this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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'Privileged' isn't something that you either are or aren't, and it's not productive to blanket state some are privileged and some aren't.
Example: I'm queer and white. I have white privilege, but some people have straight privilege over me.
Every human suffers. Some people who objectively have more privilege than most will read something like this and think they can't be part of 'the privileged' because they've suffered or they've had to work for things others were just handed, so therefore, they're 'the non-privileged', and if they can handle it, the other non-privileged can, too.
Take, for example, many non-college-educated people in their 50s or 60s who managed to safe up for a house through hard work, and now think the young or immigrants are lazy because 'if I managed it through hard work, why can't they?'
The way the last comment frames it as 'the privileged' precisely plays into the problem it's addressing.
I hate the term privilege because it sounds like you have something that other people don't have. When in reality privilege is the lack of things.
White privilege means a person doesn't have to worry nearly as much about police. Straight privilege means a person doesn't have to defend their right to get married. Male privilege means a person doesn't have to survive earning 30% less money for no reason.
You are commenting on Yann's "third category" from the twitter image. It's something of a satellite to the main point, which is that the major groups of people are divided by how they feel about others' suffering. How do you feel about that?
But then privilege is a consequence of the society, not the individual. You can be in a community that doesn't discriminate, at which point neither applies. You can be in a community that overvalues queerness or undervalues whiteness.
People who bought homes in the 90s, when real estate was more in line with wages, benefited from the historical moment. You can call that privileged.
And people inherit property from family. That's definitely a privilege.
But it all overlooks a broader system of cheap lending for mega-rich financial institutions, which allow groups like Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway to become some of the largest landlords in the country.
Talking about "white privilege" or "millennial privilege" or "native born privilege" in the face of a historic real estate consolidation at the hands of a tiny aristocratic elite seems trite and misplaced.