I used to say that there is no privilege like Liberal Privilege, but I think that is no longer true. Even they are getting eaten now for saying the wrong things. Privilege Recently I heard of two additional types of privilege, which I believed on sight to be true: Attractive people are believed to be more intelligent, trustworthy...just everything nice. 45 countries for that one. Nick Wright (one more sports journalist from Syracuse) also mentioned that being funny also confers privilege - if you can make the joke land and gave examples of Dave Chappelle and Charles Barkley. It reminded me of Screwtape (Letter XI)
“Humour is for them the all consoling and (mark this) the all-excusing grace of life. Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. If a man simply lets others pay for him, he is ‘mean;’ if he boasts of it in a jocular manner and twits his fellows with having been scored off, he is no longer ‘mean’ but a comical fellow. Mere cowardice is shameful; cowardice boasted of with humourous exaggerations and grotesque gestures can be passed off as funny. Cruelty is shameful—unless the cruel man can represent it as a practical joke… And this temptation can be almost entirely hidden from your patient by that English seriousness about Humour. Any suggestion that there might be too much of it can be represented to him as ‘Puritanical’ or as betraying a ‘lack of humour’!
Privilege, BTW, was originally about many types of privilege and their interplay.
3 comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxuUkYiaUc8 SNL: Sexual Harassment and You
I'm surprised they said it. I have seem one incontrovertible example of this at work and a few that looked that way.
The problem with Privilege, like all stereotypes, is not that it was made up out of whole cloth but that it is deployed indiscriminately and substituted for closer analysis.
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