Checking My Privilege to Check My Privilege

          You better check yourself before you wreck yourself, so the saying goes.  Or rather, you better check it before you wreck it, and by it I mean the left.  Or more specifically, the now-popular practice of those on the left to privilege-check themselves and others about every aspect of their identity and its corresponding privilege, except the privilege inherent in this practice itself.  And I think this ideologically inconsistent blind-spot is to detriment of the liberal activism.  I wrote about privilege-checking previously, subverting its logic to describe a form of privilege that its own proponents possess but are typically unaware of: liberal privilege.  Such privilege is the advantage of coming from, and belonging to, a liberal political ideology that has apparent advantages across academia and media.

          Extrapolating from this is the more insidious possibility that the practice of privilege-checking is itself symptomatic of an intersection of privileges, the most obvious being white and liberal in my opinion.  Whereas my previous writing focused on the privilege of a liberal identity and the need for liberals to check against it when doing advocacy work, I am now offering the more radical position that privilege-checking is itself representative of privilege.  And yes, to be free of hypocrisy, I admit I am a white liberal (and male, heterosexual, able-bodied, Christian). And yes, my privileges deserve to be checked, and this whole essay is a check on privilege-checking and is thus thoroughly informed with liberal irony.

          The most problematic aspect of my previous writing on privilege was that one cannot deny the advantages conservatives possess in their own academic institutions and televised media and literature, specifically all those of a religious nature.  But I think this flaw is more a reflection of the flaws in the construal of privilege, rather than a limitation of my own writing.  Privilege is the benefits of unearned, and often unrecognized, power.  Such power is most often represented as a totalized institution or system but this is mere theoretical delusion, a liberal conspiracy theory.  There is no absolute all-encompassing system of power from which privilege emanates.  Identity and its privileges are intersectional as any novice leftist would admit; but if privilege is the unconscious and undeserved benefit of identity-based power, then this power is intersectional as well.

          We benefit from the multiplicity of intersecting and conflicting power systems of inherent in our identities.  These benefits are dependent upon the context of our situation and cannot be reducible to a merely calculated summary of our identities.  Thus a homosexual black female of liberal persuasion would not only be empowered, but arguable in power in a critical theory class at her university campus while the same individual would arguably oppressed if attending a conservative evangelical theological seminary school.  Hence we all, given the appropriate context, need to check our privilege but obviously particularly identities and situations demand this more than others. Another flaw in the way that privilege-checking is typically flaunted around, is that it implicitly undermines the standards of rights upon which so much liberal theory depends.

          Often times, when one is told to check their privilege and is given examples of such privilege, one will hear descriptions like “the privilege of not being harassed by police” or “racially profiled by the government” or “not being sexually assaulted.”  This conflates the abuses of minorities with the privileges of the majority and reduces equality to an arbitrary balance between the privileged and the under-privileged measured by the lowest common denominator of abuse suffered.  Is the left so cynical that it is a privilege, an undeserved advantage, to not be beaten by the police because you are black, to be spied on because you are Muslim, or be sexually abused because you are a woman? Of course it does not; the absence abuse is not a privilege, it is a fundamental right recognized by liberalism and from which a basic standard of equality emerges.  Yet this is exactly the implicit conclusion of labeling as privileges the violation of recognized rights.

          To construe every disadvantage of a minority into an equal and opposite advantage to the relative majority is to undermine any mutual pursuit of equality between parties; it entails that the majority benefits when the minority suffers such that it is never in the interest of the former to work towards the emancipation of the latter.  Hence oppressed minorities may unnecessarily antagonize their privileged allies while majority oppression is legitimized as defense against minority retaliation.  To admit this conceptual confusion is not to suggest that the practice of privilege-checking is incoherent, but is only to say that not all advantages are privileges but may simply be the standard of rights to which should be inherent to all individuals.  Power and privilege are intersectional and situational, and the critique of privilege requires a universal standard of rights to establish equality if it is to be legitimate.  If such a standard is not recognized, then the pursuit of equality is illusory and is simply the substitution of one identity’s privilege for the position of another.

          If people typically misunderstand what power and privilege is when privilege-checking, they also misunderstand the power and purpose of it as well.  Its purpose is not to invalidate the perspective of its target, however common that result may be.  Such invalidation would not undermine the oppression of the status-quo but would merely reinforce and reproduce it in alternative systems of power.  If white males could not discuss the oppression of women of color during a university lecture because their identity was privileged while the identity of their subjects were not, then this would simply create a context in which women of color were in fact privileged over white men.  This reversal would undermine the very justification for silencing men in such a situation to begin with.

          It is fallacious to assume that simply because one identifies with a privileged population, they cannot legitimately communicate with those lacking such privilege.  Privilege-checking should be leveled against those in power when effective communication breaks down due to their privilege rendering what they say inconsistent with reality.  Privilege is checked when it is illegitimate due to the intrusive influence of its own ignorance, but that does not mean that all communication from a position of privilege is necessarily incoherent.  When confronting such incoherency through privilege-checking, the privileged is informed of how the misinformation is due to their position of power, but their message itself is critiqued for its lack of empirical or logical consistency.  Several times in my experience, I will present some contrarian perspective from the left, which is then ignored entirely on the grounds that it was written by a person of privilege, usually white privilege, and thus it was assumed to be irrelevant.  To assume that this response is legitimate is to be guilty of the same abuses of reasoning that those privileged with power commit and it is why it is so necessary to check our own use of privilege-checking, lest we fall into hypocritical incoherency.

          Privilege-checking does not presuppose that privilege is totalized into a single institution of power nor does it necessarily entail that all inequality is primarily due to privilege. The purpose of privilege-checking is not the inherent invalidation of privileged perspectives either.  But it does entail that the privileged position one holds entails a certain measure of ignorance, that such privileged ignorance is not permissible, and that it is inconsistent with the experience and identity of the less advantaged.  When we are privilege-checked we are asked to acknowledge our privilege, examine the way it informs our ignorance, and to exercise the patience necessary so that we may learn from those outside of our isolated perspective.  It does not require guilt or self-deprecation as conservative caricatures would suggest; the one guilt we should feel over our privilege is if we fail to acknowledge we possess it and do not learn from it.

          It is of the up-most importance that one recognizes that it does not require that one silence one’s perspective or sacrifice one’s identity.    To require such a response would be dehumanizing for suppression a part of one’s personality and would be irresponsible for requiring that one ignore the power of one’s privilege.  Privilege, once recognized and aligned with the oppressed, is empowering for it is the recognition that one is in a position of power to do good for others.  The self-censorship of those with privilege does not negate oppression caused by such power-but normalizes it by removing dissenting opinion from within the privileged community.  For example, if white people ceased to speak with authority on matters of racial oppression simply because they were white, this would only leave room for white people indifferent to such oppression to manage the conversation of race in favor of the status-quo and would reinforce the perception that whites are indifferent to race.

          Privilege-checking does not necessitate censorship because of one’s privileged identity, nor does it permit the indulgence in the mere recognition of such privilege.  Simply asking one to acknowledge their privilege but not do anything about it is merely an invitation to narcissism, and over-indulgence in there now-recognizable advantages.  If self-awareness, gratitude and superficial humility are the only purposes of admitting to one’s identity privileges, then the practice of privilege-checking does nothing but reinforce the inequalities it calls attention to.    The most privileged thing one could do is to recognize one’s privileges but do nothing, so one is compelled to speak and act against the hegemony of such privileged power.  This is not simply a sin of conservatives in response to being privilege-checked, but liberals as well, especially of the white upper-class variety.  Privilege-checking is often abused on the internet and has often devolved into a form of trollish meme activism, repeated by people who do not comprehend it but regurgitate it for attention in leftist forums.

          The capacity for significant societal progress is already severely restricted when filtered through the privileged perspective of internet communication and liberal academic vocabulary; your capacity to speak in the name of oppressed minorities is limited when it is bounded by the constraints of needing access to internet and familiarity with academic terminology and theory.  That is why the target audience of my writings is white upper-class liberals; it is not that I am simply uncomfortable with policing people of color in their activism when I am not in the same position as them, but I think my rhetoric will be unappealing and unnecessary for many of them.  People of color should already understand privilege and how to check against it, the problem to me is with white liberals who engage in this rhetoric but only superficially to exercise ideological power over one another on the internet.  White liberals run the risk of appropriating the language of privilege-checking to their advantage and entertainment; abusing it in order to make themselves appeal more authentically liberal to one another and thus completely detaching it from the concern to educate one another for the purpose of alleviating the oppression of minorities.

          There is a persistent tension in the left between allying with the privileged and the privileged co-opting critical language of resistance and pacifying it into a form of passive entertainment among themselves.  Those with privilege have power, and such power can be invaluable to societal progress when recognized and reoriented to encompass the concerns of the oppressed.  But privilege also affords one a measure of ignorance and indifference which can make one’s alignment with such concerns ineffectual and inconsistent.  This tension turns divides the left against itself by atomizing individuals into infinitesimal particles of privileged identity checked against one another, paralyzing any form of progress and reconciliation; some advocate speaks out and is immediately silenced because they have some form of privilege.  Amidst such intellectual confusion and critical indulgence, the right manages to take further action against the left.

          I think that a correct understanding of privilege-checking can navigate between the extremes of the privileged co-opting critical conversation to their own purposes and the impossibility of attempting to exercise all such conversation of privileged perspectives.  Understanding privilege to be relative to multiple intersecting identities and relative to their situation makes us aware that our own activism can be oppressive in its own contexts.  Recognizing that not all oppression presupposes the corresponding privilege of some identity means that our activism need not fall into a simplistic binary between the oppressor and oppressed in every situation.  Realizing that checking our privilege does not require silencing one’s perspective allows one to advocate with the power one is privileged with, free from any paralytic guilt attached to it.  Critical reflection on privilege need not extend blindly for infinity but can be arrested when it is consistent with these principles. 

          A liberal can check their own privilege-checking practices by first questioning if they are acting consistent with their other liberal values, if they are attempting to make an ally or just antagonize, and if they are interested in making progress or just acquiring attention.  And if found to be acting out of privilege, such recognition does not require that they silence or abandon their identity as a liberal or that they see their liberal privilege as necessarily oppressive for privilege-checking does not entail that.  A liberal is merely asked to realize how they are advantaged by their identity, how they can learn from other less-privileged identities, and how they can use the empowerment of their privilege to help those lacking such power.  A liberal identity and education is indeed privileged and empowering, but it is also a right worthy of all individuals and hence should be advocated for in spite of whatever inconsistencies it has. 

          I admit that this writing is the privilege of someone informed by a liberal university education and the time to sit and think of oppression in the abstract without suffering a great deal of it.  But I am not content with that idle recognition and I hope that this exercise of writing has made myself, and can make other similar individuals, a better ally to oppressed minorities and motivates us to take action more meaningful that mere privilege-checking of one another.    I hope my essay has contributed towards navigating a path towards progress and I welcome my own writing to by checked for its inherent privileges; I only ask that such a critique be aware of its own privileges in turn and that it criticizes my writing for its conceptualization and not banally for my own identifications.    

Check Your Liberal Privilege

          This essay serves as a critique of the liberal use of “privilege checking” and “white privilege” by turning the logic of these concepts to reflect back upon those that utilize them ignorantly to perpetuate the very systems of power that they oppose.  Lest I be labeled a reactionary conservative critic or accused of hiding that identity under the guise of a leftist vocabulary, I confess that I am a devotee of the left politic, albeit not one of particularly fanatical devotion.  I have faith in the principles of patience, tolerance, and education which I believe are essential to the canon of liberalism.  Yet, a particularly obnoxious and hypocritical, if not heretical, sect of liberal pseudo-intellectuals insist on blaspheming against these sacred values even as they pontificate in their name.  These inquisitors of the left are incessant in their reminder to “check your privilege”, especially focused on the white, heterosexual, cis-gender, male (as they should be) but their aim is not the recognition of privilege but the demonization of those with it.  My critique of exposing the hypocritical tendencies of some on the left is not to undermine their rhetoric, for such a critique presupposes the relative validity of such terms, but originates from a desire to see such terms consistently applied, precisely because they are of such vital importance to our political body. 

          In principle, I am grateful to reminded of my privileges, and not in a way demeaning to those that lack them.  I am sincerely appreciative of those who remind me that there is more to comprehend beyond the intellectual horizon of my race, gender, and class.  It humbles me and keeps me focused on the ideals of patience, tolerance, and education to which I subscribe and I hope, makes me more a more respectful and charitable ally of those less privileged.  But in practice, I feel like this is rarely the way that privilege checking is utilized, and hence in contradiction to the liberal tradition that gave rise to it.  Too often I have noticed that when one is accused of white privilege (or any privilege for that matter) and reminded to check said privilege, it is not used as an opportunity for education, but for condemnation.  It is not an invitation to a meditation on one’s complicity in a system of oppression, but is an oppressive accusation meant to silence perceived opponents.  The accused are not educated to recognize the systems of racism, sexism, and classism in which they are complicit but are simply shamed into silence by being labeled racist, sexist or classist.  Such rhetoric is thoroughly impatient, intolerant, and ignorant and utterly opposed to liberal thought.  It only serves to perpetuate the oppression that conservatives may engender, and only reinforces their perception of liberals as oppressors themselves.   

          The understanding of privilege checking and white privilege was conceived within the confines of liberal academia and the rhetorical use of them is most explicit in student activism on university campuses. Privilege checking is not intended to cause shame, guilt, or dismissal of one’s individual struggles.  It is not about the individual at all, but about the system of implicit advantages they possess simply by occupying a particular identity in society.  It is ironic that professors and students who are disciplined in the critical recognition and subversion of privilege and power, perpetuate it so ignorantly.  Then again, that is exactly how power and privilege function according to their ideas.  According to Peggy McIntosh who first popularized the term “white privilege,” white people are indoctrinated to be unaware of the privileges they benefit from and the power they possess.  Liberal students are told to think critically but are in fact reinforced to regurgitate the ideology of their authoritative professors; thus they may verbally be educated in tolerance but are behaviorally being indoctrinated in intolerance.  Such a system protects the privileged against hostility while directing hostility itself upon those lacking its privilege.  I see the same oppressive pattern repeated in the protestations of liberals against conservatives.  Such rhetorical violence only reinforces conservative misunderstanding of authentic liberal principles and divides liberals against one another in a paralysis of contradictory accusations of privilege and abuses of power.

          Ideologically-driven leftist academia and media insulates liberals into the delusion that they are necessarily morally and intellectually superior to those of a conservative ideology.  Conservatives are rationalized as immoral and ignorant and often prejudicially accused of being racist, sexist and classist against people of color, women, and the poor, among other minorities.  While I find it impossible to deny that these tendencies exist within conservative politics, and may even dominate the agendas of conservative party leaders, I also find it necessary to admit of the possibility that there exists a state of mind between moral purity and depravity.  To deny such a possibility is to subscribe to that monstrously inauthentic moral binary of good and evil which deludes so much of conservative thought.  My family is thoroughly conservative, and though I am compelled to disagree with them on most societal issues, I cannot accuse them of villainy, be they family or not.  They are simply ignorant and misunderstand the opponent they perceive liberal thought to be.  And I find it hard to blame them and other conservatives when faced with the condescencion coming from the pseudo-intellectuals that dominate so much discourse from the left.  Just as it is essential for white allies of people of color to check their white privilege in discourse, so too is it necessary for liberal proponents of privilege checking to be cognizant of the privileges afforded to them by their political identity.     

          Because privilege presupposes ignorance of itself, liberals are unaware of the passive benefits they possess through liberal academia and media, privileges that parody the very things they call attention to in those that possess white privilege.  Individuals fortunate enough to of a liberal heritage will find it easy to find themselves in the company of those that share their ideological commitments and easy to avoid those that contradict them.  They can voice their opinions without fear of ridicule or fear of being labeled a bigot in one form or another for simply holding such a political opinion.  They need not fear their political affiliation being discovered and compromising their job opportunities or academic positions.  They can more easily find academic resources to support their ideology and fund their campaigns or guest speakers. A liberal can display their political commitments without fear of vandalism and can criticize government actions without being automatically perceived as a dangerous radical.  Liberals are privileged with being able find their ideology widely confirmed in the literature they read, the lectures they attend and the television they watch, be it news or entertainment.  I want to be emphatic that the symmetry between liberal privilege and white (or male, or class, or heterosexual, etc) privilege makes an equivalence between them.  As much as conservative pundits may bemoan that they are the victims of racism, sexism or classism from the left, no such equivalence is warranted and to attempt to do so is insulting. 

          Not everyone is so privileged to arrive at a university with a thoroughly grounded commitment or comprehension of liberal values, having inherited the conservative culture of their parents.  Lacking a proper education in the ideology of the left and faced with sooner being called bigots than being called to join the struggle against it, it is inevitable that conservatives would feel marginalized, if not oppressed, however banal that oppression may be.   Such unfortunates will quickly find the university to be an environment unforgiving of their lack of understanding.  I arrived at my university with a naïve commitment to the left, lacking in a comprehension of its more esoteric doctrines.  I was not well-versed in the vocabulary of social justice politics and found such alternative vocabulary vexing in the absent of patient educators.  Thus my education has been an unnecessarily slow and conflicted, albeit rewarding, process.  If the left is to endure and prosper it must be communicable, and such communication depends upon its pedagogy being patient and tolerant, especially to those encumbered by conservative values.  If privilege and ignorance are complicit, then the privilege of a liberal identity at the university entails a measure of ignorance about itself and it is this ignorance which undermines the liberal education as a means of combating oppression.  Not all discourse is admirable, for it can serve to normalize oppression as much as it can oppose it; there is no legitimacy to engaging in conversation with someone who refuses to listen, but there is equally no benefit in refusing to engage simply because we are unwilling to listen to thought different than us.  For so much of current leftist rhetoric to focus on the invisible abuses of privilege, it is all the more necessary that we on the left be responsible and ensure that we ourselves are not perpetuating alternative insidious forms of ignorance and abuses of power, however slight. 

          When the terms of privilege checking and white privilege serve to disable discourse rather than enable it, when we utilize such language to establish or own power rather than destabilize that which already exists, we do not honor the struggle of the truly oppressed towards their vision of equality.  Although this critique details the privilege liberals have over conservatives in academia and media, the purpose of such a critique is not to disqualify liberalism and take pity on conservatism but to expose the limitations of liberal rhetoric to maintain its coherency and potency.  It is a fallacy of conservatism reflection that the occasional hypocrisy of leftists is taken to invalidate their liberalism; hypocrisy is only important when the ideal being contradicted is worthy of being upheld.   Just as checking one’s white privilege does not necessitate feeling guilty or shameful about being white, but merely the acknowledgement that one is in a position of privilege and accountable for it, so too does is the acknowledgement of liberal privilege free of the taint of narcissistic and debilitating remorse.  It only requires that one be aware of it, to not abuse it, and to listen to those that lack it and are worthy of it.  The rhetoric of privilege checking and white privilege and other social justice vocabulary is worthy of being upheld indeed, but it must be recognized that the means by which this language is communicated must not contradict the ends it serves.  It is the perpetual tragedy and irony of people that they are capable of comprehending the powers of oppression and then revising new forms oppression on others even as they speak against it.  If academia and media are to remain bastions of liberal communication and education, then they must do so without being colonized by this hideous contradiction.