Is majority privilege unjust? (original) (raw)

White privilege': A mild critique1

Theory and Research in Education, 2008

White privilege analysis has been influential in philosophy of education. I offer some mild criticisms of this largely salutary direction – its inadequate exploration of its own normative foundations, and failure to distinguish between 'spared injust-ice', 'unjust enrichment' and ...

The Concept of Privilege: A Critical Appraisal

South African Journal of Philosophy, 2014

In this essay, I examine the use of the concept of privilege within the critical theoretical discourse on oppression and liberation (with a particular focus on white privilege and antiracism in the USA). In order to fulfill the rhetorical aims of liberation, concepts for privilege must meet what I term the ‘boundary condition’, which demarcates the boundary between a privileged elite and the rest of society, and the ‘ignorance condition’, which establishes that the elite status and the advantages it confers are not publicly recognised or affirmed. I argue that the dominant use of the concept of privilege cannot fulfill these conditions. As a result, while I do not advocate for the complete abandonment of the rhetoric of privilege, I conclude that it obscures as much as it illuminates, and that the critical theoretical discourse on liberation and oppression should be suspicious of its use.

*Forthcoming in Understanding and Dismantling Privilege. Reprinted with permission of the authors

2016

This paper provides an analysis of how privilege functions in the negotiation of the rights and accommodations for children with disabilities. As white educated mothers, we examined how parents with race and class privilege are positioned in the interaction with schools, and how the structure of that interaction reinforces and reproduces inequity. The first process we consider is how parents with privilege are encouraged and expected to pursue the individualized strategy (i.e. ‘save my son’) over collective strategies (i.e. how do we equitably address the needs of all children with disabilities). The second process we consider is how parents are pushed to accept the rehabilitative approach over an approach which questions the construction of ‘disability ’ and the range of possible institutional responses to it. Finally, from a Disability Studies theoretical framework, we question how our participation in these two processes helps reproduce the existing structures of inequality. Draw...

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack

Through the work to bring materials from Women's Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's. Denials which amount to taboos sur round the subject of advantages which men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended.

White Privilege: A History of the Concept

This goal of this thesis is to examine the way the term and concept of White privilege has been created in contemporary American society. The main argument will be before and directly after discrimination based on race was made illegal in the United States by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, scholars used the term White privilege to describe structural and governmentally perpetuated privilege consciously given to Whites. Such privileges were associated with home ownership, employment, and citizenship. Years after the legislation passed, however, discrimination and bigotry were still issues throughout the country. The definition of White privilege shifted alongside changing pathways of discrimination. From the latter part of the 20th century onward, White privilege would be understood not as perpetuated by conscious and explicit efforts, but by the subconscious. This thesis will show how that shift occurred by investigating scholars and non-academic writers implementation the term White privilege.

The Responsibility of Privilege: A Critical Race Counterstory Conversation

Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, 2018

This work takes the approach of a critical race counterstory conversation and is most ardently concerned with the issue of centralized privilege in our academic spaces. In this essay the author asks the audience to consider aspects of privilege we have access to, what measures we can take within the institution to make space and not just take space, and how we can apply this work, whether that be work in the classroom, office hours, department meetings, or in interpersonal conversations toward the agency of those at the margins. The author challenges the audience to move beyond the fallacious notion that comfort in situations of social injustice should be guaranteed and urges her readership to lift their voices in this socio-political moment toward a movement that makes our efforts known as accomplices in the struggle.

Survey Article: On the Nature of the Political Concept of 'Privilege'

The political notion of privilege is a concept that is much discussed, generates a great deal of controversy, but is rarely analyzed. We aim to provide an analysis of privilege, including a novel taxonomy of types of privilege. Moreover, we think that getting clear on the nature of privilege can help make sense of some of the controversies and attending discussions of the concept. We also characterize and explain the resistance people described as having privilege often feel in these discussions. The upshot of our analysis is that we offer more effective strategies in how to think about efficacious political and discursive responses to privilege. Section 1 of the paper will offer a novel taxonomy of kinds of privileges. Section 2 offers formal schemas of the taxonomy from section 1. We distinguish between advantage, entitlement and benefit privilege in addition to distinguishing positive and negative privilege. In Section 3 we consider politically and dialectically efficacious responses to claims of privilege. In section 4, we raise one further distinction between overall and specific privilege and use the resources we've offered to analyze some real world cases of complaints about claims of privilege. Section 5 contains our concluding thoughts 1. Some Preliminaries A few preliminaries about the nature of privilege are in order. First, privilege in the political sense is properly attributed to groups primarily and to individuals derivatively. For example, white privilege is typically thought of as something that white people have as a group, and it confers privileges that members of the group have in virtue of being members of that group. White people have the privilege of not being harassed (as often) by the police in a range of cases that African Americans do suffer police harassment. But it may well be true that an individual white person gets harassed by police all the time because she is romantically involved with a police officer's ex. In one sense she lacks the privilege, but she lacks it for reasons external to how she is racialized. Second, and related to the first, individuals may and typically do belong to both privileged and underprivileged groups. Sometimes membership in a group will

Challenging the Conceptualizations of White Privilege In Education

Social justice, diversity, inclusive education, and equity are areas that have previously and continue to draw attention in education. However, critical theorists (Dei, 2000; Kincheloe, 2008; McLaren, 2000) argue that even with focus, mission statements, goals, initiatives and programs in such areas, little or no real improvement has been made in the area of inclusive education or closing the gap among diversified students in terms of academic achievement or social equality in the Western world. This has spurred the onset of critical studies, in particular the study of whiteness (Levine-Rasky, 2000a). This case study seeks to explore and challenge six educators’ conceptualizations of white privilege and dominance in an Ontario school site by using Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack: The Daily Effects of White Privilege”. This study examines how such conceptualizations guide and translate into pedagogical practices that may be hindering equitable education for all students. The purpose of this case study is to explore the process of challenging conceptualizations of white privilege and dominance in order to help teachers move toward more critical self-transformative learning possibilities that may help create a more inclusive learning environment in their respective classrooms. A review of the literature indicates that persistent issues associated with diversity and inclusive education are deeply rooted in an historical, multifaceted, interrelated dependence on social dominance and oppressions. Critical theorists (Kincheloe, 2008; Levine-Rasky, 2000a, 2000b; Sleeter, 2005) and anti theorists (Apple, 2004; Dei, 2000; Delpit, 2006) have suggested that critical scrutiny by educators is required to deconstruct the status quo in order for transformative and critical change to take place in both system and agency. The findings generated from this inquiry offer new insights into how conceptualizations of white privilege and dominance may be hindering inclusive learning environments and the equal education opportunity of all students. A further analysis and interpretation of the findings, indicates further direction of professional development of in-service teachers that focuses on developing critical educators that implement critical pedagogies and challenge systemic dominance needed for transformative actions to create more equal opportunities for all students.