Quote:
Originally Posted by PsYcNeT
So are you saying privilege doesn't exist in Canada?
|
Of course it does. In some cases it's based on group identity, more often it's on an individual basis. It's impractical to address individual privilege (should you give a man who comes from a poor and uneducated family preference for entrance to medical school over a woman who comes from a family of affluent doctors?). The issue is whether it's better to address group privilege by treating all people as equal, or by trying to rebalance the scales by regarding people foremost by their group identity and then basing your treatment of them on whether they're privileged.
First you would have to identity exactly who is privileged. Is it a a binary quality - is everyone either privileged or not-privileged? If it's not binary, is there degrees of privilege and some imaginary ranking? And of course, we have overlapping identities. Does an affluent Asian woman who thinks homosexuality is immoral rank higher or lower on the privilege scale than a poor gay white man? Are all men more privileged than all women, regardless of affluence, education, or ethnicity?
Also, these identities and privileges are fluid. There was a time in this country when Irish weren't allowed in some bars, and when Jews couldn't belong to golf clubs. Nobody rang a bell one day and moved the Jewish identity up the privilege ladder over some arbitrary threshold.
Lastly, there's no correlation between bigotry and privilege. The poor or disadvantaged minority isn't any more likely to be broad-minded and tolerant of others than the secure majority. Have a friend tell you what his Chinese grandmother thinks of black people. Or look at how intolerant of homosexuality most Muslims are.
In short, using 'privilege' in such a simplistic fashion betrays extreme naivete and ignorance of history. There's a reason identity politics is rejected even by most minorities - it's an ethical dead-end that only entrenches division.