The privileged outsider

What can and should someone who is perceived as a member of a majority group do in relation to those who are members of minority groups, particularly in regard to aiding their activism? (I say "perceived" because whether someone's part of a minority can often be a messy question.)

Could you give us a bit more context?

edited 14th Aug '11 8:54:42 PM by Grain

I'm trying to keep the question general, since there are so many issues to cover—male vs. female, gay vs. straight vs. bi vs. all sorts of queer, white vs. everything else . . . I'm perceived as a straight white male, so I have little to no experience with what people who're perceived as something else have to go through. (About the only claim I can make is that people often perceive me as having Asperger's Syndrome.)

(I wonder if all this talk about perception is considered offensive in and of itself. I've certainly never felt like any of the stuff I'm supposed to be.)

edited 14th Aug '11 9:01:43 PM by feotakahari

@OP: interesting question. As a straight white male (which statistically means I should be running the show, according to some people), I've never felt like I belonged where genetics and fate placed me. I've always been poor, my co-workers are always not like me, and I find myself in situations that sound a hell of a lot like what most minorities complain of.

I think "privilege" only knows one color; whatever shade they're printing money in this week. The rich have it, the poor want it, and all other points of difference are encouraged by the powers-that-be so the real majority (i.e. the poor) doesn't wake up and go "hey, wait a minute"...

As long as we're too busy scrabbling for scraps(and bitching that someone else got better scraps than we did), we're not taking a stab at the good meals on the table.

I'm part of the "Guy from the upper middle class who ended up being down on his luck due to a failure of the people he blindly relied upon" category. Which is, in same ways, the worst of both worlds.

Educate yourself and share your knowledge. Knowledge is power. Dispel ignorance. Read a lot. Don't be vindictive or guilty, just resolute.

edited 14th Aug '11 9:18:11 PM by Grain

I live in Georgia and am from Michigan-aka the north. The good ol boy network doesn't generally take kindly to outsiders claiming education as a virtue. I may be overstating the effects though.

The best thing is to educate other privileged people. The privileged have a responsibility to understand why they're privileged.

Straight white male who lives in poverty. I don't get a lot of sympathy from people (apparently I had the "opportunity") and some people have been legitimately surprised to hear my backgrounds. Then again, most of my friends were in band, which is regularly made-up of middle/upper class folks. (So are most school organizations with the exception of some sports.) Most people just assume that unless you're Mexican, you probably have a stable household, and even then you're probably well-off enough to not need a job.

Can't say education really helps. From my experiences, most of the "privileged" people are too stubborn to realize that they have more than the average person, or have been raised to think that everyone in America is born with a fair chance at living a happy life. I struggled to keep myself in marching band despite being one of the most dedicated players, all because I had a passion for music, yet everyday I was being called into the head director's office so he can chew me out for not making payments as if I'm just hiding money from him. The lesson I learned? You can't play music if you're poor.

What the "privileged" need to do is be sympathetic of the majority. They need to understand that they have things this majority will never have, and it's up to them to help them out and give away what they were given, or to give them the same rights they cherish. It depends on the issue, in order to be more specific, however.

I'm a nonwhite female and even I feel too much of a "privileged outsider" most of the time. To be frank I haven't had to deal with that much serious racism, sexism, classism or whatever, at least not to the point that it was recognizable. So most of the time I just say "screw it", all perspectives are valuable, if only people who meet certain standards are allowed to talk about certain things that doesn't sound very productive.

Edit for clarity: I suppose what I mean to say is one can keep moving the goalposts for what is considered "privileged"/"unprivileged". So I think it'd be best if no viewpoints are automatically discarded.

edited 14th Aug '11 9:37:22 PM by Merlo

How will the privileged become aware without education? It's a tough job, but who could do it better than enlightened privileged people?

edited 14th Aug '11 9:41:57 PM by Grain

Meh, straight white male.. I grew up middle class, but my parents weren't well off enough to pay for me to go to college, and we weren't poor enough to qualify for financial aid, so I joined the military to pay for school. I don't really have a whole lot of sympathy for people who have to wave their minority status around as the root of all of their hardships, especially not in my state in particular, California is relatively accepting of all comers.(compared to everywhere else)

We're all struggling in the game of life, the only difference is what part of the struggle you're currently in.

Straight white female from a well-off background. I would agree with you guys in saying that money is the main privilege - it's just that in a lot of places money is correlated with skin colour.

The only place where I'm not 'privileged' is gender, and even that I'm not so sure of. Masculinty and femininity just seem to be trade-offs of privileges and disadvantages.

Bisexual white female here. I'm fairly certain that privilege, as a couple other people have mentioned, really only has anything to do with money. It sort of irks me when people insist that I'm supposed to be privileged, considering that my family has always been poor, and when I was a kid we had to dig through dumpsters to put food on the table. If that's what being privileged is, I don't want it.

White male. I live in the Beverly hills of the midwest, but I have no pretensions about not being privileged, IE I know I've had a very lucky background.

But I know that I'm lucky. My mom got lucky in the 80s, working in a company which managed to pay well in a field which few people know about. She gets paid well because she actually does something that not many people are able to do. She got knowledgeable about what a shithole her company was. Think Dilbert levels of stupid from her bosses.

I'm not smarter than other people I know, I don't do as well socially as other people I know, I'm not as hard a worker as other people I know...

But I think I can do better, government wise, than the rich guys who are senators.

As a white heterosexual university educated male, I should have won the lottery of life but as I am working class so I can't do anything with my degree as I've got no connections. Therefore I would be the unprivileged outsider.

Well, it depends. Going out and marching in the parades and whatnot is rather pointless, since, as noted, we aren't one of them. You can support bills in favor of them, if you like, but it is their activism. A movement has to be made by the people it pertains to, rather than people to whom it is not relevant. Support =/= activism, I guess...

I disagree. It would be amazing to see privileged people marching alongside the underprivileged. The privileged people are more obligated to be activists than the underprivileged.

Well, I don't hold it against people who do, but it just seems out of place, to me. If, supposedly, only the privileged are in power, it should be their duty to change the rules to allow the underprivileged in, too. Activism is an appeal to people in power. If the people in power decide they support the cause, why would they be an activist? Just change the rules.

Naturally, it's not that simple, but the logic just seems strange to me.

~shurg~

These aren't usually laws, they're social pressures. Too many people don't even know the rules exist, let alone care about changing them.

"Privilege" in this context doesn't mean that your life doesn't suck, or that your suffering is somehow less important than other people's.

It just means your life doesn't suck in particular ways because of circumstances mostly outside your control.

Then everyone is privileged, just in different ways. In which case, why does everyone keep making such a big deal about it?

With regards to cohesion of the privileged and underprivileged: Beyond the simple fact that it IS symbolically beneficial for the privileged to march in solidarity with the underprivileged to demonstrate an awareness of underlying disparities, it does wonders to damage the cause of separatists of any ilk. Depending upon your preferences, that may or may not be a good thing.

http://www.dickshovel.com/priv.html

http://www.dickshovel.com/priv2.html

What does white privilege mean?

I feel your pain, if you lack connections you are out of luck.

edited 16th Aug '11 11:06:40 AM by IanExMachina