Whence Invisible Backpack of *fill-in-the-blank* Privilege?

[capri0mni]

Now that I

a) am learning how to make simple, slide-show-based videos with "Windows Movie Maker" and

b) have a means to record my own voice-overs,

I'm thinking of making a series of slide-show based videos out of this post My own version of the Bipedal Privilege Backpack (each video focusing on two or three privileges at a time, and illustrated with stick-figure cartoons).

And I'd like to open with a discussion of what "Privilege" is, and what it means to have "an invisible backpack" full of it.

So I'm asking my circle:

What counts as "privilege"? Is privilege always founded in culturally determined biases? Is that the difference between "privilege" and "natural ability"?

and also: Whence the metaphor of the "invisible backpack"? Who thought that up, and what was the inspiration?

Comments

[spiralsheep]

"privilege" is a form of social power and/or cultural capital. Sometimes it's derived from being part of a social majority or sometimes, in hierarchical social systems, from x having more culturally-enforced social power-over than y because of a physically unrelated but culturally sanctioned z.

I'm sure there are better/simpler definitions if you google, but mine would obviously be based in ethical philosophy and I presume you want to reach your own working definition anyway.

(Note: I'm reasonably attached to concepts of "power-over" and "power-with", i.e. I have power-with you and you have power-with me because we have mutually chosen a relationship but someone would have power-over us if they could impose their choice of relationship terms on us without our consent.)

[capri0mni]

"privilege" is a form of social power and/or cultural capital. Sometime it's derived ... from x having more culturally-enforced social power-over than y ...

*nods*

I'm currently puzzling through a way to explain the concept in a "beginner's language" way, especially for this case of bipedal privilege. To whit (something like):

"Being able to climb a flight of stairs with ease is not a privilege, in and of itself. But it can morph into a privilege when that flight of stairs is the only means provided to enter a desirable space."

[spiralsheep]

Yeah, the practical example that immediately occurred to me, because of our recent conversation about ramps, was the fact that in my society many mobility-impaired people have traditionally been denied education not because they're "unfit" for education but because we/society chose to favour stairs as an architectural feature (note: framed with a social model of disability, usual disclaimers for people who conceptualise via a more medical model).

David Blunkett held one of the four most powerful and challenging political jobs (Great Offices of State) in my country when he was Home Secretary. He is also blind. His blindness wasn't an obstacle to him doing his job. BUT many blind people in the same society are denied employment they could do simply because our society has chosen to favour visual methods of "official" communication.

[capri0mni]

Or, as my aide reports the goings-on in America's "special ed" classrooms (or at least Virginia's), teachers and other school officials deciding/declaring that a child can't understand or read the alphabet until it can be proven that the child can write the alphabet -- using either the standard writing implements, or a single type of "adaptive" implements.

As she said to me, last year, when J was first entering nursery school: "It's like saying 'We won't teach you the alphabet until you can prove to us you can knit with your toes."

Basically, the whole school system here is aimed at reshaping kids in order to make them fit specific modes of predetermined test-taking methods.

[spiralsheep]

Yes, I remember you talking about that. :-/

[spiralsheep]

AFAIK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh originated the concept of the "invisible knapsack" but I don't remember what, if anything, she credits as inspiration (although there is an explanation in her writings on the subject).

[capri0mni]

Thanks for the name and starting point.

I don't know about her inspiration, but for me, it conjures up images of those boorish types of people who plow through crowded streets, oblivious to the fact that they're knocking into those around them with their overloaded backpacks (I'm sure you've encountered folks like that).

[spiralsheep]

I know what you mean, yes.

Also, if we all have invisible knapsacks (from our of our fairy godmothers?) then some of us are gifted with silver spoons to spend* and some of us are loaded with dead weights (or are even additionally expected to carry privileged people's silver spoons around for them while we trail in their wake cos they're social protagonists and we're servants/scenery).

* Note my cunning and TTLY SUBTLE reference to SPOONS!!1!! ;-)

[capri0mni]

Yes. I did note that. That was ttly cunning!

I also like your elaboration on whether our backpacks carry goodies or burdens. As for who filled them up, my guess it's our ancestors-or-the-spirits-of-same, since our privileges and attitudes toward them are most often inherited without-thought.

[spiralsheep]

I worry about what people might choose to hear if I stray anywhere near concepts that can be reinterpreted as sins-of-the-fathers or Those-Xs-have brought-Y-on-themselves-because-They're-all-Z.

Babylon 5 brought me a fresh appreciation of mathematical probability and its retelling as the capriciousness of supernatural beings:

"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."
- Marcus Cole to Franklin, A Late Delivery from Avalon

[capri0mni]

Heh. Truth. Over on the LJ side, pedanther sent me a link to a New Year's Country/Celtic/Folk-Rock song called "Let the Good Guys Win;" the opening line is:

May I get what I want, not what I deserve

And yet, my mind went to ancestor spirits as the source of privilege, because, so often the only reason privileges persist is "Because that's the way we've always done it."

In the specific renovation program I was complaining about on Thursday, for example, they were trying to design the house to look like something that had been built a couple hundred years ago, and of course a ramp wouldn't have been part of the design, back then... so of course the ramp is ugly and modern...

[trouble]

As I recall, the image she was going for was that some people come with fully-packed backpacks that make the trip much easier than those who come with partially-full or empty ones. The backpack carries the metaphorical equivalent of extra socks for when you get a dunking in the river or calamine lotion to soothe bug bites.

[capri0mni]

aha. That makes sense. The little gratuities that society gives you.