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) 2013-07-22 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.