Privilege

A Reader

Michael S. Kimmel, Abby L. Ferber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367098209
• eBook ISBN: 9780429974434
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Privilege is about more than being white, wealthy, and male, as Michael Kimmel, Abby Ferber, and a range of contributors make clear in this timely anthology. In an era when 'diversity' is too often shorthand for 'of color' and/or 'female' the personal and analytical essays in this collection explore the multifaceted nature of social location and consider how gender, class, race, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and religion interact to create nuanced layers of privilege and oppression. The individual essays (taken together) guide students to a deep understanding of the dynamics of diversity and stratification, advantage, and power.

The fourth edition features thirteen new essays that help students understand the intersectional nature of privilege and oppression and has new introductory essays to contextualize the readings. These enhancements, plus the updated pedagogical features of discussion questions and activities at the end of each section, encourage students to examine their own beliefs, practices, and social location.

part one

seeing—and refusing to see—privilege

What is privilege? Who has it? Who doesn’t?

On virtually every campus in the country, students are debating about privilege. We are being asked to “check our privilege,” which often invites a significant amount of self-reflection before speaking—for example, recognizing the specific station from which one speaks.

Privilege is elusive, though, precisely because it is not a thing, not a possession that one “has.” For one thing, privilege is not a singular unit: either you have it or you don’t. There are so many axes of privilege—by race, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion. The list goes on and on.

For another thing, privilege is neither bad nor good. It’s not bad to be privileged. It simply is.

Third, privilege is not like an article of uncomfortable clothing that can simply be discarded once one realizes it’s there. Once you are aware of it, though, you don’t have to feel guilty. It’s like feeling guilty for breathing. But awareness brings responsibility—at least for those who believe, as we, the editors do, that getting an advantage through something other than your own talents and hard work is unfair.

These first readings explore the dimensions of privilege today, making it visible. We start with an effort to deny it, by a white male student at Princeton. In it, he claims that his class background negates all the other ways in which he is privileged: race, gender, able-bodiedness, sexuality, or religion. In this way he reveals something important about how we all navigate the complex world of privilege: that very often what is most visible to us are the ways in which we are not privileged, and what is obscure are those ways in which we are privileged.

It’s as if we live in a culture in which no one wants to be privileged; rather, everyone seems to want to be unprivileged. Partly, this is because we want to believe that whatever we have earned has been the result of our own hard work, overcoming obstacles, applying ourselves. We don’t want to think that we were handed this all on a silver platter. It’s as if we are a medieval society standing on its head: in the medieval era, status was fixed, and members of the hereditary aristocracy knew they were privileged and reveled in it. Peasants could only dream of being lords.

Today, no one wants to claim they are privileged. It’s as if owning your privilege is a badge of dishonor.

The essay by Tal Fortgang, denying his privilege, spurred an enormous reaction, as others replied by examining just what sort of privilege he actually might have and explaining why those dimensions of privilege might not be visible to him. (The articles by Charles Clymer and Daniel Gastfriend are examples of this response.)

Following this dialogue, we turn to Peggy McIntosh’s brilliant essay in which she discusses the way white privilege and male privilege intersect. McIntosh’s pathbreaking discussion of the “invisible knapsack” described and enumerated a wide variety of privileges that white people get, just for being white. White people did nothing to “earn” these; they’re just inherited at birth. In this essay, she uses race to talk about gender. In “The Invisible Crutch” Jessica Shea translates this knapsack into a crutch and enumerates a wide array of benefits one gets just for being able-bodied.

In addition, the empirical article by Angelica Guitierrez and Miguel Unzueta examines the effects of affirmative action compared to “legacy admissions” at certain elite colleges and universities. We present them here as a dialogue: the denial of privilege and the beginnings of understanding how some dimensions of privilege might be invisible to us. Next, Juan Cole gives us a satirical yet poignant examination of how whiteness even provides a level of privilege to terrorists. Finally, Bob Pease examines how privilege is not allotted only by social status, but also by geographical position.

In this edition of the book, we’ve continued to highlight religion as a source of privilege. In 1797, John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which was ratified unanimously by the Congress. The treaty declared, pretty unequivocally, “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” And from the signing of the Constitution onward, the separation of church and state has been a foundational principle of American democracy, and no one is to be persecuted for practicing their religion.

Yet is there not a certain privilege given to those who are Christian? Is not Christianity so normative that it is difficult for those who are not Christian to practice their religion? Ironically, in recent years, that has been interpreted to mean that if my religion commands that I discriminate against some people, it should be permitted—because the state can’t interfere with the free exercise of religion.

1

checking my privilege

Character as the Basis of Privilege

Tal Fortgang*

There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. “Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.

I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive. Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that”; check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.

But they can’t be telling me that everything I’ve done with my life can be credited to the racist patriarchy holding my hand throughout my years of education and eventually guiding me into Princeton. Even that is too extreme. So to find out what they are saying, I decided to take their advice. I actually went and checked the origins of my privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can’t possibly comprehend. I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.

Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.

Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?” Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.

Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential. Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?

That’s the problem with calling someone out for the “privilege” which you assume has defined their narrative. You don’t know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are. Assuming they’ve benefitted from “power systems” or other conspiratorial imaginary institutions denies them credit for all they’ve done, things of which you may not even conceive. You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression. You don’t know who conquered their demons, or may still be conquering them now.

The truth is, though, that I have been exceptionally privileged in my life, albeit not in the way any detractors would have it. It has been my distinct privilege that my grandparents came to America. First, that there was a place at all that would take them from the ruins of Europe. And second, that such a place was one where they could legally enter, learn the language, and acclimate to a society that ultimately allowed them to flourish.

It was their privilege to come to a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character.

It was my privilege that my grandfather was blessed with resolve and an entrepreneurial spirit, and that he was lucky enough to come to the place where he could realize the dream of giving his children a better life than he had.

But far more important for me than his attributes was the legacy he sought to pass along, which forms the basis of what detractors call my “privilege,” but which actually should be praised as one of altruism and self-sacrifice. Those who came before us suffered for the sake of giving us a better life. When we similarly sacrifice for our descendants by caring for the planet, it’s called “environmentalism,” and is applauded. But when we do it by passing along property and a set of values, it’s called “privilege.” (And when we do it by raising questions about our crippling national debt, we’re called Tea Party radicals.) Such sacrifice of any form shouldn’t be scorned, but admired.

My exploration did yield some results. I recognize that it was my parents’ privilege and now my own that there is such a thing as an American dream which is attainable even for a penniless Jewish immigrant.

I am privileged that values like faith and education were passed along to me. My grandparents played an active role in my parents’ education, and some of my earliest memories included learning the Hebrew alphabet with my Dad. It’s been made clear to me that education begins in the home, and the importance of parents’ involvement with their kids’ education—from mathematics to morality—cannot be overstated. It’s not a matter of white or black, male or female or any other division which we seek, but a matter of the values we pass along, the legacy we leave, that perpetuates “privilege.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color. My appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, and to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting. While I haven’t done everything for myself up to this point in my life, someone sacrificed themselves so that I can lead a better life. But that is a legacy I am proud of.

I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing.

Tal Fortgang is a freshman from New Rochelle, NY. He plans to major in either history or politics.

Notes

* Fortgang, Tal. “Checking My Privilege.” The Princeton Tory, April 24, 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author.

2

this response to that Princeton freshman should be required reading for white males

Charles Clymer*

Tal Fortgang, a freshman at Princeton University, has ignited much of the blogosphere with an op-ed he wrote recently for the Princeton Tory, the school’s conservative student publication. In it, Fortgang decries being told, “Check your privilege,” and denies that he receives a significant benefit from his skin color and gender. He spends much of the piece outlining his Jewish family’s tragic history at the hands of Nazi Germany.

Fortgang’s column aggressively denies the existence of any “invisible patron saint of white maleness,” which he considers an “invisible force” that diminishes the accomplishments of white men. As a fellow straight, white male, however, this argument falls flat. Even with my own personal history of childhood abuse and lack of financial resources, I am acutely aware of the ways I benefit from my skin color and gender every day. To argue anything else is essentially to claim that racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia no longer exist.

Fortgang is a white male. He is also straight and ostensibly cisgender (that is, born with the gender with which he identifies). He grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., described by its police department in 2008 as the safest city in New York state and is among the top five safest cities of its size in the country. New Rochelle has an average household income of $108,355, more than twice the household median income in the U.S. Before matriculating in one of the most elite universities in the world, Fortgang attended SAR Academy & High School, a private institution in Riverdale, N.Y., that boasts a theater, a hockey rink, a new “iPad one-to-one curriculum” and a beauti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Toward a Sociology of the Superordinate
• part one: seeing—and refusing to see—privilege
• part two: understanding privilege
• part three: intersections: the complicated reality
• part four: making new connections, moving forward
• Index