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As a very belated follow-on to my vague meanderings after doing the privilege meme...
I came across this post:A Little More Discussion on Privilege. The discussion is about the relationship between class and race (and is quite interesting), but the final section is more just about privilege in general, and captured what I was groping towards.
Namely, that there is a difference between your/your parents material circumstances and your/their culture/attitude/expectations, and both create privilege in different ways. I was fairly poor growing up, but my parents are very intellectual people who not only value education etc but know how to get it and see it as attainable, as a result of their own intellectual middle class upbringing. I sometimes wonder how much I would have overcome the sense of despair that pervaded my working class primary school if I hadn't gotten the scholarship to a snooty private school (admittedly, I'm not sure how much of that was internal. I was not a very well balanced kid)
Hmm. I had more to say but my brain has sputtered out :/
EDIT after reading comments: success is about walking through open doors, and privilege helps with this by giving you:
- more doors to start with
- the self confidence to go through them
-the ability to recognise them as doors
-the knowledge of how to access them
- being allowed to pass through them (ie being "the right sort of person")
I came across this post:A Little More Discussion on Privilege. The discussion is about the relationship between class and race (and is quite interesting), but the final section is more just about privilege in general, and captured what I was groping towards.
Namely, that there is a difference between your/your parents material circumstances and your/their culture/attitude/expectations, and both create privilege in different ways. I was fairly poor growing up, but my parents are very intellectual people who not only value education etc but know how to get it and see it as attainable, as a result of their own intellectual middle class upbringing. I sometimes wonder how much I would have overcome the sense of despair that pervaded my working class primary school if I hadn't gotten the scholarship to a snooty private school (admittedly, I'm not sure how much of that was internal. I was not a very well balanced kid)
Hmm. I had more to say but my brain has sputtered out :/
EDIT after reading comments: success is about walking through open doors, and privilege helps with this by giving you:
- more doors to start with
- the self confidence to go through them
-the ability to recognise them as doors
-the knowledge of how to access them
- being allowed to pass through them (ie being "the right sort of person")
Re: Interesting discussion
I think people tend to be afraid of discussing anything which makes then look bad. White women don't want to discuss race, poor men don't want to discuss gender, rich people with disabilities don't want to discuss class etc. We tend to see our own oppressions as paramount and everyone else's as a distraction (even when their particular issue is the topic under discussion) it annoys the heck out of me.
(Sorry I took a while to reply, I was waiting until I had something really insightful to say but then decided that might take a while :D)