted them as a simple call to be aware of my advantages in interacting with women, people of color, LGBT people, etc., to be supportive and show solidarity, to hand them the mic and help amplify their voices, and to be on the alert for ways in which the justice movements I’m a part of could better address the intersectional needs of less privileged members.

But suppose some people do say the things Casey quotes? Some people also say things like “Why do blacks get to say the n-word?” “What’s wrong with a White Student Organization?” or “Slavery was 150 years ago and segregation’s been over for four decades — why do they have to dwell on it?” I hear stuff like this all the time from people who “never owned slaves” and don’t think they “act racist.”

The very fact that anyone sees racism or sexism as a matter solely of individual bigotry, that either a man or a woman, a white or black person, can equally be guilty of, rather than a structural phenomenon, reflects profound ignorance about the reality we live in. And any white person, man, etc., who fails to understand that we benefit by being white or male in ways that give an advantage over anyone who isn’t, is ignorant of something they shouldn’t be. Whether people fail to learn because somebody’s teaching the ideas badly, because somebody’s encouraging them to misunderstand, or because they don’t want to understand, doesn’t change the fact that these are things that need to be understood.

Whether intentional or not, the beliefs that privilege is about guilt and that racism is about “personal attitude” or “acting racist” have done a great deal to undermine social justice activism. By not only obscuring perception of the social structures of oppression we seek to dismantle, but also causing people to resent the concept of privilege based on a false understanding of what it means, these beliefs derail efforts to fight oppression.

Casey, oddly, attempts to put intersectionality forward in opposition to the concept of privilege. But the two concepts are inseparable. The whole purpose of intersectionality is to understand differential privilege within a group. To treat the acknowledgement that intersecting forms of privilege make people worse off than individual forms of privilege as a refutation of the concept of privilege is decidedly — I use the word again — odd.

Odder still, he actually quotes Nathan’s argument against essentialism as if it backed up his own position, as if it were a remedy for the “collectivism” of plain old vanilla-flavored oppression theory:

Essentializing a basic “woman’s experience” or “black experience” means ignoring the different ways oppression is experienced among members of these groups. Often, such essentialism means taking the experiences of relatively privileged members of groups as default. For example, a standard “women’s experience” may specifically describe the experiences of straight, cisgender white women, as they experience misogyny without typically experiencing the homophobia, transphobia, and racism that other women may face.

But the problem with essentialism is that it doesn’t pay enough attention to privilege. The “holistic undertanding of individual experience” that Nathan points to — the idea that a “typical female experience” may exclude women of color, working class women, trans women, &c — is more privilege-oriented than monolithic female, black &c identities, because it was created to prevent upper-middle class white professionals like the typical TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), SWERF (sex worker exclusionary radfem), and rich CEOs like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer from passing themselves off as spokespersons for the “typical woman,” and likewise to prevent a similar position of hegemony by an upper-middle class professional “black leadership” within the Civil Rights movement.

Finally, Casey repeats that “pointing out privilege is a cause without a call to action.” That’s like saying an understanding of hydraulics doesn’t build an irrigation system. No — but any attempt to build an irrigation system in ignorance of the principles of hydraulics, or in violation of them, will be doomed to failure. I really don’t know what to say, other than to repeat that any “action” that’s not based on an accurate perception of reality won’t be very effective. As I said in my original response, the sharecroppers union split along racial lines in the 1930s, not because members addressed race privilege, but because they failed to do so.

In this regard, I can do no better than quote Nathan: “Casey Given urges action to challenge the institutions and rules that enable and exacerbate oppression. But in order to engage in such action successfully, it’s important to have an accurate analysis of the oppression we’re seeking to fight.” Both action without reflection, and reflection without action, are useless.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

It’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly Nathan Goodman and I disagree on our viewpoints of the privilege framework. In “The Various Functions of Privilege Analysis,” he agrees with me that using the framework usually “muddles” conversation because “basic rights,” such as not being harassed because of one’s race, are oddly “referred to as ‘privileges.’” Moreover, he “perfer[s] to avoid” using the expression “check your privilege” because “[e]nough people have a knee jerk negative reaction to the phrase” — a point I made in my response to Kevin Carson.

Furthermore, Nathan acknowledges the collectivist critique that many libertarians have made — which I’ve avoided in this Mutual Exchange for originality sake — that the privilege framework “involves making unjustified assumptions about individuals.” Nathan quite correctly points out that there is no standard “women’s experience” or “black experience,” as each individual is a product of numerous socioeconomic factors (i.e. race, gender, wealth, sexuality, ability, etc.). Furthermore, he rightfully points out that any attempt to essentialize a “woman’s experience” or “black experience” usually favors more societally acceptable individuals over others: “For example, a standard ‘women’s experience’ may specifically describe the experiences of straight, cisgender white women, as they experience misogyny without typically experiencing the homophobia, transphobia, and racism that other women may face.”

Despite all his quite compelling critiques of the privilege framework, Nathan somehow still sees value in it. To save privilege from its collectivist downfall, Nathan posits anti-essentialism as a means to “look at individuals holistically” rather than making categorical assumptions about their experience. But, how is Nathan’s individualistic vision of anti-essentialism any different from the standard libertarian retort to judge individuals by their personal experiences? I don’t so much disagree with Nathan as I fail to see where he disagrees with me.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

Casey Given offers some interesting criticisms of the concept of privilege, criticisms drawn from feminist and anti-racist scholarship and activism rather than from the right. While I agree with some of these criticisms, I think his piece ignores several functions the concept of privilege can play, as well as some concepts in feminist theory that are useful for overcoming some of the criticisms often raised by libertarians.

He is correct to note that the conversation often becomes muddled, with basic rights, or at least reasonable expectations for all humans, referred to as “privileges.” I would contend that this indexing can still be useful, in order to understand how one’s own success may be contingent on oppressed people having basic rights denied to them. But the conflation at play can pose problems, and that’s worth noting.

However, a concept can be wielded in confusing ways and still serve useful functions. One key function of the feminist or anti-racist conception of privilege is its connection to standpoint epistemology. This focuses on how privilege makes itself invisible to the privileged party and simultaneously conceals the conditions of oppression from the privileged party. In other words, it deals with how knowledge is distributed along lines of oppression. In “The Knowledge Problem of Privilege” I argued that calls to “check your privilege” often represent “an attempt to get people to recognize the limits of their knowledge.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains this epistemological approach, known as feminist standpoint theory, as follows:

Women are oppressed, and therefore have an interest in representing social phenomena in ways that reveal rather than mask this truth. They also have direct experience of their oppression, unlike men, whose privilege enables them to ignore how their actions affect women as a class. The logic of an epistemology that grounds epistemic privilege in oppression is to identify the multiply oppressed as multiply epistemically privileged. Within feminist theory, this logic has led to the development of black feminist epistemology. Collins (1990) grounds black feminist epistemology in black women’s personal experiences of racism and sexism, and in cognitive styles associated with black women. She uses this epistemology to supply black women with self-representations that enable them to resist the demeaning racist and sexist images of black women in the wider world, and to take pride in their identities. The epistemic privilege of the oppressed is sometimes cast, following W.E.B. DuBois, in terms of “bifurcated consciousness”: the ability to see things both from the perspective of the dominant and from the perspective of the oppressed, and therefore to comparatively evaluate both perspectives (Harding 1991, Smith 1974, Collins 1990). Black women are “outsiders within,” having enough personal experience as insiders to know their social order, but enough critical distance to empower critique.

This approach to recognizing relationships between power, oppression, and knowledge is not unique to feminist theory. In “Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts,” James C. Scott argues that the perspective of the oppressed is rarely understood by their rulers. The power of rulers over their subjects or bosses over employees deters the ruled from telling the truth to those above them, thus relegating the perspectives of oppressed people to what Scott terms a “hidden transcript.” These types of information asymmetries can be discussed without phrases like “check your privilege,” and Enough people have a knee jerk negative reaction to the phrase that I personally prefer to avoid it. But the concerns about social position and situational knowledge that the phrase is often meant to raise are real and valid, so we should engage seriously with those who express these concerns in terms of privilege.

Often when I bring up the epistemological issues that discussing privilege is meant to illuminate, libertarians counter by arguing that this concept is collectivist, or that it involves making unjustified assumptions about individuals. This can be true if we essentialize groups and assume a universal “woman’s experience” or “gay experience” or “black experience.” This is why the concepts of intersectionality and anti-essentialism discussed by feminist scholars like Trina Grillo are so important to honing a realistic theory of social oppression. Intersectionality is about recognizing people and the oppression they experience holistically. For example, when studying the experience of a woman of color, it’s not sufficient to just study misogyny and racism and then add up the impacts of both. Sexism, racism, homophobia, poverty, and other factors all intersect to produce unique and potent forms of each other. Institutional environments further play a role. This means that while the law looks at particular forms of discrimination and oppression in isolation, intersectional feminists favor examining individuals and the oppression or privilege they experience holistically. This produces a more nuanced and individualistic feminism, as well as one that promotes solidarity among people resisting oppression. Anti-essentialism further promotes an individualist and nuanced approach to conceptualizing oppression. Essentializing a basic “women’s experience” or “black experience” means ignoring the different ways oppression is experienced among members of these groups. Often, such essentialism means taking the experiences of relatively privileged members of groups as default. For example, a standard “women’s experience” may specifically describe the experiences of straight, cisgender white women, as they experience misogyny without typically experiencing the homophobia, transphobia, and racism that other women may face. But this of course ignores that all these forms of oppression shape how some women are subjected to misogyny. Furthermore, it erases how cisgender straight white women have their particular gender norms shaped by their race, their sexual orientation, and their cisgender privilege. Thus, this essentialism normalizes a privileged experience while erasing the nuance of oppression. Anti-essentialism, much like intersectionality, enables us to look at individuals holistically, particularly as they experience oppression. As Trina Grillo puts it, “the anti-essentialism and intersectionality critiques ask only this: that we define complex experiences as closely as possible to their full complexity as possible and that we not ignore voices at the margin.”

Casey Given urges action to challenge the institutions and rules that enable and exacerbate oppression. But in order to engage in such action successfully, it’s important to have an accurate analysis of the oppression we’re seeking to fight. Tools from feminist theory and critical race theory such as standpoint epistemology, intersectionality, and anti-essentialism are all useful for analyzing, understanding, and ultimately dismantling oppression. And all of these tools have been tied to privilege analysis, thus making such analysis well worth studying.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

In “Why Privilege Theory is Necessary,” Kevin Carson highlights three points of disagreement with my initial article. First, he claims that the point of the privilege framework is “not about feeling guilt.” Second, he believes that the privilege framework can “foster solidarity” among various socioeconomic groups. Third, he asserts that focusing on policy reform to eliminate oppression will only “make other forms of oppression function more smoothly and efficiently.” It is my point of privilege to respond in disagreement on all three points.

Regarding guilt, Kevin may not perceive the privilege framework as serving to shame individuals of supposedly privileged socioeconomic classes. Nevertheless, many reasonable people see it as such, especially students required to undergo sensitivity trainings on college campuses. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has documented this academic trend over the past two decades, challenging the often bizarre exercises that students are forced to participate in to be made aware of their so-called privileges. One infamous case at the University of Delaware involved an exercise in which students were made to stuff marshmallows in their mouth if they have a societal disadvantage and then talk to each other, symbolizing the supposed privilege that straight white males enjoy since they were the only ones in the class without a muffled mouth.

Intentional or not, jamming the privilege concept down one’s throat (sometimes literally, as at Delaware) has had well-document pushback for attempting to induce guilt. The Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective, for example, reports one student’s reaction to reading Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”:

My reaction to this paper was basically if you are a white male you should be ashamed of yourself. Even if what happened a hundred years ago wasn’t done by you and you have tried to be accepting to all, you should still be ashamed.

This perception of guilt is all too common in discussions of privilege. As Jennifer Ng of the University of Kansas observes, “White students quite commonly deny their involvement in a racist society by pointing out that they were never slave owners.” And why should they confess to perpetuating racism through privilege if they themselves have never acted racist? Ng continues, “I doubt students would feel any more comfortable with being asked to personally identify or theoretically associate themselves with the deeds or feelings of colonizers or Nazis.”

In short, it should come as no surprise that the privilege framework’s practice of singling out heterosexuals, whites, and males for a supposed privilege that they did not choose comes across as a guilt trip and receives pushback as a result — which brings us to Kevin’s second point. With such well-documented hostility to the privilege framework, it seems impossible to claim that it serves to “foster solidarity” among various socioeconomic classes. To the contrary, its practice of alienating people based on race, sex, and sexuality has only served to divide rather than unite. The very fact that we’re debating this issue in a Mutual Exchange is testament to its divisiveness.

Indeed, it’s remarkable how explicitly the privilege framework marginalizes whole classes of people by assigning societal value to literally skin-deep qualities like race and sex. Kevin quotes an Occupy activist for stating on Twitter that “society has created a gendered hierarchy” that “needs to be dismantled, and you can’t properly dismantle something you don’t understand.” If this societal hierarchy needs to be discussed, let’s be specific about it.

Which race is more oppressed — blacks or latinos? Is a white trangendered woman more privileged than a black male? Do Jews and Catholics have the same white privilege as protestants? It seems impossible that any discussion of this privilege hierarchy will “foster solidarity” instead of reinforce discriminatory stereotypes. This is precisely why the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective recommends shifting intersectionality’s focus from privilege to oppression, as I argued for in my initial article. Fighting injustice is a uniting cause; pointing out privilege is a dividing one.

Furthermore, pointing out privilege is a cause without a call to action — which brings us to Kevin’s final point. As pleasing as it may be for libertarian anarchists to pat themselves on the back for being aware of their privilege, the state will continue to oppress. Anarcho-capitalists may conjure up an ideal world in their head where such oppression does not exist, but the real challenge for any activist is implementing their vision in reality. Instead of wishing the world’s problems away, libertarians should be active in fighting oppressive policies that actively keep minorities down like occupational licensing, mandatory minimum sentencing, the drug war, restrictive immigration, deportation, the public education monopoly, and the minimum wage. Anything less like privilege is bourgeois musings.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

Casey Given, in “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”, questions the relevance or usefulness of the concept of privilege. Not that he questions the existence of racial and gender oppression — far from it. He simply argues that privilege theory is irrelevant to — or actually detracts from — fighting oppression. The “privilege framework” has the effect of

sweeping oppression under the rug by emphasizing white guilt over political action to end socioeconomic inequality. What, after all, is the point of checking one’s privilege if not followed by action? Libertarians should pay heed by ignoring the privilege framework to instead focus on addressing racial injustice through market-based policy reform….

If awareness of one’s privilege is not sufficient to end oppression, then the framework itself seems little more than an exercise to alleviate white guilt. But, what good can that do? White guilt will not stop cops from racially profiling black people. White guilt will not help a family escape the cycle of poverty their ancestors have been stuck in for centuries…

Here Given displays a failure to grasp what privilege theory is about. It’s not about feeling guilt. People are born into privileged groups through no fault of their own; no culpability is involved. Rather, privilege theory is simply about awareness — about an accurate perception of the reality we must work within — as Occupy activist and medic Oakland Elle (@OaklandElle) succinctly explained in a series of tweets on May 25:

“Why do we have to talk about gender? Why can’t we all just get along?” –Dudes….

We have to talk about it, have to address it, because society has created a gendered hierarchy (among others). That hierarchy needs to be dismantled, and you can’t properly dismantle something you don’t understand. In my opinion, it starts with listening to people who are talking about their experiences with marginalization, rather than silencing them.

Privilege is an important concept to understand because it has a useful explanatory function, and correctly perceiving the world we operate in is necessary for operating effectively. Those who say “I don’t see race” and “I’m color-blind” are hindered in their effective functioning in the world just as much as literally color-blind people who can’t tell a red traffic light from a green one. Race and gender are real-world phenomena with very real material effects; so failing to perceive them is not a state of affairs to celebrate.

“Guilt” is beside the point. If members of different groups receive differential structural benefits through no fault of their own, anyone who wants to navigate the real social world we live in had better be aware of that fact. Pretending not to be aware of it is just stupid.

Given also suggests it’s perverse to treat as “privilege” many of the items included in the standard checklists of white or male privilege — most of which simply involve a normally unexamined sense of feeling welcomed, normal or safe in most daily social situations. After all, these are things that social justice activists should consider the minimum acceptable standard for everyone.

[The] answer to fixing such inequalities is not to put down people who rightfully enjoy its privileges but to prop up those who do not enjoy them through political action.

But that’s just it. The point is not to treat feeling welcomed and normal, not “othered,” as anything less than what everyone should experience in a just world. It’s to recognize that there’s a cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-class differential in how fully or whether at all that entitlement is realized.

This is closely related to another common misconception about privilege: That it’s about who’s better off in absolute terms. It’s not uncommon, for example, for a white person to deny that they’re privileged because (say) they were severely abused as children, or grew up malnourished in a house without indoor plumbing. But “white privilege” doesn’t mean that all white people are quantitatively better off, in absolute terms, than all people of color. It means that being white, as such, confers a differential advantage, all other things being equal. Of course all other things are never equal. So some severely impoverished or maltreated whites may be worse off in absolute terms than some well-to-do upper-middle-class blacks. The point, rather, is that when a black and white person are alike in all other things except race, the white person is better off than a black person who faces the same situation in all particulars except for being black.

My comments on the relevance of privilege to understanding the world we operate in and fighting for social justice is not just some general theoretical observation. The concept of privilege has very real, concrete applications in fighting for justice.

You may have noticed Given’s repeated calls for “policy reform.” Here at the Center for a Stateless Society, needless to say, we’re not usually real big on policy reform. Not to put too fine a point on it, we generally view working within the state to make the world better through legislative action amounts to flushing effort down the toilet. The state in its very essence is oppressive. If it weakens one form of oppression, it will do so only to make other forms of oppression function more smoothly and efficiently. The state will always be executive committee of a ruling class.

So the state may very well pass legislation, under pressure from upper-middle-class CEO feminists like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer and upper-middle class professional black civil rights activists, to “make the cabinets and board rooms look like the rest of America.” But it will do so in order to strengthen the system of class oppression by weakening the racial and gender divisions within the ruling class.

A few years back, on Black in America, Soledad O’Brien quoted Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s cry of “I have a dream,” and then said that as evidence of the realization of that dream today, “Some are Secretary of State. Some are CEO.” My dream is to see the last Secretary of State strangled with the entrails of the last CEO.

Rather than lobbying the state to initiate reforms, we at C4SS prefer to make the kind of world we want to live in ourselves. As the Wobblies say, “Direct Action Gets Satisfaction.”

And the practical use of privilege theory is within the activist groups that are engaged in just such direct action. For example the idea of “intersectionality” was originally developed, not to further some kind of “oppression olympics” or competition to see who is worse off, but to foster solidarity within each movement by being attentive to the needs of specific intersectional groups in that movement, in order to prevent this differential oppression being used by opportunistic outsiders to create divisions. The working class movement must acknowledge the special intersectional problems of women or minority workers in order to prevent enemies from playing up racial divisions in the movement (as they did, for example, in COINTELPRO-style efforts by the planter class to split the tenant farmers’ unions along racial lines back in the ’30s). The feminist movement must pay specific attention to the needs of women of color, working class women, sex workers and transgender women in order to prevent them from becoming disaffected from a movement dominated by upper-middle-class white professional types like (again) Mayer and Sandberg.

Thus, privilege and intersectionality theory are not “identity politics” that undermines the effectiveness of social justice activism. They’re the cure for it.

A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside of C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged. The following Mutual Exchange will begin as a feature by Casey Given’s, “What’s the Point of Checking Your Privilege?”. Nathan Goodman, Kevin Carson, Casey Given and Cathy Reisenwitz have prepared a series of articles challenging, exploring and responding to the themes presented in Given’s original article. Over the next week, C4SS will publish all of their responses. The final series can be followed under the categories: Mutual Exchange or The Point of Privilege.

With the stroke of a keyboard, Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang has singlehandedly brought the topic of privilege roaring back into the national discussion. “Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color,” Fortgang penned in an article for the conservative Princeton Tory, “to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting.” Republished in Time, Fortgang’s article has ignited crossfire of cheers and jeers from all sides of the political spectrum.

However, what the media has largely failed to recognize is that this circus is nothing new. The concept of privilege has been lingering in academic circles for over a half-century now, somehow surviving despite seemingly being debated to death. While bursts of conservative outrage such as Fortgang’s float to surface every so often rallying around American meritocracy, what’s more damning is the criticism the concept has received from the same social justice scene that it sprung from. Some left-leaning academics have condemned the privilege framework for sweeping oppression under the rug by emphasizing white guilt over political action to end socioeconomic inequality.

Though rarely mentioned in the media firestorm over Fortgang’s article, the privilege concept traces its roots to Wellesley Professor Peggy McIntosh’s seminal 1988 essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies.” In it, McIntosh provides a list of 46 “daily effects of white privilege,” ranging from the abstract (e.g. “I will feel welcomed and ‘normal’ in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social”) to the concrete (e.g. “I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed”). While most of the social advantages enumerated in McIntosh’s list are undeniably true, the essay ultimately leaves the reader uncertain of what exactly to do with the newfound knowledge of their societal advantages.

Indeed, McIntosh admits near her essay’s conclusion that simple awareness of one’s privilege is not enough to combat it. “I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude,” she recalls. “Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.” How, then, can the privilege framework help end structural inequality? McIntosh seems to hint at some sort of government policy reform without providing any answers. At the second-to-last sentence of the essay, she is left asking, “What will we do with such knowledge?”

If awareness of one’s privilege is not sufficient to end oppression, then the framework itself seems little more than an exercise to alleviate white guilt. But, what good can that do? White guilt will not stop cops from racially profiling black people. White guilt will not help a family escape the cycle of poverty their ancestors have been stuck in for centuries. As the Midwest Critical Whiteness Collective explained in a fall 2013 Harvard Educational Review article, “while reading and working with McIntosh’s piece might be a consciousness-raising exercise for individual white people, her text provides limited help with understanding and undermining systemic white supremacy.”

The privilege concept not only ignores action, it ignores oppression as well. McIntosh makes it clear that the two are separate concepts in the very first sentence altogether by highlighting how she has “often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged.” Privilege in McIntosh’s mind is more than just the absence of oppression; it’s special advantages that society bestows upon selective classes of people.

Looking back at her list, however, it seems puzzling to apply the “overpriviledged” label to daily experiences like not being harassed at a grocery store. After all, shouldn’t everyone feel safe shopping regardless of their race in an ideal world? Isn’t the very goal of anti-racist activism to help minorities “feel welcomed and ‘normal’ in the usual walks of public life, institutional and social?” In this sense, McIntosh seems to conflate privilege with human rights, as Africana philosopher Lewis Gordon explains in the critical race compilation What White Looks Like:

A privilege is something that not everyone needs, but a right is the opposite. Given this distinction, an insidious dimension of the white-privilege argument emerges. It requires condemning whites for possessing, in the concrete, features of contemporary life that should be available to all, and if this is correct, how can whites be expected to give up such things?

McIntosh’s preoccupation with criticizing the privileges that everyone should enjoy is perversely prioritized over fighting against the oppression that nobody should be subjected to. Make no mistake about it, there are great differences in how various socioeconomic classes of people experience daily life. However, answer to fixing such inequalities is not to put down people who rightfully enjoy its privileges but to prop up those who do not enjoy them through political action.

Estado: Instituição que intervém no livre mercado através do exercício direto da coerção ou da concessão de privilégios (sustentados pela coerção).

Impostos: Forma de coerção ou interferência no livre mercado em que o estado coleta tributos (os impostos) que permitem que ele contrate forças armadas para agir de forma coercitiva na defesa de privilégios, além de se envolver em guerras, aventuras, experimentos, “reformas” e outras atividades custeadas não por seus próprios recursos, mas às custas de “seus” súditos.

Privilégio: Do latim privi, privado, e lege, lei. Uma vantagem concedida pelo estado e protegida por seus poderes de coerção. Uma lei em benefício privado.

Usura: Forma de privilégio ou interferência no livre mercado em que um grupo, apoiado pelo estado, monopoliza a emissão de moeda e, com isso, cobra tributos (juros), diretos ou indiretos, sobre todas as transações econômicas.

Latifundismo: Forma de privilégio ou interferência no livre mercado em que um grupo, apoiado pelo estado, passa a ser “dono” da terra e, assim, extrai tributos (rendas, aluguéis) daqueles que vivem, trabalham ou produzem nela.

Tarifas: Forma de privilégio ou interferência no livre mercado em que as mercadorias produzidas fora do estado não podem competir em igualdade com aquelas produzidas dentro do âmbito do estado.

Capitalismo: Organização social que incorpora elementos como impostos, usura, latifúndios e tarifas e, portanto, é contrária ao livre mercado, embora alegue representá-lo.

Conservadorismo: Escola filosófica capitalista que afirma apoiar o livre mercado, mas que, na verdade, defende a usura, os direitos artificiais à terra, as tarifas e, às vezes, impostos.

Social-democracia: Escola filosófica capitalista que pretende corrigir as injustiças do capitalismo acrescentando novas leis às já existentes. Toda vez que os conservadores passam novas leis que criam privilégios, os social-democratas criam outras leis modificando esses privilégios, o que impele os conservadores a fazerem leis mais sutis que recriam os antigos privilégios e assim por diante, até que “tudo que não seja proibido é obrigatório” e “tudo que não seja obrigatório é proibido”.

Socialismo: Tentativa de abolição de todos os privilégios através da concentração de todo poder no agente coercitivo por trás dos privilégios, o estado, transformando a oligarquia capitalista em monopólios estatais. É o mesmo que tentar branquear uma parede pintando-a de preto.

Anarquismo: Organização social na qual o mercado opera de modo livre, sem impostos, usura, concentrações de terras, tarifas ou outras formas de coerção ou privilégio. Os anarquistas de “direita” preveem que, num livre mercado, as pessoas escolheriam voluntariamente competir mais do que cooperar; anarquistas de “esquerda” preveem que, num livre mercado, as pessoas escolheriam voluntariamente cooperar mais do que competir.

Traduzido do inglês para o português por Erick Vasconcelos.