1:
A specter is haunting the internet; the specter of unexamined
privilege. Out there in the rarefied world of political commentary and op-ed
journalism there is an increasing weight being placed on the concept of
privilege. This is perhaps not surprising given our current predicament and the
anger many feel at elite sections of society. But this seems to be something
different from the familiar rhetoric of outrage at a time of recession and
social unrest. The accusation that a speaker is privileged and especially the
demand to ‘check your privilege’ isn’t just being aimed at wealthy politicians,
businessmen and opinion makers but at individuals who ostensibly appear to be
on the same side, debating similar issues, and coming from similar social
backgrounds. In recent months the use of
the term has been particularly charged in online debates about feminism,
racism, sexuality, and issues around transgendered people.
“Check your privilege!”
This has become the rallying cry of the Mob when faced with a woman with whom
they disagree. (...)(It’s) about playing an inverted game of Top Trumps where
the real message is that it’s not who you are but how you were born that determines
whether what you have to say is worth listening to”. - Sadie Smith
"Check your
privilege", for example, is a profoundly stupid trope that states that
only those with personal experience of something should comment, or that if a
person is making an argument, they should immediately give way if their view is
contradicted by somebody with a different life story. It is hard to imagine a
more dishonest intellectual position than "check your privilege", yet
daily I see intelligent women who should know better embracing it”. – Louise Mensch
The general premise underlying the demand to check one’s privilege
is that certain speakers have a disproportionate advantage in getting their
voices heard and as such need to attenuate their interventions into various
issues in order not to impose their perspective at the expense of others. On
the face of it there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that, it equates to
a general recognition of the need for equality between speakers and to listen
to all sides and viewpoints without allowing those with the loudest voice to
drown out everyone else. However the reality is more complex. The idea of
privilege checking is claimed to be deployed as a part of a family of theories
described as Intersectional. Laurie Penny, one of the most prominent exponents
of privilege checking, here responds to Louise Mensch:
"Intersectionality"
is another new bit of equality jargon that the stiff suits in the conservative
commentariat loudly claim not to understand – despite or perhaps because of the
fact that schoolchildren have been using it on the internet for years. All it
means is that you cannot talk in any meaningful way about class without also
talking about race, gender and sexuality, and vice versa. These things
intersect – that's why we call them intersectional. (Guardian May 2013)
The claim that it’s not possible to say anything meaningful about
class without taking race, gender and sexuality into account is a strong one.
I’m not quite ready to throw out my Marx, and there are also plenty of good
texts on race and gender which don’t accord equal weight to class, so perhaps
we should break this down a bit.
2.
Roughly speaking intersectional theories are to do with the way in
which agents in different social locations have differing perspectives owing to
their experiences and subsequent status as knowers. Knowledge claims are as the
theory goes always socially situated. More
specifically these theories build upon ideas from Marxism via feminist
epistemology that agents in situations of oppression are in a position of
epistemic privilege relative to others regarding the conditions of that
oppression. The standpoint of the
proletariat is epistemologically advantageous on questions of capitalist
exploitation compared to those of the ruling class for example. Feminist
readings of this idea in the 1980s similarly emphasised its application to
women’s experience of a world dominated by men. The dominated whether workers
or women live in a world structured by others for their purposes – purposes
that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical
to our development and even existence (Hartsock pg241).
Intersectional social
epistemology further develops this insight by incorporating how other social
divisions, say on race and sexuality, intersect with those of class and gender.
The implication is that social researchers must recognize how multiple axes of
oppression intersect and generate variations in knowledge claims on a variety
of issues and society as a whole. In particular it emphasises the value of
claims made from the margins of society, by those most disenfranchised and
distant from the centre of power. The activities of those at the bottom of such
social hierarchies can provide starting points for thought – for everyone’s
research and scholarship – from which humans’ relations with each other and the
natural world can become visible. This is because the experience and lives of
marginalized people, as they understand them, provide particularly significant
problems to be explained or research agendas (Harding in Alcoff & Potter,
eds. pg 54).
Some of the most recent scholarship in the UK has attempted to
ground an ethics of testimony by developing the notion of an epistemic or
testimonial injustice. This analysis homes in on how social and identarian
power can affect the legitimacy and credibility of a speaker’s testimony.
Broadly speaking, prejudicial dysfunction in testimonial practice can be of two
kinds. Either the prejudice results in the speaker receiving more credibility
than she otherwise would have – a credibility excess –or it results in her receiving less credibility
than she otherwise would have – a credibility deficit (Fricker pg17). Paradigmatic
cases of this kind include rape victims’ testimony to a trial jury, and the
testimony of French Muslim women on their reasons for taking up the hijab.
So interestingly in the literature the concept of privilege is most
often used when talking about the epistemic privilege of those marginal groups.
Far less time is spent emphasising the material/social or whatever privilege of
those at the top. This isn’t surprising as the goal of standpoint theory is to
focus on the value for social research and possible avenues of resistance, of
the knowledge resources of those at the bottom, rather than taking pot shots at
perceived opponents. We can I think immediately refute Laurie Penny’s claim
about the inability to say anything about class without including race, gender
and sexuality. If I make the claim “people on lower incomes suffer a greater
range of health problems relative to those on higher incomes” do I need to take
race, gender, and sexuality into account for this claim to be true or
meaningful? Seemingly not; although Penny might object that this claim does not
differentiate between the specific sorts of health problems affecting say gay
and disabled people on low incomes; that alone does not invalidate the claim.
Nor again does the fact that I am a person on middle income affect the truth
value of my claim.
Although this is quite a general claim it is I think still
meaningful, not least in the potential to highlight inequalities in health predicated
on economic inequality, and to engender possible demands for extra provision of
healthcare to low income families or more general calls for social justice.
There is arguably an important distinction to be made between these sorts of
empirical claims and those which we might call more perspectival or subjective
interpretations; though this distinction itself is a point of controversy.
Quite how much objectivity is mediated by subjectivity is one of the big issues
that separate both feminist and social epistemologists; although our privilege
checkers don’t seem to waste much time considering this important detail.
Perhaps the point to emphasise here is ‘scope’; the more detailed
your analysis the greater need you may have to differentiate between social
needs and perspectives, particularly if the aim of your research might be to
provide guidance for healthcare provision to a diverse community. On the face
of it though there is a great deal that can be said about class and similarly
about race, gender, and sexuality without qualifying one’s claims ad infinitum along intersectional lines.
3.
So now let’s look at some examples of how intersectional theory/privilege
checking is deployed in recent online discussions. There are literally dozens
of blogs, Twitter streams, and articles on the websites of the Guardian, New
Statesman and Independent which deploy the notion of privilege in the manner under
consideration. For consistency’s sake I’m going to cite four examples from the recent
writing of Laurie Penny, who as I stated above does it rather a lot.
“Beauty is about class, money, power and privilege – and it always
has been.(…) Even the most stereotypically thin and beautiful woman will find
herself dismissed as unattractive if what comes out of her mouth happens to
threaten male privilege, which is why feminists of all stripes continue to be
labelled “fat and ugly”.” (NS May 2013)
“I count myself extremely lucky to have grown up as a political
writer in the age of the internet. Suddenly, where once there were only a few
privileged pundits talking to each other and expecting the proles to listen,
there are writers from all walks of life producing dazzling, meaningful prose
and finding their audience.(…) the age in which middle-aged white men
pontificated from rarefied platforms and expected to be listened to is over”. (NS April 2013)
“Whatever
you choose to call it, practical equal rights for women will always be a
terrifying prospect for those worried about the loss of male privilege. It’s no
wonder that “feminism” is still stereotyped as an aggressive movement, full of
madwomen dedicated to the destruction of the male sex and who will not rest
until they can breakfast on roasted testicles.” (NS March 2013)
“Privilege
is not the same as power. Nor is it a game whereby only the least privileged
people will henceforth be allowed an opinion – the last time I checked, the
political conversation was still dominated by rich white men and their wives.
These are the people who go into spasms of outrage at the very notion that a
black person, or a woman, or a working-class person might have as much right to
an opinion as they do on matters that affect them. I'd like to reassure these
people that taking away their monopoly on opinions is the very opposite of
censorship, and furthermore that their whining is distasteful”. (Guardian May 2013)
So here we have four quotes which together bring in class, race,
sex, age, and physical attractiveness, all of which hinge on the articulation
of an opposition between a purportedly marginal group and a dominant one. The last quote is particularly worthy of note
as it forms part of a defence of the use Penny makes of privilege in her writing.
I think it’s important to distinguish the two things which are at work here:
firstly, the use of intersectional theories as an analytic tool utilizing the
potential epistemic resources of the oppressed; and secondly the practical deployment
of the concept of privilege as part of that strategy. These two aspects - as I
think should be obvious now- are quite separate issues, although commentators such
as Penny often act as if they mutually entail each other. Moreover as these
quotes demonstrate the approach taken here focuses primarily on the negative
side of the discourse: the calling out of an opponent’s privilege, rather than making
visible the lives of marginalized people. There is a great deal that could be
said about the limitations of this kind of privilege discourse; it will suffice
for me to highlight three at this point.
Privilege discourse does not accommodate the notion of achieved stance.
In the tradition of standpoint theory from the 1980s it was customary to view
the epistemic privilege of women as an ‘achieved stance’. That is to say that
social location and perspective alone were not deemed sufficient to count as
having an epistemically privileged standpoint. What was thought necessary was a
practical political engagement centred on testimony which elucidated the shared
experience of unequal power relations to the underprivileged group. The primarily
negative and elitist approach taken by the privilege checkers does not maintain
that tradition. There is no shared standpoint developed amongst the community
of online commentators or their peers. Nor is there an emphasis on the
testimony of the oppressed. If it appears at all it does so mediated through
the lens of the journalist in opinion pieces or asides on the commentators own experience
of the issue at hand. This absence of genuine testimony from the margins correlates
well with the practice of dismissing the speech of some while valorising others
without any reference to the content of the utterances in question. This is
clearly a hypocritical or at least contradictory practice for anyone like Penny
who sets herself up as a spokesperson on social issues while admitting her own
privileged position in comparison to those she writes about.
Privilege discourse maintains an undifferentiated approach to social
oppression. Despite all the talk of multiple social positions the last word in all these
machinations on privilege tends to be the overall hegemony of the white middle
aged heterosexual male. As the above quotes demonstrate this point is made
repeatedly by Penny, as it often is by other commentators who deploy privilege
discourse. While certainly having more than a grain of truth to it, their
insistence that this be the last word does nothing to provide a roadmap for
social change in any of the cases of oppression they highlight.
If it is indeed the case that these social hierarchies are multifaceted and
structural then the calling out of white male privilege by a minority of well
educated online commentators seems somewhat inadequate as a political strategy.
Furthermore it entirely misses the advantage claimed for Intersectional theory
which is to move away from theorizing domination in simple oppositional terms. There
is little in the writing of the privilege checkers that deals with the more
nuanced aspects of this work: for example how the interests and power of
wealthy sections of minority communities affects those communities ability to accurately
represent themselves in the media.
Privilege discourse does not argue for the relative importance of
the different social locations it highlights. Why should the testimony of
“unattractive” people be considered especially valuable? One of Intersectional
theory’s own internal limitations is to question whether the identities they
highlight represent epistemically relevant categories of social location. This
criterion would be met only insofar as the society under consideration is
structured along the lines of the category in question. Beauty for example
clearly confers considerable advantages to those who are considered to meet
their society’s norm for it. Despite this fact though, it is questionable as to
what degree western societies are actually structured along the lines of beauty
or at least how significant to overall equality and social justice such a
structuring might be. Penny’s brief comments on this issue don’t provide much
clarity aside from counterpoising the suggested beauty hierarchy with the
overarching dominion of male privilege. This is a good example of how privilege
discourse does very little aside from noting a series of phenomena associated
with difference, and reiterating the hegemony of the White Male.
4.
The practical consequences of ‘checking one’s privilege’, of
shutting up rather than trying to form a consensus is encapsulated by a recent
spat on Twitter. The occasion was Penny’s suggestion (a quite correct one I
think) that people should not rise to a race-baiting article written by Rod
Liddle in the Spectator after the murder of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich in
May. However instead of arguing her position she fell into silence after having
apparently had her privilege checked by a number of women including black comedian
Ava Vidal. Ostensibly it was Penny’s ‘white privilege’ vis-à-vis someone suffering a racist
attack that she was owning up to and subsequently being silenced by.
Now let’s go back to the Marxist reading on proletarian perspective
to make some sense of this. Recall that the idea is that the bourgeoisie as a capital
owning class have an interest in maintaining the status quo, whereas the
proletarian sees more clearly the true nature of social relations as they do
not share the bourgeoisies’ interests, are subject to their rule, and have
direct experiential access to the reality of exploitation. The essential point
here is the misalignment of interests combined with the difference in perspective
potentially achieved by virtue of their experiences. It is unlikely that a CEO
of a top company and a shelf stacker will have similar perspectives on economic
exploitation owing to their different epistemic positions relative to the
system as a whole, and their different interests in that system. As such if you
wanted to know about the reality of working class life under capitalism you
would go first to the shelf stacker not the CEO. I don’t think this is the
situation with Penny and her Twitter row.
In her case while she may not have had direct experience of racism
relative to the women she was conversing with, nevertheless it is likely they
did share the same interest in combating racism. As such while the experiential
difference may yield different approaches to achieving their goal there is
nothing that should prevent them coming to a shared understanding of what might
need to be done, or conversely they could just agree to disagree over the
particulars. There was however no justification in this case for Penny to give
way simply because the person disagreeing with her on a point of practice was
part of a group who were more likely to have the experience in question. This
form of self-censorship makes a united response to racism or any form of social
oppression far less likely and may ultimately reinforce a feeling of
separateness between agents who in fact share common aims. It‘s also important to recognise that this
censorship of self and others is an interventionist rather than structural
approach to the problems of democratic speech. In effect what is being
practiced here is a form of policing the public sphere, or at least that narrow
avenue of the public sphere in which Penny and her privilege checking
compatriots operate.
Let there be no mistake; there is a problem with marginal lives
being suppressed or distorted by dominant discourses. One need only witness the
demonization of benefit claimants and migrant workers to understand this. The
question however is whether individuals like Penny who themselves are the
product of and work within the framework of that dominant discourse have any
legitimacy in playing the role of gatekeeper.
5.
It’s worthwhile reiterating that the discourse on privilege
exemplified here doesn’t spend much time exploring the possible untapped
resources of knowledge and experience offered by marginalized people. Instead,
it spends much of its time weeding out the so called unexamined privilege of
the purported dominant group or subgroup, and more often simply among the
commentators own peers. This is done not by reference to what the speaker
actually says but by appeal to the speaker’s nominal identity (being white,
being male, being heterosexual, being able-bodied). Penny as an Oxford graduate is no doubt
familiar with the old Latin phrase ad
hominem, which in footballing parlance is translated as playing the man and not the ball.
Instead of appraising the statements of the speaker for signs of a partial or
ideological perspective they simply appraise the speaker, resulting in what
looks very much like a game of discursive top-trumps where the speech of some
individuals is rendered invalid before it’s even heard.
To this ad hominem
distortion there is I think a further fundamental problem with privilege
discourse. Without adequately defining the scope and limits to the situated
knowledge claims they highlight, the radicalised intersectional aspect of
privilege discourse can begin to revolve in ever decreasing circles. The idea of different perspectival and
epistemic locations gets increasingly conflated with the concept of subjective
identity itself, such that the multiplicity of possible identities results in a
corresponding multiplicity of possible intersections which without
qualification as to their specific epistemic characteristics produces a general
demand to shut up about things you have not experienced yourself. Following
this logic intersections thus multiply ad
infinitum to the point of elevating the banal truism of ontological
separation; i.e. that no two individuals can share the exact same experience.
At this point radicalised intersectional theory collapses into an extreme form
of scepticism where all statements are rendered invalid beyond the life-world
of the individual, and thus all those claims pertaining to a shared world are
foreclosed from the outset. All the world becomes bodies and opinions, the
latter which of course is the domain of political commentators and op-ed
writers like Laurie Penny.
The corrective is obviously that the statement itself must be heard
and examined in order to make a judgement. It is not acceptable to dismiss the
speaker simply on account of their position, nor is it valid to valorise the speech
of the oppressed in-toto without
examining the content of the statement and defining the scope of enquiry. Or,
as Linda Martin Alcoff succinctly puts it: “the fact that judgement is sometimes
correlated to social position does not yield relativist conclusions, because
judgements from any location must still be subject to challenge and
verification. (Alcoff in Sullivan & Tuana, eds. pg41)” It is precisely this
properly democratic aspect of challenge and verification that is missing from
the privilege checkers discourse. None of this reflective, nuanced approach is
applied by Penny, or her fellow minor hacks and online commentators, who
instead practice a kind of liberal interventionism within their online domain.
Instead of the possibility of forming consensus between groups on issues of
social domination there is just a multiplicity of incommensurate opinions, some
of which require silencing, and others which can never be challenged.
Privilege checking I think is thus correctly characterised as a
predominantly middle class game played by a tiny group of online activists, bloggers,
and social media users, very few of whom appear to spend much time searching
out the potential epistemic resources of those most underprivileged in society. Or, at best they are happy to attempt representing
them from afar. These commentators do however have a disproportionate influence
on public opinion, at least that part of public opinion that wishes to align
itself with “the left”. Their function as an all too visible mediating layer
between full on political activism and undecided political audience is the sole
reason I find their output of interest at all.
If it is the case as Penny claims in her response to Louise Mensch
that schoolchildren have been using her brand of intersectional privilege
checking for years, then perhaps that’s because it represents a particularly
simplistic and juvenile idea of democracy. It is certainly one which I hope
will be short-lived.
References:
Fricker,Miranda – Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of
Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007)
Harding, Sandra – Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is Strong
Objectivity, in Alcoff,Linda &
Potter,Elizabeth, eds. – Feminist Epistemologies (Routledge, 1993)
Hartsock,Nancy – The Feminist Standpoint Revisited and Other Essay
(Westview Press, 1998)
Alcoff, Linda – Epistemologies of Ignorance: Three Types in S. Sullivan & N Tuana, eds. –
Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (State University of New York Press , 2007)
