In modern humanities and social science, claims that someone is approaching an issue from a position of “privilege” are often wielded to discredit their argument. Privilege is conceptualised and perceived pejoratively, denying dignity, value and voice to many different people collectively and individually on the basis that their standpoint is too myopic and biased to be taken seriously.
Such dismissals often create a great deal of pain for those they shut down. And this rhetoric of what we might call “privilegism” itself reflects an ideology that has become academic orthodoxy and tends to regard its assumptions as beyond challenge, rather than requiring robust testing against empirical reality.
But those wielding this rhetoric overlook the diverse and dynamic human experience of discrimination, marginalisation and vulnerability, rousing hostility towards people who are actually disadvantaged in various ways – or, in the case of groups, have members who are disadvantaged in various ways.
Although some acknowledgement is made in academic popular culture – and particularly in academic literature – that various forms of disability are invisible, the general tendency is to focus on all the ways in which privilege and underprivilege are assumed to be knowable and largely agreed upon.
It is true that there are many visible groups whose historical and contemporary disadvantages are widely acknowledged and empirically verifiable. These include the physically disabled, women and individuals identifying as LGBT. They also include African Americans, Native Americans and other indigenous peoples and First Nations, as well as a wide range of other racial and ethnic minorities, including Hispanic and Asian Americans.
But the discrimination, erasure and pejorative stereotyping of Arabs of diverse faiths – Christian, Muslim and Jewish – in American, European and other contexts are often overlooked and misunderstood – as are these groups’ experiences of discrimination, persecution, flight and efforts to find refuge. This is in part because of the widespread practice of categorising them sociologically as “white” – in the US census, for example.
Other Middle Eastern groups whose experiences of discrimination, displacement and dispossession are rarely acknowledged as disadvantaged include Mizrachi Jews with Arab heritage, Egyptian and other Coptic Christians, Kurds and Yazidis.
Even within groups, advantage and disadvantage is not distributed uniformly. Individuals’ lived experiences and identities are often more complex and nuanced than is allowed for in assumptions based on collective experiences. Access to power, resources and recognition – both economic and symbolic – is complex, multidimensional and dynamic, and its effects on individual lives are not easily predictable.
As intersectionality theory emphasises, an individual’s disadvantage (or advantage) cannot be assessed on a single parameter alone, whether that be race, gender, sexuality, social background or anything else. There are myriad ways in which individuals are privileged and not privileged simultaneously. Some individuals, for example, may have extensive economic advantages but face profound racial and ethnic disadvantages. For others, the reverse may be true.
Some of the individual forms of disadvantage neglected by popular academic conceptions of privilege include health status and, in particular, mental health and well-being. Mental illness is enormously common (affecting at least one in four people at any one time) but also profoundly stigmatised, including within academia, while treatment and support services are often underfunded and hard to access.
Another example is the experience of harassment, abuse or domestic violence. These deeply intimate and frequently traumatising experiences are typically not shared with the wider community, not least because victim-survivors are frequently made to feel fearful, ashamed and, sometimes, disbelieved, especially if their experiences are considered to reflect poorly on particular communities. But while some forms of abuse follow predictable patterns of exclusion and asymmetries of power, others do not.
The demands of caregiving responsibilities, for parents, partners or children, are also a form of invisible disadvantage for all but the very wealthiest, placing immense demands on time, health, relationships and personal freedom and welfare. And some individuals experience bereavement in particularly traumatising circumstances, such as losing a child or (as a child) being orphaned. Such experiences potentially create many different disadvantages – social, economic, health, emotional and psychological. And while the trauma may arise suddenly and unexpectedly, it may endure for decades.
Collectively, there are also peoples such as Armenians, Jews, Bosnian Muslims and Rwandan Tutsis whose debilitating experiences of genocide are often not recognised as sources of enduring, multigenerational disadvantages except by researchers who focus on genocide studies or study the psychology of trauma and resilience.
Even economic circumstances – which we may be tempted to infer from information about where an individual was raised, educated or lives now – can obscure complex and shifting realities of advantage and disadvantage, and our inferences are often wrong. Many of us have our own experiences of being misjudged on such parameters.
So before we wield the powerful rhetorical concept of privilege, we need to enter into a more critical and analytical relationship with it and be humbler about our capacity to make accurate judgements about its application to particular groups or, especially, individuals.
But even when we are in a position to make accurate judgements, we must question the ethics of deploying a term that de-individualises, dehumanises and marginalises both individuals and communities of identity and belonging.
Everyone is entitled to the same human rights and human dignity, the same equality and universality, irrespective of the relative degree of privilege or disadvantage they experience at any point across their lifetime.
Noam Schimmel is an associate fellow at the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in the McGill Faculty of Law and also lecturer in international and area studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
