Undoing Privilege

Unearned Advantage in a Divided World

Professor Bob Pease

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848139046
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de las minorías

For every group that is oppressed, another group is privileged. In Undoing Privilege, Bob Pease argues that privilege, as the other side of oppression, has received insufficient attention in both critical theories and in the practices of social change. As a result, dominant groups have been allowed to reinforce their dominance. Undoing Privilege explores the main sites of privilege, from Western dominance, class elitism, and white and patriarchal privilege to the less-examined sites of heterosexual and able-bodied privilege. Pease points out that while the vast majority of people may be oppressed on one level, many are also privileged on another. He also demonstrates how members of privileged groups can engage critically with their own dominant position, and explores the potential and limitations of them becoming allies against oppression and their own unearned privilege. This is an essential book for all who are concerned about developing theories and practices for a socially just world.

PART ONE

Theoretical and conceptual foundations

ONE

Oppression, privilege and relations of domination

We live in an unequal world structured along the relational divisions of class, race, gender, sexuality and other social divisions. How that inequality is understood and the extent to which it is justified has been the subject of a considerable amount of debate in popular culture and in the social sciences. Numerous books have documented various forms of social inequality in Western societies, including economic inequality, status inequality, sex and gender inequality, racial and ethnic inequality and inequalities between different countries. Many of these books concerned with sociological inquiry have also examined the sources of social and political inequality in modern capitalist societies and the ways in which social and political arrangements reproduce those inequalities.

To help understand the costs of inequality, other key concepts in the social sciences have also been used to explain the dynamics of modern capitalist societies, including: social exclusion, social divisions, social problems, discrimination, disadvantage, powerlessness, exploitation, oppression and, to a lesser extent, the concept of elites. While each of these concepts is important in illustrating the structural dimensions of unequal social relations and examining the costs of these relations for marginalised and oppressed groups, they do little to address the role played by those of us who benefit most from existing social divisions and inequalities. Nor do most of these books examine how these inequalities are reproduced by and through the daily practices of privileged groups.

Many writers on social inequality demonstrate the structural and institutional dimensions of social inequality and how it is reflected in political and legal institutions. Such theories of social dominance emphasise the importance of locating inequality within the context of institutional and structural arrangements. These theories have been significant in explaining the continuation of social inequality. They have certainly informed my own understanding of modern capitalist societies and they have shaped my own critical consciousness of structural inequalities.

However, most inequality theorists do not explore the responsibility of privileged groups for maintaining these social arrangements. Perhaps they consider it to be self-evident. But it is this self-evidence that, in part, lessens the responsibility that members of such groups have to challenge these unequal arrangements.

The other side of discrimination and oppression

One concept that would seem to provide a basis for holding privileged groups responsible is that of discrimination, whether this be in the form of class, race, sexuality, age or gender discrimination. There has been an explosion of social science literature dealing with the experiences of discrimination. While much of this literature acknowledges the structural basis of discrimination based on race, gender, class, sexuality and so forth, it is usually presented in terms of personal or group attitudes and prejudices. Terms like ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ are used to describe people who stereotype and discriminate against others. However, such terms focus on the behaviour of individuals and groups and usually ignore the wider social context in which discrimination takes place. Mostly, the individual is blamed for being prejudiced rather than identifying the ways in which their behaviour is socially reinforced and normalised (Wildman and Davis 2000). In this way, these descriptions often hide the flipside of discrimination, which is privilege. We need to make privilege more visible rather than focusing on only one half of the system of inequality. The concept of discrimination places too much emphasis on prejudice and is too narrowly focused to address the complexity of dominant–subordinate relations.

In relation to the concept of oppression, there is a considerable amount of literature that focuses on the oppression of particular groups: women, gays, people of colour, and so forth. While it is usually recognised that dominant groups gain from the oppression of others, most books on oppression are concerned with changing the way the oppressed think and act. Considerable attention is given to how oppressed groups reproduce their own oppression.

Such writers emphasise how inequality is legitimated through a belief in the ‘rightfulness’ of existing social inequalities. However, when discussing which groups believe in the ‘rightfulness’ of the unequal distribution of rewards and resources, most social theorists emphasise the role played by the marginalised. It is suggested that subordinated individuals perpetuate their own marginalisation and oppression by internalising the ideas from the dominant culture into their psyches. Many people blame themselves for not achieving more in their lives because they are actively encouraged to do so.

One way that has been used to explain this accommodation is ‘internalised oppression’, which Pheterson (1986: 148) describes as ‘the incorporation and acceptance by individuals within an oppressed group of the prejudices against them within the dominant society’. For example, some gay men may internalise homophobia and feel a lack of pride in their identity and their history.

This leads often to a concern with strategies to assist marginalised groups to challenge their oppression. Oppressed groups may accept, accommodate to or reject their subordination. The latter response is what Mansbridge (2001) refers to as ‘oppositional consciousness’. Subordinate groups are said to ‘have an oppositional consciousness when they claim their previously subordinate identity as a positive identification, identify injustices done to their group and demand changes in the polity, economy or society’ (ibid.: 1). Such a term is seen to embrace race, class and other forms of consciousness of subordination. Oppositional consciousness encourages subordinate groups to identify dominant groups as oppressors. During the rise of second-wave feminism, gay liberation and anti-racist struggles by indigenous peoples in the 1970s, this critical consciousness of oppression was the basis of much social activism.

The concern is with the opportunities and capacity of the excluded to resist the forces of their exclusion. There is a danger here that those seen as socially excluded may be portrayed as reproducing their own marginalisation. This notion comes close to blaming victims for their own victimisation. To what extent can we charge those who are oppressed with not doing enough to challenge their oppression, while those who are privileged have barely begun to acknowledge the role they play in oppressing others?

The role of dominant groups in legitimating social discourse through the control of ideology is well known in Marxist theory, whether it is in the form of producing ‘false consciousness’ or, in Antonio Gramsci’s (1957) words, ‘ideological hegemony’. The argument is that dominant groups maintain their position by winning over the hearts and minds of those who are exploited by the existing system. This lack of consciousness of inequality is thus presented as a way of explaining its continuance. So the focus is on how those who are marginalised are unaware of or do not acknowledge the structural basis of social inequality. While these writers acknowledge the existence of dominant groups, the self-interest of these groups in maintaining the existing inequalities is usually taken as a given and is not critically examined.

One of the main factors in encouraging oppositional consciousness is seeing unequal relations as unjust. Why should this concern be directed only at those who are on the receiving end of injustice and subordination? If we focus only on discrimination and oppression, we reinforce the invisibility of privilege. If we are really going to understand the sources of discrimination and oppression in society, we must understand how privilege is constructed and maintained. Furthermore, as Bailey (1998: 117) comments, we need to be ‘attentive to the ways in which complex systems of domination rely on the oppression of one group to generate privilege for another’.

To put it another way, why do sociologists focus primarily on the bottom of the social divisions and not on the dominant group? It is often noted that academics are more likely to study ‘down’ rather than ‘up’. There are numerous sociological studies of oppressed and marginalised groups, but few studies of powerful and privileged groups. Why is this so? Is it simply because it implicates those in power? If we focus exclusively upon the oppressed and the socially excluded, we get a one-sided picture that reinforces the invisibility of privilege. Understanding the construction of privilege is necessary for a complete understanding of how oppression and discrimination are sustained.

Privileged groups may also come to see the injustice in systems of domination. For example: men can challenge patriarchy; white people can challenge racism; heterosexuals can confront homophobia. This consciousness of inequality is particularly more likely if people have an oppositional consciousness about their own subordination on one dimension of stratification. Such people may be able to more easily empathise with the experiences of another group’s oppression. For example, it might be expected that black men would be more likely than white men to support feminism because they have experienced oppression. Sandoval (2000) refers to this as ‘differential oppositional consciousness’. However, while groups who are dominant on one dimension of inequality and oppressed on another may, in some instances, identify more closely with oppressed groups, on other occasions they may identify their interests with dominant and privileged groups. I examine the complexity of people experiencing both oppression and privilege more fully in Chapter 2.

While it is important to recognise the structural constraints on challenging inequality and it is equally important to explore the potential of subordinated groups to mobilise collective actions against inequality, I am arguing that those who benefit from existing inequalities are often ‘let off the hook’ and that the role they play in reproducing inequalities is neglected. This book talks about the ways in which members of dominant groups reproduce their dominance, sometimes consciously but often unconsciously as well.

We need to develop a new vocabulary to understand the ways in which various dimensions of privilege are interconnected and reproduced. This means that the very naming of privilege as opposed to discrimination, social exclusion, oppression and so forth gives us another perspective from which to understand social inequality.

Elite studies and studying up

An exception to the focus on the oppressed and marginalised is elite studies that do study upwards. The concept of elites is commonly acknowledged in the social sciences, but there are considerably fewer studies of them. Elites are those who have considerable wealth and power usually located in politics and business. More than forty years ago, for example, Lenski (1966: 43) tried to answer the question of ‘who gets what and why’, and argued that ‘privilege is largely a function of power’. Similarly, just over twenty-five years ago, Daniel (1983: 12) argued that ‘(t)he status of occupations provides a useful reflection of the way [in which] power and privilege is held in society’. Her focus was on how those at the top of the occupational hierarchy constituted an upper-class elite.

I find that the concept of privilege is inadequately explored in elite studies. The problem with elite studies is that there is often little critical examination of the legitimacy of elite power. The classical elite theorists, Pareto (1935), Mosca (1939) and Michels (1962) all approved of elite domination, arguing that elites were inevitable in all societies because people with superior abilities would excel and achieve high status. Back in 1956 C. Wright Mills noted that ‘ordinary men [sic], even today, are prone to explain and to justify power and wealth in terms of knowledge and ability’ (Mills 1956: 351). Conservatives have long argued that people reach the top strata of society by hard work and in doing so continue to win the ideological battle over the legitimacy of the power of the elite. Thus I argue that Mills’s phrase of ‘even today’ still applies, more than fifty years later.

Many of those who advocate elitism do not see any incompatibility with democracy. Carlton (1996: 204), in a contemporary revision of elite theory, argues that elite status arises out of ‘necessary role differentiation in society’, and so he regards elitism as inevitable. Woods (1998) also notes that all elite theorists, in portraying an elite at the top of a pyramid above the masses below, end up reproducing the idea of the elite possessing superior qualities and abilities. So, many elite theorists do not explicitly challenge the legitimacy of the elite but are instead more interested in the functions of elitism.

Since elite theories identify privilege and power as being based upon considerable wealth and political and bureaucratic positions of authority, everyone else constitutes the ‘non-elite’. In this way, many of us who have particular dimensions of privilege are encouraged to see ourselves as part of the ‘non-elite’ because we are not in the upper class. This drawing of the boundaries between the elite and the non-elite conceals the multifaceted nature of privilege that I examine in this book.

Bailey (1998: 109) describes privilege as ‘systematically conferred advantages individuals enjoy by virtue of their membership in dominant groups with access to resources and institutional power that are beyond the common advantages of marginalised citizens’. Sidanius and Pratto (1999: 31–2) identify the main benefits that accrue from privilege:

possession of a disproportionately large share of positive social value or all those material and symbolic things for which people strive. Examples of positive social value are such things as political authority and power, good and plentiful food, splendid homes, the best available health care, wealth and high social status’. Individuals come to possess these benefits by virtue of his or her prescribed membership in a particular socially constructed group such as race, religion, clan, tribe, ethnic group or social class.

What is important here is that the groups to which people belong are more likely to make them privileged than their individual abilities. Privilege is usually thought of as positive state brought about by either hard work or luck. However, even many of those forms of privilege that people believe that they have earned through their own efforts are often complicated by unearned systems of dominance of which they are unaware. When privilege is systematically conferred, rather than earned, it gives one group of people the power to feel superior over another. While some forms of privilege need to be extended to become the norm in a socially just society, other forms of privilege need to be rejected because they reinforce hierarchy and damage people’s lives.

One of the first writers to relate the concept of privilege to the specific benefits individuals receive was Peggy McIntosh. She distinguished between ‘earned strength and unearned power conferred systematically’ (McIntosh 1992: 78). McIntosh constructed a list of fifty advantages that were available to her as a white person that were not available to people of colour under racism.¹ To make sense of how individuals gain these benefits, we need to identify the key dimensions of privilege: the invisibility of privilege by those who have it; the power of the privileged group to determine the social norm; the naturalisation of privilege and the sense of entitlement that accompanies privilege.

The invisibility of privilege

Most privilege is not recognised as such by those who have it. In fact, ‘one of the functions of privilege is to structure the world so that mechanisms of privileges are invisible – in the sens...