As college freshmen arrive on campus, they will be taught about privilege. Depending on how elite the institution, this teaching may be more or less heavy handed. At the extreme–the most elite institutions, attended by the most socio-economically well-endowed students–the message may be loud: “You are the privileged. Recognize your privilege! Abnegate and forswear it.”
I have some ideological qualms about this well-established institutional infrastructure, and its pedagogical action. I stipulate that this university effort is well-intentioned. The goal is to minimize the likelihood that any graduate of that college will act as, or end up as, an “entitled little s**t,” in evocative phrase. I applaud that goal. But I fear the means chosen to advance it.
The fraught ideology lurking behind these well-intentioned efforts can be limned by comparing the semantic resonance of “privilege” to that of “advantage.” Of course, I cleave follicles: at thesaurus.com, advantage is listed as a synonym of privilege (although curiously, privilege is not listed as a synonym of advantage.) Although there must be considerable overlap of meaning between the two, their connotations are far from identical.
If you were to explore the semantic reverberations that surround each word, here is what you might find. Privilege carries moral freight: the word fits easily into such phrases as unearned privilege, undeserved privilege, excessively privileged. Advantage attracts more neutral ascriptions that revolve around size or comparison: big advantage, small advantage, differential advantage, no advantage. Privilege is unjust, a taking; advantage is factual, an edge. Privilege is privilege over others. Advantage is a displacement relative to others. Privilege is totalizing—you are, or are not, privileged. Advantage is more granular: advantages and disadvantages may simultaneously be held, or someone might hold an advantage in one personal situation but not another. He’s a hunk (=advantage in dating) but not too bright (=disadvantage in school). Advantage is neutral, and advantages or their lack can be netted out. Privilege is binary, and a loaded term.
Next, consider the prototypical target of the re-education effort: white, probably; male, generally; affluent, maybe very affluent; hence fortunate, in the neighborhood where they grew up; and, within the narrow sphere of adolescent life, centered as it is on school, successful, perhaps extremely successful (how else would they have survived the gauntlet of elite college admission?)
The college student just described is undoubtedly advantaged; and, like most human beings, is probably not aware of how little of his success rests on his own actions, as opposed to being the expected outcome for members of his class, his fellows having the same sort of social background, who enjoyed the same advantages of birth. A little more humility is likely a good thing.
But privilege is a sledge hammer where a steady breeze would do the job. Getting a college student to believe that he is privileged, and not just advantaged, is the first step in convincing him that he underwrites an unjust political arrangement that must be changed, and that can only be changed by the self-abnegation of he and his fellows.
I do not support the Revolution; politically, I oppose the overthrow of the American polity.
The world is not perfect, however improved since the 1820s, and injustices abound. But inequality will always be with us, as seen most clearly in the unequal distribution of academic aptitude, which got these individuals into an elite college in the first place.
Advantage and disadvantage, on any human metric you care to name, are real and will endure—outside the socialist paradise. No pedagogical purpose, but only a political agenda, is served by teaching young people to systematically mistake advantage for privilege.
The goal, I say, must be to blunt the effects of inequality—not to pursue a foolish dream of eliminating disadvantage altogether.
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