This Comic Will Forever Change the Way you Look at Privilege

[Rilgin]

69. With Respect

You say, "First you have to get people to recognize privilege exists".

Maybe, just maybe, that is because it might just be the wrong word. The word privilege has lots of connotations. Posts (including most in this thread) who use "privilege" are trying to convince people that a word that has connotations for most people either does not have connotations or should be read to not make those connotations.

The second problems is that, again despite, the attempts to say it is not, one connotation is that it is accusatory of individuals and is not a description of society. If you have something undeserved, most moral codes of people become personally and individually uncomfortable about themselves (and not society) because it does not call on them to help others, it calls on them to somehow lose their "privilege" because it is not deserved.

What some of us here have said, is that the word privilege is bad no matter how many times you explain that it just means "inequality". Just using the words "inequality" "racism" or "institutional racism" will not have the same connotations. If there are unequal schools, most people will say bring up the bad schools as the solution without cognitive dissonance on whether if they or a kid goes to a good school, they are somehow bad or personally repressing others. Referring to above, if however there are "privileged" schools, it might be the reaction to close the good schools so they are no longer privileged and do not have to individually feel bad.

People who you are trying to convince of a social problem will probably recognize that our society is not equal in various ways. Inequality as an issue is being increasingly recognized both in the population and the pundits. This is shown in poles on issues in society. People generally are increasing their awareness that there are problems in our criminal justice system because those are the common words that directly describe the issue. They also might recognize and even acknowledge that there exists pockets of actual and institutional racism in our society. This shows that the right words are making headway in our population. In contrast, using the word "privileged" does not seem to actually cause people to increase recognition, it causes internal resistance.

Those are the major problems with the concept and the word and the attempt to get people to recognize the word.

When you try to use a word that does not mean exactly what it means to most people, it prevents you from actually obtaining the recognition of problems you seem to want from people. This would seem to be the goal, getting recognition of issues and not having people fight recognition of social problems. Again, with respect, the problem with this and other threads trying to get people to adopt the word is that it is like trying to fit a square peg of a word into a round hole, rather than using a round peg that people understand.