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0 pointsatmavatar1y ago0 comments

> Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications.

This has always struck me as a fatal messaging problem. When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.

The real problem isn't that [men / white people] may indirectly get propped-up when others are artificially held down -- it's that people are being held down. The current (and disastrous) progressive messaging often sounds like "we want to hold you down, too".

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ceejayoz1y ago

> When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group...

That's one possible interpretation, yes. Not everything works that way, though. Gay people getting married didn't take anything away from me. As the meme goes, "it's not pie".

ryandrake1y ago

One of the arguments against gay marriage, back in the day, was that gay marriage would somehow take away from straight marriage. It was a pretty vague argument and I never really heard a coherent articulation of it, but a lot of people repeated it.

chongli1y ago

Gay marriage succeeded as a movement long before the issue of wokeness came to the fore (with the BLM movement). If you actually read the positions of the thought leaders of the latter movement (people like Ta-Nehisi Coates) the argument is exactly what liberal, white, and right-wing people are afraid of:

The Case for Reparations [1]

People are right to react with vigour to these sorts of large-scale redistribution plans. This is a design of the far-left in academia that has its roots in the communist movements of the early 20th century in Europe and Russia, whose worst excesses led to the deportation and execution of millions of Kulaks in the Soviet Union [2].

You might call this a slippery slope argument but the historical precedent was exactly that: a slippery slope where society slid all the way to the bottom. Once enough people have convinced themselves that it is good and right to use the political process to take property away from a group they consider to be their enemies, there is no limit to the amount of destruction they can achieve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Reparations

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

davedx1y ago

> Gay marriage succeeded as a movement

It's still illegal in half the world https://www.hrc.org/resources/marriage-equality-around-the-w...

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zahlman1y ago

>When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things.

It's also radically different from what "privileged" originally means.

In an apolitical context, to have a privilege is to be consciously treated specially, in highly specific and well understood ways; this is because you have done something specific to earn it; and it's mutually understood that this is not an entitlement and it can be revoked at any time if you violate what's expected of you.

Whereas, in the modern sense, to "be privileged" is to be unconsciously treated specially, in vague and nebulous ways, because of nothing you did but rather because of facts of who you are and what you look like; this is just because life isn't fair; and the only way to fix the problem (if you see it as one) is (supposedly) to enact sweeping social change that will indirectly take it away from you.

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