No! I will not Stop it! ...

[RainDog]

303. I assumed this was the case in your case

And that's why you dislike the use of the word "privilege" so much - b/c you associate it with economic privilege. This becomes, in turn, a fissure between people who aspire to or are part of the "elite" - whether it's economic or educational - that others can ignore what is the most important reality in this nation: economic factors within a society that disparages the poor - from the right by shame and from the left by using certain assumptions.

Not too many Eric Hoffers around (he's an interesting guy you might like to check out - called the "longshoreman philosopher" and author of The True Believer - a classic of thought about mass movements and fanaticism after the rise and fall of the Nazi party - it also resonates in an era of religious fundamentalism as a mass movement in response to social change in the U.S. and other nations.

Here's the thing, tho - I don't disagree with the Republican woman or the feminist scholar, Naomi Zack, or African-American scholar Lewis Gordon about how problematic the word "privilege" is - this seems to be your main issue, too - BUT I also agree with 1SBM that any term is going to be criticized, so you might as well go with the one that's there - or simply don't use it yourself - but it's wrong to try to "censor" others' use of the word by "educating" them about how off-putting it is. That issue is soooooooooo minor in compared to the issues the term addresses.

You can listen to a program where Lewis Gordon speaks about an extremely important historical voice (Frantz Fanon) here: http://cassian.memphis.edu/counterpoint/lewis_gordon.mp3

Gordon has said:

"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? Yes, there is the case of the reality of whites being the majority population in all the sites of actual privilege from prestigious universities to golf clubs and boards of directors for most high-powered corporations. But even among whites as a group, how many whites have those opportunities?"

http://books.google.com/books?id=9wZo92f1EMIC

---so his views should resonate with you - but he still doesn't deny the lived experience of African Americans now under the umbrella of "white privilege" - this is pretty much the same position as Zack.

Reference to Zack here (and more interesting reading)

She acknowledges race is non-existent - but racism exists because of a history that did believe in the idea of different races.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/MGM-Mixed/conversations/topics/913

None of these people, however, are going to insult African Americans for using the term to discuss their experiences - and you shouldn't, either.