Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2013-07-21 03:32 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2013-07-21 03:32 pm
[ SECRET POST #2392 ]
⌈ Secret Post #2392 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 064 secrets from Secret Submission Post #342.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-21 10:50 pm (UTC)(link)I have a lot of respect for the fact that you're having this conversation in a language other than your own, but while I don't think you're advocating mass murder, I do think you're struggling with the ideas people are working with and not just the words they're using.
I'm disabled, and to a greater extent than just 'weak eyes', and I do see it as others being given an unnecessary advantage. Part of the reason why you may be having trouble with the framework here is using that as your reference point- wearing glasses doesn't generally attract much stigma or unfair treatment in most modern societies, so you aren't going to really see the discrimination firsthand.
People who have less talent and less work ethic than I do in my field have been promoted ahead of me because people take one look at my disability and make incorrect assumptions about what I can and can't do. There are places I can't easily go and activities I can't easily participate in that would be no problem if those in charge remembered that people like me exist and designed things a little less narrowly. I am at a disadvantage in certain situations because of my impairments; but I am at a disadvantage in many, many more situations because society is set up to give other people an advantage, and that's what people are talking about when they say 'non-disabled privilege' or 'able-bodied privilege'.
I suspect if you asked people talking about other privileges (race, sexual orientation, etc) they'd relate similar experiences. 'Distinctive advantage' is not as lacking here as you think.
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-21 11:10 pm (UTC)(link)My only problem here is the weird use of the word "privilege". And a lot of other words that get used differently in social justice language than anywhere else.
Privilege, to me, means an advantage. What advantage do all able-bodied people have from you being disabled? None. If you were suddenly able-bodied tomorrow, all able-bodied people would not be any worse off. Your disadvantage does not give anyone an advantage. Sure, it is harder for you to get a job, but there's only a few disabled people, so it doesn't actually make it any easier for the many, many able-bodied people to find a job. YOU have a disadvantage, but that doesn't actually give anyone else an advantage. If half the population, or even 40% were disabled? THEN the able-bodied people would have a noticeable advantage, because it would actually have an effect on, for example, the job market as a whole. THEN it would be privilege. If 90% of people were disabled? THEN being able-bodied would definitely be a privilege and an advantage.
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-21 11:46 pm (UTC)(link)"People who have less talent and less work ethic than I do in my field have been promoted ahead of me because people take one look at my disability and make incorrect assumptions about what I can and can't do."
there's only a few disabled people
Individual disabilities may not be very large groups, but disabled people as a whole make up somewhere between 5 to 20 percent of the population depending on how you define the demographic. That's more than just a few.
If 90% of the population were disabled, that would influence what's considered 'normal' and it'd probably be the people without such impairments who'd be at an unnecessary disadvantage. (If you don't mind watching a 40 second Youtube video, this may help you get an idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVV_I-FHNTg )
THEN the able-bodied people would have a noticeable advantage, because it would actually have an effect on, for example, the job market as a whole.
It has more of an effect than you think (as mentioned above, there's more of us than you probably think), but even if it only has a tiny effect on non-disabled people's job markets, it has an enormous effect on OUR work opportunities. Most of us are employable in one variety of job or another, but our rates of unemployment and underemployment are huge because we're so often not judged based on our actual skills but by people's uninformed ideas and stereotypes.
After reading your last response, I think we may be having both language and ideological barriers here- I think I don't really understand what you're using 'privilege' and 'advantage' to mean, so can you please spell it out for me? I'm willing to do the same, if you'd like.
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-22 12:13 am (UTC)(link)The first thing you mentioned, where people have been promoted when you were more qualified - YOU have a disadvantage there, but does everyone else really get an advantage out of you being overlooked? ONE promotion (or even ten) that you don't get make a big difference to you, but to the hundreds or thousands of people in your job field? To everyone else it doesn't make a difference, because only one person got that promotion instead of you. The other ten people you work with didn't get it. Most of the other people in your job field did not get an advantage for not having your mental illness. Only one person got that promotion. So there are still 10 or 100 people who don't have a mental illness who didn't get that promotion. So no, simply not having a mental illness doesn't give one any advantage or privilege.
To simplify:
100 people. 99 get ice cream, 1 doesn't. That sucks for the one. He/she has a disadvantage. the 99? Do not have an advantage, do not have privilege. ( and the 1 should definitely get ice cream too)
100 people. 10 get ice cream. 90 do not. The 10? Have a definite advantage and privilege. (and the 90 should all get ice cream too, though that might be harder to do since there are more)
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-22 01:14 am (UTC)(link)100 people. 10 get ice cream. 90 do not. The 10? Have a definite advantage and privilege. (and the 90 should all get ice cream too, though that might be harder to do since there are more)
And there's the disconnect.
Social justice, like other specialized areas of discussion, has grown its own set of jargon and terminology and sometimes people who are used to hearing it forget that not everyone is so familiar... but I think this may be mostly plain ordinary language issues rather than jargon issues, at least for these particular words.
In my dialect of English at least, I've only really heard 'privilege' used to talk about unfairness. 'Advantage' and 'disadvantage', to me, imply each other- if one person in a group has a disadvantage, the other people have an advantage; if one person has an advantage, the others have a disadvantage. Even outside of social justice discussions, the size of the groups isn't part of my normal definition for any of these words.
If the words in your language that you're mentally translating these terms to DO have that connotation, then they don't mean quite the same thing as what many English writers/speakers are trying to mean (and vice versa- I got very confused here because what I interpreted you as saying wasn't what you meant). I would never have thought to break that out of the definition because it feels as obvious to me that it doesn't mean anything about group sizes as it feels obvious to you that it does.
Does that help a little?
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-22 01:35 am (UTC)(link)But well, you agree that people should occasionally remember to explain the special social justice jargon to people, since it's not something everyone can just "know" out of nowhere? Because that's my main issue, it took me 5 years to figure out that people meant "not having a disadvantage" when they said "privilege". 5 years of social justice discussions that didn't make much sense because I though "huh? what?". Could have been solved if someone had just explained once. (and even here, asking mostly got assumptions and insults. Asking when you don't know something seems to be very frowned upon where social justice is concerned, which can't be good)
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-22 02:25 am (UTC)(link)In your breathing example, I would say both that they have a disadvantage and that other people have an advantage. I wouldn't say that other people have privilege there, because privilege is fundamentally about whether or not people are being treated fairly and no one in that example is interacting with anyone or anything.
As to whether people need to be better about breaking down jargon, I think that depends a lot on the audience. If I'm talking to random people on the internet about science, for example, I should either try to define my terms before I use them or I should try to just avoid jargon. If I'm talking to other scientists, though, I shouldn't have to keep interrupting the discussion to define basic terms because some non-scientist overheard and didn't understand the words I was using. Online, this can get kind of fuzzy because the boundaries of discussions aren't so clear and you can reach audiences you were never even aware of. And sometimes it just gets messy. Communication is fiddly even without translation involved; add in a language barrier and all kinds of difficulties with differences in connotation can crop up.
I may have missed something, but I didn't really see anyone insulting you in this discussion. Sometimes making incorrect assumptions, but those mostly seemed to me to be based on reasonable interpretations of your word choices, and you made some incorrect assumptions too.
Some of the hostility you've encountered elsewhere is probably from incorrect assumptions or misinterpretations on one or both sides. Some of it is from the wrong audience situation I talked about above- people not wanting to explain to you because they weren't actually talking to you. And some of it is because in these sorts of discussion you sometimes get people asking questions when they don't actually want answers- and when people encounter enough of that, sometimes people want to stop answering because they can't tell who's asking real questions and who is just trying to bait them.
If you don't mind revealing yourself, sharing the fact that you're an ESL speaker might help with a lot of these situations- sometimes people will still be too tired or too intent on their conversation with someone else to define terms, but at least they'll be aware that that's where the disconnect is probably coming from.
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-22 08:38 am (UTC)(link)The problem with your tallenss/shortness example is that a person with below-average height can still be taller than an even shorter person, but that doesn't make them a tall person. It makes them a short person who's taller than even shorter people. And a person of average height is neither tall nor short - they're average. I think that's what OP means by advantage and disadvantage. Being blind is a disadvantage, but having all 5 senses isn't an advantage, it's the standarn norm. Now, if someone possessed a 6th sense, that person would have an advantage, a privilege, over others.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2013-07-22 06:20 pm (UTC)(link)I think that kind of ties in with what Inkdust is saying below, about trying to reframe or displace that reference to the norm. That's part of why terms like 'cisgendered' are a thing- no one gets to occupy the position of 'unlabeled default human being' and everyone (hopefully) gets taken into consideration.
Re: Privilege
(Anonymous) 2013-07-22 02:52 am (UTC)(link)I'm not sure if this is exactly what AYRT is talking about, but the concerns about the use of the word "privilege" (as distinct from the concept of privilege) seem at least somewhat similar to the concerns I've had for a while. Let me see if I can articulate those.
It sounds (to me) like what AYRT is trying to describe is the notion that both "advantage" and "disadvantage" are deviations from a sort of "baseline expectation" or zero-point, if one were to think of how-one-is-treated-by-society as a graph. The baseline is zero, advantages are positive numbers, and disadvantages are negative numbers.
(TW: discussion of rape in the following paragraph)
My concern is similar to this. A lot of what are described as "privileges" are simply receiving the zero-point treatment by society which everyone ought to receive. For example, I am a woman. I cannot walk out to my car in a dark parking lot at night without having to think about my potential danger of being raped. This is not something men typically experience (while men can be raped, it is not generally the same sort of omnipresent threat that it is for women). However, I do not consider "being able to go to my car in a dark parking lot without worrying about rape" to be a privilege, in the sense of a bonus or an extra -- it is a right that I, as a woman, am denied in the society in which I live. Being able to go to one's car at night without the fear of sexual assault is a baseline expectation that everyone ought to have. To me, that makes it NOT a privilege.
Essentially, in my intuition of what the words mean, in order to correct unfairness, you remove privileges and restore rights. You give or guarantee everyone the baseline expectations, and you take away the unfair extras. Most of what I see described as "privileges" in social-justice language are not extras; they are what everyone is entitled to but many people are unfairly denied. That's why the use of the word "privilege" makes me uneasy, and what I suspect makes the concept of privilege harder for some people to understand.