nakedcapitalism | If we consider modern privilege discourse as a sort of semi-animate
entity, a part of its genius lies in its ability to convince its
adherents that questioning it means claiming that no disadvantages
distributed unfairly according to collective patterns exist.
Or that questioning it means denying the existence of subtle
conventions that make certain people feel unwelcome in certain settings.
Or, closer to home, that critiquing McIntosh’s œuvre means dismissing all of her ideas.
I believe, on the contrary, that there are important questions that
should be asked about all of these topics. Privilege discourse doesn’t
exactly encourage asking them, but that doesn’t need to stop us.
First, the lateral/vertical world distinction is worth thinking
about. The way in which the distinction is partially overlaid on gender
in McIntosh isn’t really essential, even to her own treatment of the
idea.
Real questions arise at this point. To what extent can things
smacking of meritocracy be done away with? To what extent can the
vertical world be marginalized?
To what extent can people, even well-meaning people working towards
similar goals, discuss ideas without sometimes tearing the social
fabric?
The lateral world seems less uncomplicatedly good than McIntosh
suggests. The secretary praised by her for “keeping everything going” might
be working for an elementary school, but might instead be working for
an arms dealer. In a case like the latter, the lateral world’s
relationship with the vertical world is not conflictual but symbiotic.
One thought I’ve had is that I think people respond better if treated
as individuals who are potentially involved in larger group patterns,
rather than as exemplars of groups, fighting an uphill battle in any
effort to be seen as single people.
One way in which privilege discourse has been “efficient” is by
separating the process of classification of something as a privilege
from the process of assigning it a moral charge. I don’t think there’s
anything inherently wrong with trying to look at advantages as a single
large category. But from this starting point, it seems clearly important
to make distinctions about where these advantages come from, what they
signify, and what can be done about them.
In the spirit of McIntosh’s vertical/lateral distinction, we could
make a (not at all hard and fast) distinction between “vertical” and
“lateral” advantages. Vertical advantages would include things like
money, where people generally feel like having more is preferable.
Lateral advantages would include things like speaking French versus
speaking English, where either one can be preferable, depending on the
milieu.
One problem, in fact, with classifying lateral advantages as
“privileges” (and therefore presumptively bad) is that they are more or
less coterminous with culture. If the goal is to make it so there are no
environments where some people are more confident and others less
confident, I don’t see how to do this without leveling all cultural
distinctions. After all, one name for a place where a particular group
of people feel disproportionately comfortable is home.
