I'm a classy privileged lady

[sqbr]

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")

Comments

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

The three questions at the end of the article remind me of everything I have ever found wrong with the issue of privilege.