Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world

Re:Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of th... by aaren on Monday January 20, 2014 @10:30AM (#7089943)

Indeed, you may not be as privileged as someone born in an affluent suburb of London. Hopefully someone that did have that background would take that into account when making assumptions about your past and motives. Different people can have different privileges - you can't necessarily win at privilege.

If you at least skim read the checklists you will see that most of the examples don't take the form of anything like handouts or support groups.

By telling me "Do not talk to me about privilege, I know what poverty is." you are using the concept of privilege in your argument and are essentially telling me to check my privilege. I'm ok with that.

Privilege isn't about discrediting anyone. It is about helping us understand the experiences of other people.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of th... by rfnslyr on Monday January 20, 2014 @10:35AM (#7089973)

Way to spin this in a nice tone, you must be great in sales. No I am not telling you to "check your privilege".

I am asking you to not discredit ME based on your definition of privilege, which is really just a generalization under a different name. You generalized and put me in the "white male" category, then applied blanket assumptions to that group as a whole.

There is no such thing as "privilege". There is bias, and it differs from person to person. One manager may care if they are hiring a short lesbian black woman, another may not, that is up to the dynamic of the two individuals and cannot be attributed to some sort of greater force, privilege.

At the end of the day, in this field, it is your work that matters. If you come to me with a shit portfolio and a 2.0 GPA, and you happen to be a short black lesbian female, that has less to do with your privilege and more to do with the fact that your works sucks.

I hire people. I hire people old, young, black, white, transexual, poor, wealthy, gay, straight, anyone. It's the work that matters.

Anybody who patches up their own deficiencies with "privilege plaster" should steer themselves in a different direction.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Oxfam: 85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of th... by hythloday on Monday January 20, 2014 @11:20AM (#7090241)

FWIW, your argument that you do not have the privileges that your interlocutor assigned you is an argument from lived experience:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Lived_experience

When you say that bias differs from person to person, I don't think anyone would disagree. Do you believe that it differs such that the net effect is exactly neutral across the population?

At the end of the day, in this field, it is your work that matters.

I admire your willingness to put forward a testable hypothesis. Unfortunately, it has been tested, and (at least for scientists) is wrong: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3478626/

Which leaves you claiming that you are peculiarly immune from robustly observed cognitive biases. This may well be true for you particularly, but even if that is the case it is still not a widely followed effect (even among people who believe themselves to be gender-blind).

[ Parent | on HN ]