Zero- and Non-Zero-Sum Advantage

I've been thinking a lot recently about "privilege," what I agree is more sociologically termed advantage.* Specifically, I've been wrestling with the practice of publicly forcing people to acknowledge their advantage. I think this crescendoed last summer during the BLM protests. On whole, I think that these kinds of correctives are good. Part of advantage, after all, is not having to recognize that advantage so making advantaged folks see and address their advantage opens the opportunity for social change.

Along the way, however, I think there has been a shift from making people aware of their advantage to shaming and stigmatizing that advantage. As an example, imagine a white woman posting a picture of the new home she just purchased to Facebook and her friends commenting on the post that she is blindly demonstrating her privilege. It is a fine line between rightly problematizing her ignorance of her privilege and problematizing the purchase of a new home per se. I propose that it is better to think of two kinds of advantage/privilege, zero-sum and non-zero-sum.

By zero-sum advantage, I mean those kinds of situations in which one benefits at the expense of another. Generational wealth is a good example of this since, under capitalism, one's economic fortunes are tied to the current and/or historic exploitation of others. Because of this, corrective actions are necessary beyond just consciousness-raising (e.g. reparations or redistributive taxation). My advantaged economic standing is systemically linked to the standing of others, which requires the reduction of my advantage.

By non-zero-sum advantage, I mean those kinds of situations in which one's benefit is not directly linked to another's disadvantage but is instead a comparative or relative advantage. Interactions with the police are a good example of this since the fact that whites are less likely to have negative interactions with the police does not explain the increased propensity for police to target (intentionally or otherwise) blacks. The disprivilege of BIPOC folks to be disproportionately mistreated by the police does not mean that whites should be exposed to more mistreatment; instead, the "advantage" of being treated fairly and humanely should be expanded to the disadvantaged.

In other words, non-zero-sum advantages should be extended to those who are disadvantaged, while zero-sum advantages should be removed from those who are advantaged. I think this distinction will be helpful in both the public discourse about advantage/privilege as well in its treatment.

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* - See here for a note about this.

Politics as Owning vs. Working

Today is Election Day here in the U.S. My wife shared an interesting perspective on the campaign with me last week that I thought I'd relate here. She likened Trump supporters to "owners" and Clinton supporters to "employees." She explained that by "owners" she meant that Trump supporters seem to feel a sense of entitlement, that the nation belongs to them. While it may have some connotations of exploitation that aren't intended in this instance, by "employees" she meant that Clinton supporters seem to feel an obligation to work for the collective good, that we're in this together. It reminded me of the famous line from Kennedy's inauguration speech when he said, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." Core Trumpists are white men without college degrees, those who once were quite privileged but have since seen women and people of color rise to greater levels of equality and who live in a world where a high school diploma is no longer sufficient for prosperity. Core Clintonistas, on the other hand, are by definition a diverse coalition. It's not difficult to see how the former are struggling to come to terms with the challenges to their status and how that challenge can feel like a threat at the hands of the former. Owners and Workers--I think it works pretty well.

Is It Ethical to Give Thanks for Privilege?

On this Thanksgiving holiday, I ask an important question: Is it ethical to give thanks for privilege? In essence, that is what many of us do on Turkey Day. In fact, it is often ritualized as we go around the table and delineate all of the things for which we are thankful. Like in the other parts of our lives, however, we are unlikely to contextualize these items, instead misunderstanding them as earned and/or "blessings" from divine providence. Both conceptions cloud the reality--and thus perpetuate the fact that--some of us are systematically advantaged over, and even at the expense of, others.

I'll hold myself up as an example. Here is a partial list of things that I might name at the dinner table today: I am thankful for my health, my family, and my career. Now, here is a partial list of my intersecting statuses to which many would be unlikely to attribute these "blessings": I am white, upper class, a man, heterosexual, married, Mainline Protestant, over-educated, and American. It's tough to imagine a person with a more privileging set of identities than me, and yet, people like me are typically more likely to tacitly ascribe their "blessings" to their own efforts and/or to God's preference for them. The implication is that those who have less for which to be thankful have not worked hard enough and/or have somehow been spurned by God. The notion that God blesses or prefers some over others is a theological problem into which I won't delve here, but the notion that privilege or relative advantage is wholly earned is contradicted by over a hundred years of scientific, sociological evidence. The danger is that by being ignorant to the structural nature of privilege, we collectively cement that privilege along with the deprivation for the unprivileged.

So, what to do? Many spend the holidays "giving back" by volunteering at soup kitchens and homeless shelters, and they should be applauded for these efforts; however, such volunteering serves to ameliorate the symptoms of disadvantage only temporarily. Deeper change is needed to address the causes of inequality. This Thanksgiving, I hope that as we all reflect on our "blessings," we will take some time to reflect also on the systematic ways in which many among us are are not "blessed" and that we might be moved to action by that reflection.

Comparative Advantage vs. Absolute Privilege

I have written a few times before on teaching about privilege (here, here, and here). I'm not so sure I was entirely correct in my initial assessment in which I argued that it might be more productive to teach privileged students that they are comparatively advantaged vis-a-vis their disadvantaged counterparts rather than teaching them that they are absolutely privileged. The distinction may seem pedantic, but there are important implications in the different approaches. (I've written here about counterproductive approaches when attempting to change privileged perspectives.) Essentially, disadvantaged students live with their lower status every day and don't need to be convinced about privilege. Part of privilege, though, is that those with it are privileged to not notice it. Herein lies the problem. More on this later.

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UPDATE (5/16/2012): Here is a new take on teaching white privilege using video games as a metaphor.

Why Your Congresswoman Has No Problem 'Keeping It in Her Pants'

The New York Times takes a stab at why it always seems to be congressmen and not congresswomen who get caught up in scandal. Here is what Ms. Stolberg surmises:

But there may be something else at work [besides biological determinism or gendered differences in free time]: Research points to a substantial gender gap in the way women and men approach running for office. Women have different reasons for running, are more reluctant to do so and, because there are so few of them in politics, are acutely aware of the scrutiny they draw — all of which seems to lead to differences in the way they handle their jobs once elected.

“The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “Women run because there is some public issue that they care about, some change they want to make, some issue that is a priority for them, and men tend to run for office because they see this as a career path.”

This is an intriguing conjecture, but I think it misses a bigger, more obvious explanation: men are socialized to take risks while women are socialized to be risk-averse. We encourage boys to play dangerous, injury-prone violent sports but feel more comfortable when girls stand on the sideline as cheerleaders. We let "boys be boys" but lecture girls on making "smart decisions" like not walking alone at night while handing them a fob of mace. When the boys and girls grow up having internalized these lessons, we shouldn't be surprised when their adult behavior mirrors these values: men are going to risk career, marriage, and family more often than women because this is what they have learned to do.

Moreover, climbing to the higher echelons of power, like becoming a congressperson, necessitates risk. Many give up lucrative careers, mortgage homes, and put strain on their families in order to win office. In other words, those who do stupid risky things do so because taking risks has served them well in the past. While tweeting a picture of one's junk might seem completely irrational to most of us, it makes perfect sense in the context of the gendered politics of the United States.

Teaching Privilege

Maybe we sociologists have been going about teaching privilege wrong. It's a concept that many find difficult to swallow, and understandably so. The way we do it now, we're basically telling our white students and our male students that their successes do not belong to them, and I think this might be counterproductive. Perhaps it would be better if we taught instead that they can own their success but that others should not be forced to own all of their shortcomings. Being black and being a woman--and God forbid, being a black woman!--puts people at a disadvantage socially. Privilege is about relative advantage. By telling white men that all of the good things in their lives are an undeserved fluke, we almost guarantee that they will be resistant to the concept. Instead, if we present it as the undeserved disadvantage experienced by others, the privileged will be more able to remain open to understanding the concept.

Race, Yes--But Not Only Race

Here is what Christopher Hitchens over at Slate on Monday about Glenn Beck and the Tea Party party:

One crucial element of the American subconscious is about to become salient and explicit and highly volatile. It is the realization that white America is within thinkable distance of a moment when it will no longer be the majority....In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one....It's not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

I think that Hitchens has it wrong. It's dismissive and reductionistic to write that this whole thing is about imaginary racist fears. I'm not saying that race isn't a part of this. It most certainly is, but the relationship is spurious. It's only about race inasmuch as race is a part of status. In other words, white Americans are (correctly) sensing that their long-privileged location at the top of the social totem pole is in danger. Unlike racial politics, or even necessarily class, status is by definition hierarchical, that is, it stratifies. It's zero-sum; equality is not an option. If we think more broadly about Tea Party sentiment in terms of changing status, the seeming-irrationality of the race-related fears disappears. The problem is not a bunch of racist idiots but instead a structural issue of status.

I see a clear parallel between the feelings of persecution among middle class whites whose status is threatened (or at least is no longer untouchable) and the embattled subcultural identity of Evangelicals in the U.S. (see Smith's American Evangelicalism), and I suspect that this explains the free flow of both ideas and people between these groups. More on this later.