Cafe Inquiry

Hello everyone. I hope you are staying safe and well. While the D.C. area appears to be tentatively reopening, hosting an indoor discussion for several hours appears unwise. After due consideration, for the foreseeable future I am going to try to host a virtual discussion. Hopefully at a certain point we will have the testing and contact tracing necessary to fairly safely meet in person, or more distantly a vaccine. I hope you will join us in this endeavor. As this is a test, I will have Meetup open for messages to try to address any technical difficulties.

This month's discussion topic: privilege

Privilege is defined by some social scientists as a special, unearned advantage or entitlement. Privilege is usually linked to social and cultural forms of power, and can be based on a person's age, race, religion, ethnicity, or class. In many ways, privilege is the flip side of social inequality and practices such as red-lining.

There's a notable pattern where those who benefit from a type of privilege are unwilling to acknowledge it. Most people instead look for ways to justify or minimize the effects of privilege. They justify this by acknowledging the acts of individuals, but deny that privilege is institutionalized as well as embedded throughout our society (for example: "a few bad apples"). People resist acknowledging privilege because doing so would require us to acknowledge that whatever success they have achieved did not result solely through their own efforts.

Social privilege, as a concept, is inextricably linked with racism and iwas likely formulated by W.E.B. Du Bois. Also, given the murder of George Floyd, and marches against police brutality, I think considering privilege within the context of the police and justice systems is useful. Research shows both that Blacks are disproportionately more likely to be killed by police, convicted of crimes, and have longer sentences. Whites, on the other hand, are less likely to be stopped or killed by police, convicted of crimes, and sentenced for shorter periods.

What is privilege and how is it maintained? How can we as individuals, or society, productively address the ramifications of privilege? Is privilege necessarily the flip side of inequity, or can we as a society choose to extend historical privileges more broadly? Is there a good way that people can overcome our possibly innate resistance to acknowledging privilege?