Alyssa says: “Your white privilege is no more visible than your able-bodied privilege, yet you aren’t bothered by admitting that you have an able-bodied privilege. Why? Admitting that you have an able-bodied privilege does not have guilt attached to it. Everyone knows that you didn’t take someone’s leg so that you can walk. You may benefit from being able-bodied, but you didn’t actively go out and hurt others to gain the privilege. Most white people are in that same situation. They benefit from a society that gives them privilege for being white, but they didn’t activly take privilege away from someone else. The difference is white privilege is manufactured. People actively took from others to gain their privilege and were able to do so by saying they don’t look like us so they aren’t one of us.”

But a huge chunk of the able-bodied privilege *is* manufactured. It’s manufactured when architects design buildings with steps or narrow doors that wheelchairs can’t get through, when designers create websites that can’t be deciphered by screen-readers, never mind the regular old not-getting-the-job, not-getting-the-taxi, not-getting-the-apartment of a person being actively discriminated against!

The reason that I don’t consider ablebodied privilege as visible as white privilege is that I have several friends who have physical difficulty getting around but are not in wheel chairs, MS sufferers for example. Because they are young they often get older people expecting them to stand up on buses and trains not realising that they have greater need to sit, and people criticising them for using lifts instead of stairs when it is actually necessary for them to do that. I am also disabled although not in terms of mobility and nobody would know by looking at me.

The thing that’s frustrating is when people like me (who grew up with class privelege and entitlement) don’t see how that effects people who DON’T grow up with it, and how it can have such a lasting impact.

Had the exact opposite experience where I grew up as a latchkey kid with parents who worked 14+ hours/day 7 days/week for several years, where I worked part-time during junior-high and high school to help contribute to the household, and where money was extremely scarce, especially during my high school years.

One of the results of this has been a willingness to make stark distinctions between what I “need” and what I “want”, a distinction I found most friends and acquaintances from middle and upper-class backgrounds were unable or unwilling to make. One example of this was a recent conversation with an older friend from an upper-middle class background who insisted he “needed” a new computer despite being buried in debt and having a computer that may be old, but still perfectly functional for his needs as a grad student. It took a while before I got him to realize that considering all of that, his “need” were really a “want” he cannot afford given his current financial state.

Privilege buys isolation–you can avoid as much of the real world as you like. It also buys access–you can take as much of it as you like also. Privilege produces Paris Hilton. And, worse, It produces George Bush.

It also produces great art—-money and a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf said.

This has been a country of white privilege since its founding. The unprivileged or under-privileged class has grown disproportionately to the rest of the population. We can go back to the Industrial Revolution to trace some of this, but the point is now and always has been that the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. This is called Capitalism. Capitalism’s end product is privilege.

I think it’s this flexibility of what people see as a different levels of privilege and the fact that a privilege can be outweighed by a disadvantage (tough these can depend on circumstance) . I suppose some issues that aren’t easy to fit in a check box are always going to be harder for people to grasp and understand.

So, who were the privileged ones? Back then, people would unequivocally say the city people were. NOW we might say, my cousins certainly had the far healthier lifestyle–strong aerobic exercise, milking cows themselves, excellent natural food, clean air. etc. (No accident that they all lived to be ancient, while my city relatives dropped like flies.)

We never had to recycle one bowl of milk so that everyone could eat some cereal in the morning. We never had to deal with a drug addicted parent, as some of our friends did. We never had to deal with that parent inviting people in the house who wanted to sexually abuse us, like some of our friends did. My parents were young, but determined and intelligent. I never had to deal with a parent with a welfare mentality.* While I did have to deal with a depressed parent, I have never had to deal with a parent who was defeated by life.

And I dealt with all of that and more, yet I am white. For this reason (as I wrote recently), my father was totally obsessed with his whiteness. That was his trump card, his (literally) GET OUT OF JAIL FREE CARD.

And rich people who are not well connected tend to get better jobs because they have an easier time envisioning themselves in a successful career than poorer people.

Amen! Or, I would add, imagining themselves in ANY “career”–rather than just a job.

This recalls some long conversations with middle-class people in which I’ve been asked, well, WHY DIDN’T YOU CHOOSE THIS CAREER, or THAT CAREER, and you think, I never knew anyone who did those things. Those careers did not go to people I grew up with, and it just never occurred to me.

Why do people want to deny or downplay the privileges that they have received?

Unfortunately, as in your 3am example, I don’t think we often perceive our privilege as actual privilege. As an attractive young woman, I received much positive AND NEGATIVE attention from men, and consequently would have boiled over if you had accused me of (phrases I have heard in the blogosphere): “thin privilege” or “looks privilege” .. yet now that I have neither of these, I feel the loss of these privileges ACUTELY!

And, most importantly -

3. Why do the phrases “white privilege” and “economic privilege” spark denials that are so strong, they can derail a conversation?**

I think poor people can feel erased by the discussion. Race is usually easy to define in our culture, but CLASS really is not. I mean, what are we even talking about? That recent class checklist that circulated online, was one of the most harrowing things I ever read. I didn’t put it on my blog, because I found I was too ashamed to admit some of those things (i.e. both parents, three step-parents, three grand-parents having been in jail)… you felt you had to explain the connections before participating, I wanted to say “Hey, they didn’t have any lawyers!” and explain that the same offense is not the same in every class (rich kids are taken home when found drunk and disorderly, poor kids taken to jail, for example). Rather than re-write Karl Marx, decided to give it a pass.

Great post, great examples and discussion.

For #1, I wonder if the meaning I’m picking up and the meaning you intend are the same thing. Entitlement is tied to privilege only insofar as learned helplessness hasn’t beaten one down. An attitude of “the world owes me a pony” is distressingly common through all walks of life. Privilege can certainly make one more demanding, but simply being demanding rarely improves one’s station. A sense of entitlement/empowerment along with the right personality does open many doors, but I can’t really see personality in toto being linked that tightly with any of the privilege types mentioned here.

Is this attitude (acknowledging privilege) unusual? Several of the comments seem to say that it’s more common for people to deny their own privilege. Maybe it’s a generational thing? I’m in my late 40s and my parents were children of the depression.

At any rate, it was not hard, when I got older, to extend this concept to other types of privilege. It was easy to understand that while I had been aware of some of my advantages there were a lot of other advantages that I had taken for granted. I don’t remember feeling anger, guilt or denial when I learned about these other types of privilege but maybe it’s just been too long ago.

One final comment is that I haven’t seen anyone comment on one very important privilege that I think about daily. I don’t live in fear that my city will be bombed during the night because the war is being fought “out there.” I do feel sad/guilty at times about this privilege.

So when I hear “privilege” I hear “temporary luxury that can be taken away from you,” and on some level I wonder when that axe is going to fall and the privilege I’ve been enjoying will be yanked away. I seriously doubt that I’m the only middle-class white person whose parents used that word, either.

Sometimes the problem really is that words mean different things to different people.