(The author has donned a flameproof asbestos bodysuit.)
I think many objections to the word ‘privilege‘ aren’t about the idea itself – that some types of people, all else being equal, are treated better by society – but about it being applied selectively.
For instance, it’s been very well documented that tall people earn more money and have other social advantages. The same is true for the physically attractive, older siblings, the left handed (and the right handed), Ivy League graduates, married people, and even women with blonde hair; one could go on and on. In fact, there are so many possible types of privilege that everyone is privileged, in some sense of the word.
Thus, I think we can say:
1. Certain types of privilege, like race and gender, are talked about endlessly precisely because they are hot-button flashpoints. This leads to other types of privilege being unfairly ignored, and it also discredits the word by causing it to invariably provoke flamewars.
2. Everyone has some type of privilege, but that doesn’t mean their lives are great, or even that they don’t totally suck. For example, tall privilege is very real, but being a tall subsistence farmer in Ethiopia still totally sucks.
The Rationalist Conspiracy 
Good point, although another problem with its application I have is that it’s in essence a probabilistic concept that is reified into a solid trait in many of its uses.
In other words, at the population level, one may be able to see disparities mostly explained by a given trait, e.g. being tall. But in conversation, it’s often assumed by social justice advocates that since this is the aggregate experience, every tall person must have experienced it and have taken advantage of it. A population frequency thus solidifies into a concrete characteristic of a single individual. Reification. This of course could be a decent inference, but in it’s use, it’s often seems to be asserted as a certainty, not a baseline probability estimate, and it is used as a trait of somebody as opposed to a probabilistic estimate of experience, which is probably why it comes of as offensive to some. This use makes it personal.
This irks me since a previous generation of social justice advocates were the ones that taught me the valuable lesson that it’s a fallacy to transplant myself into my vaguely constructed idea of another’s shoes and tell them what their experience is and should be. Since my life-experience differs from others, it’s very likely that I don’t know the issues they’ve dealt with, and the fact is I wouldn’t be me if I were raised and brought up in another environment, making that thought experiment all the more invalid. This kind of thinking is what leads to such poor advice as telling depressives to “just get over it,” or for policy-makers to believe in the self-made person immune to their environment and upbringing. Yet this is exactly what the newer generation of social justice advocates seem to do sometimes; by asserting that someone is “privileged”, they are asserting that they know another’s life experience better than the person who’s lived it. I find this both mildly insulting as well as an epistemic leap.
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the line in time between the “new” SJ advocates and the old ones? I ask because my experience with SJ has not generally been that “privilege” is used to assume personal experience from class membership (and that when it is, and this is pointed out in a palatable way, it is acknowledged as a mistake), and all of my experience is from within the last decade.
Instead, “privilege” has been used to as shorthand for (among other things) “You are behaving in a way that indicates that _you_ are making an epistemic leap that is likely to be incorrect because you are assuming things about the experience of someone in category A, while you yourself are in category B (B disjoint from A), and (this is the part that makes the concept asymmetric) category A is below category B on some complicated but not arbitrary, intransitive ranking.”
While I might otherwise be dubious of this ranking, Leah Libresco’s explanation of [privilege as a handicap in an ideological turing test](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2013/08/one-sided-turing-tests-and-privilege.html) lends the notion credence (for me) since it is an explanation from different first principles.
It’s a fuzzy boundary to be sure, but my experience is that SJ advocates in their 20s are the main ones who behave as I’ve described.
I have no problem with privilege defined in that way, however, SJ advocates tend to use the term unidirectionally. For any two opposite groups, one is privileged and the other isn’t. (And the privileged group needs to shut up and listen.)
But privilege isn’t a scalar quantity – there are multiple privileges. For example there are privileges associated with being male, and there are privileges associated with being female. They are not necessarily equal or even close in quantity, but to ignore this detail as many SJ advocates do is terrible epistemology. Privelege becomes an “I win” button for a debate as opposed to a way of crossing the inferential gaps that exist in both directions.
Your post reminds me of Robin Hanson’s on inequality.
I don’t understand the appeal of the privilege concept. Ceteris paribus, it’s worse to be a woman or a minority in many situations. Okay, great? (I also think it’s decidedly weird how much privilege talk centers around relatively minor inequality like who can afford an iPad in the United States, and not giant issues like the third world versus the first.)
A couple thoughts as to the appeal:
* Privilege is a fully general counterargument.
* Privilege is useful as a tool for grabbing social status in conversations.
* Privilege somehow explains why the world is not a meritocracy.
* Privilege is another opportunity for provoking yet more neurotic self-criticism sessions, filled with rumination, introspection, guilt, etc., of the form that many on the left love.
One of the paradoxical aspects of the concept is that while it’s ostensibly intended (in phrases like “check your privilege”) to invoke empathy in the admonished, it’s more generally an excuse to ignore and otherwise mischaracterize the privileged.
Much of privilege talk centers around things whose significance is under scrutiny: no one denies that it is significantly worse for you to be a Ethiopian subsistence farmer than a British business mogul; however, the significance of race or gender or sexuality is usually under discussion, and “check your privilege” is supposed to be a reminder that you are, by virtue of your class membership, barring truly exceptional circumstances, worse at judging this than members of another class (see my reply to Philo).
Privilege is fully general, and it is related to status, but this is only unacceptably bad in a much more limited set of circumstances than those in which it is criticized. The two that come to mind are: the privilege-caller is either incompetent or untrustworthy; or you are engaged in a truth-seeking conversation with such high stakes and urgency that getting at the truth faster justifies causing participants pain, and foundational assumptions need to be thrown out the window.
Also, in case you are not aware, the term “meritocracy” was coined for a satire (http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment), which is why I have stopped using it, both to defend the notion and to criticize it; it just muddies the issue.
Sounds like you’re talking about Intersectionality or Kyriarchy: the different ways biases and privileges help and hurt people, in different ways. For example, a white woman is privileged as a white person, but oppressed (for lack of a better word) as a woman. Or how a poor black man is oppressed in a similar but different way than a poor white man.
I see a lot of discussions about “privilege” on the internet completely miss the wealth of work that has been put into intersectionality, because it’s become a talking point and not a description of a phenomenon. It’s easy to shout at someone else “Check your privilege!” or “You didn’t account for group X when talking, so you’re X-ist!”, instead of taking into account the kinds of biases and situations that might have led them to say what they said.
(Though at this point, all I’m saying is, “Can’t we all argue in good faith?”, which seems to be answered with, “No.”)
I agree with Noah that the concept of Privilege can be used to silence people as well as for the purpose of conferring a mantle of moral superiority on the “less” privileged. In my experience there is an infallible test to separate people who are using the concept in good faith from what you might choose to call the “privilege trolls”. If you introduce the concept of “American privilege” – that is the advantages you get from being born in the US, even if you are a member of an oppressed class there – the two groups will magically separate themselves.