I worry that we're now viewing all of society's interactions through a prism of demographics and privilege. The prevailing cultural narrative is now that your demographic is your destiny. Too much success is granted to privilege and too much failure is blamed on society.
In my formative years, the rule for proper behavior seemed very simple: treat everyone the same, no matter their demographics or background. Now it seems there is a different ruleset for every demographic group. It all seems very retrograde and divisive.
You are articulating the zeitgeist of the culture: equal treatment is enough.
You are failing to accept the measured fact that people who think they are giving out equal treatment, are mistaken.
Privilege blinds you. There are problems you never see, that if you knew about you'd be all like "Shit, seriously? that really happens? That's awful". But because you never know, you fill in the blanks with your own privileged experience and so erase them. There are problems, like this one, where your eyes believe they have seen equality, but a camera and stopwatch measures unfair treatment.
You need to stop being so trusting of your own inputs.
Those "different rules for every demographic" are there to (crudely) rebalance the scales. They aren't really different rules. They are compensating for the fact that supposed neutrality is skewed hard. Think of them as komi in go.
And the concept of privilege is there to teach you how the real world works, because unaided, you'll never see it.
A nice explanation of privilege. I'm not super fond of the term, since I hear too many people use it as an attack instead of a conversation starter. Its hard to convince someone they're wrong, that has to be a delicate conversation.
Maybe: Do your best to treat everyone equally, and be aware of just how insanely hard this is for ANY human being to do.
I would go with "Try to 'overcompensate' when it comes to repressed groups; only then will you trick your brain into more genuinely equitable behavior."
It's similar to how, as a rule of thumb, we would do well to "over-document" our code. We're so close to the source that things that we consider "obvious" (due to constant exposure) are absolute headscratchers for people reading the code for the first time.
I put "overcompensate" in quotes because our brains are poorly equipped to judge equity objectively. We have to use hacks like "You cut the cake, and I'll choose which half is mine" for that reason.
It seems the topic of privilege often arises to promote empathy in some roundabout way. I just think empathy is a good concept that stands without the help of privilege. It's possible that pointing out the disparity in privilege can guilt empathetic emotions into some -- but this message then becomes unfairly reserved for those deemed as "privileged". Empathy is good for everyone. Privileged or not.
Nobody's arguing against empathy. And simply saying that privilege is "unfairly reserved" (without any qualifiers) begs the question.
We're saying that privileged people are often blind to their own privilege and others' disadvantages. To them (and I'm in this group), and thanks to things like hedonic adaption, a position of privilege feels like their "natural" state. To have some of that privilege taken away feels like a loss, even though it was nothing they earned on their own in the first place. To illustrate: How often do people hear heterosexuality applied as a pejorative label?
> And simply saying that privilege is "unfairly reserved"
I meant the promotion of empathy is being unfairly reserved. Empathy is a universally virtuous principle. To preach it at cis white males excludes others from the joys of this enlightenment.
> To them (and I'm in this group)
This is what confuses me. Why is privilege seen as a membership of a group rather than a behavioral fact about human existence? If you took someone you considered "under privileged" and gave them "excess privilege", surely they too would employ "hedonic adaption". Point being, it seems privilege can be reasoned about in principle without employing group mentality.
> To illustrate: How often do people hear heterosexuality applied as a pejorative label?
On the surface we can reason that pejoratives are bad. Beneath that we can reason that some people are victimized for being different. And beneath that we can reason that empathizing with others helps us act in more caring ways.
I think the promotion of kind language is valid and good, but I feel like it's less useful than the promotion of empathy, because the result of empathizing most likely encompasses the benefits of kind language and much more.
> You are failing to accept the measured fact that people who think they are giving out equal treatment, are mistaken.
People who try to be good are sometimes bad. How does that negate the original intent?
> Privilege blinds you. There are problems you never see, that if you knew about you'd be all like "Shit, seriously?
It's odd that people who preach about privilege fail to reason about it in principle. Privilege isn't something everyone has and fails to recognize. Instead, privilege is allotted to a select few - who without the help of the underprivileged would remain blissfully ignorant of their position.
Privilege, much like justice, has become a loaded word to signify ones vigilance against another group of people without sounding like a bigot. There's nothing wrong with trying to treat everyone with excellence. No one is obligated to engage in this speculative oppression olympics in order to reserve preferential treatment for the victors. That kind of nonsense is a fools errand.
> In my formative years, the rule for proper behavior seemed very simple: treat everyone the same, no matter their demographics or background. Now it seems there is a different ruleset for every demographic group. It all seems very retrograde and divisive.
When you're a kid, you believe in fairy tales like that. But the fact is, your brain is a heuristic machine. It comes to snap conclusions, and you often don't even know why it is you feel a certain way or believe something you do. And studies back this up over and over again. If you just commit to "treat everyone the same" you are de facto committing to making life unfair for women.
I appreciate your intent. But as a sexual minority myself, I would be insulted if someone treated me differently because of it, even if they meant well.
By all means, we should confront our biases, but for me the answer isn't layering new biases on top of old biases.
I actually liked the article's prescription. Not because of gender issues alone, but because I've worked in offices where the smartest people in the room were also the quietest (both men and women).
> I worry that we're now viewing all of society's interactions through a prism of demographics and privilege.
I don't see why this is something to worry about. Perhaps you mean that you worry we're now viewing all of society's interactions exclusively through a prism of demographics and privilege. That would indeed be a problem, but I don't see any reason to believe that it is actually happening. It seems to me that that make-your-own-destiny, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative is still alive and well.
Ideally we would want to keep both things in mind: people can make their own destinies but we need to respond to social dynamics that make it harder for some people to self determine than others. It's not about different rulesets, its trying to build a ruleset that achieves a certain equilibrium between giving everyone equal, unearned, social advantages and trying to maximize the aggregate social advantages conferred.
Also, how much was the rule actually observed back in your formative years? I feel like mysoginy and inequality are issues that are only slowly and recently becoming tthought about and reconsidered by the North American societies.
The world is already divided, in terms of class now more than in recent times (in the Western world), people are simply realizing it. Of course your ideal would be nice and a good goal to strive for/recapture. But whether that happens depends more on government policy than politeness.
In the past people were probably more divided on racial, sexual orientation, or other lines.
If anything, these results are showing that currently, and hence in the past, people have been judged harshly based on their demographics. It's not true that everyone was judged based on their own merits in the past.
It's just that people are starting to recognise it, and try to counter act it.
the thing is that this perceived cost is actually much tinier than it may feel to a privileged individual. feel-good rules like "treat everyone the same" havn't cut it, objectively, statistically. there are real injustices that sail completely under the vantage point of privileged individuals but are doing real systematic harm
In my formative years, the rule for proper behavior seemed very simple: treat everyone the same, no matter their demographics or background. Now it seems there is a different ruleset for every demographic group. It all seems very retrograde and divisive.