Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
So when Peterson talks to the white children of the 20%-60% he is talking to a group that doesn't have the power that academics apply to their race and gender. So while they are more privileged than there female or minority person in the same class the members of the upper class regardless of race or gender will out perform them. That American class chart shows this quite well.
So my thought was are the critics of Pederson more priveledged than the clients of Peterson. And then are they using their position of priveldge to attempt to limit the opportunities of a group?
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This is why the privilege stack is so fundamentally wrong-headed. It not only takes something so broad as 'while male' and stuffs it into a block, it more or less ignores class.
And I don't think that's an accident. The people who have been driving the bus of identity politics for the last 30 years are economically privileged. They're affluent and secure, and come from affluent and secure families. But the moral foundations of their ideology is that the more power people have the more oppressive (and immoral) they must have been to get that power, and the lower you are on the privilege scale the more virtuous and deserving of compassion you are.
So how can a person in the 10 or 20 per cent be virtuous? By saying men are higher than women on the privilege stack. Period. So if you ignore class and look only at gender, it turns out a highly-educated, affluent woman
can be a member of the virtuous oppressed! That means a tenured professor making $100k, daughter of a teacher and an accountant, is more oppressed than a white guy earning $30k at Staples who was raised by a single mom who works at Petland.
It really is fascinating how modern identity politics essentially ignores class. In the early and mid-20th century, leftist politics was all about class. Recognizing false consciousness to shed your bourgeoisie values was a necessary first step to becoming a justice-seeking member of the left in 1965. Back then, it was the working class, a steelworker or stevedore, who was held to have inherent virtue, to be deferred to in authenticity and lived experience of oppression, the way women and people of colour are on today's college campuses.
No longer. Now, the social justice movement is driven by people who have virtually no social experience with the working class. That's why feminist opinion-makers go on about women working in STEM, or pushing into top management positions to close the gender pay gap, but never talk about hairdressers and check-out clerks becoming roofers and plumbers. The working-class, blue collar world is utterly alien to them. They don't
know any hairdressers or check-out clerks, or their roofer and plumber boyfriends. They live in a world of publishing, media, tech, and academia.
The turning away of the ideological left in North America from the working class, it's attitude shifting from disappointment to indifference to contempt, is one of the great unacknowledged transformations of our politics.