Re: ‘Privilege’ Is Just Another Word For Family, And We Need More Of It

[Rudy Canoza]

On 1/16/2017 8:15 AM, David Hartung wrote:
> A good article, well worth the read.
>
> http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/12/privilege-just-another-word-family-need/
>
>
> [...]
> I don’t like how we talk about privilege. We’re always asking people to
> apologize for it: “Please excuse my privilege.” You’d think privilege
> was an annoyance, a bad thing that disrupts an otherwise equitable
> society.

Unearned privilege that the privileged don't recognize and treat as the
natural order of things *is* bad.

I graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) back when
it was, at best, mediocre. It had no good reputation in anything except
a few professional schools that led to big incomes - law, medicine,
dentistry, architecture, etc. Its undergraduate business school was
okay, but in all of the subjects that make a university truly a
university and not a vocational school - the humanities, the social
sciences, the arts - USC was third rate at best. Its selectivity was
non-existent - almost anyone could get in provided they could pay the
tuition. People across town at UCLA derided USC as the University of
Second Choice, and "second" was being charitable.

What the school really was, especially at the undergraduate level, was
the connections school for the offspring of conservative middle and
upper middle class white people around Los Angeles. Basically, young
men went there to major in real estate development, and young women went
there to meet and marry those young men. While I thought University of
Second Choice was a pretty good insult, I came up with my own:
University of Special Connections.

The problem with that was the moral fiber and character of the majority
of the student body. These scions of stuffy middle class success had
bathed in privilege their entire lives, and they showed not one whit of
awareness of it nor gratitude for it. They took it to be the natural
order of things. Even worse, and nastier, they took their unearned
privilege - unearned by them - to be a measure of what swell people they
were. People like me who were there on cobbled-together finances of a
little bit of scholarship money, student loans and a lot of part-time
work were openly sneered at.

I was dumb about things like that as a young man, and the local - *only*
local - mystique of the place made me see it as a bridge to success. If
I had started out there - I didn't; I was a community college transfer -
I probably wouldn't have remained there. By the time I figured out what
the place was all about, I was too close to graduating and didn't want
to lose credits by transfering, so I stuck it out, but I hated those
snotty unappreciative privileged fucks and I despise the memory of them
still.

This is not an indictment of earned privilege, or even of unearned
privilege that the privileged acknowledge and don't take as a measure of
their worth. It's not to say that people who bask in unearned privilege
should feel guilty about it or atone for it. They just need to
acknowledge it, and not be so fucking condescending and mean-spirited
toward those less fortunate.