A friend asked this morning whether I was against exercises in confronting one's privilege (or lack thereof) or merely the particular version implemented at Indiana State?
Actually, I think it's really useful to understand how you're shaped by class, money, and the social capital of your parents. I've thought long and hard about whether I'd send kids to the kind of exclusive private school I attended. On the one hand, the education I got seemed to be noticeably better than that received even by Penn classmates who had gone to marquee public schools in affluent suburbs. On the other hand, going to private school doesn't just give you funny ideas about money and class; it gives you funny ideas about money and class that you don't even know you have.
One of the falsest moments in movies and television shows is when the "rich kids" make fun of the poor kids for being poor. I went to school with pretty much the most privileged kids in the nation, and I never once heard anyone make fun of someone's lack of money, or even the quality of their material goods. The snobbery was directed entirely at class markers with no obvious monetary content--in 1980s Manhattan, the heavy, obvious makeup, and permed, sprayed hair popular among the Catholic school girls I played basketball against.
Many of my readers will disagree, but I think it's rather useful for children like the youthful me to be confronted with the ludicrous ease of their lives. But I don't think that that particular list was a very good way to do it.
Mind you, it is possible that I'm simply suffering from geographic bias--the first thing I thought when I saw it was "but poor people don't know how much their heating bills are--that's paid by the housing authority!" But weird New Yorkities aside, that list still seemed to me to reek of unconscious class bias, the kind that academics are supposed to be challenging. If you had no television, one television, or a black and white television as a child (and are under the age of thirty-five), then it is extremely likely that your parents were educated people with a great deal of social capital that they passed on to you. Having to give up a second television may make academics feel poor, but cutting out cable in order to fund piano lessons is not what happens in households that are actually underprivileged.
Academics are terrible, terrible snobs about certain forms of consumption, and painfully few of them are aware that these tastes are class markers, not ordinal virtue rankings written into the fabric of the universe at the beginning of time. Maybe I'm reading too much in, but a lot of the items on that list smacked not of privilege, but at an underpaid academic's resentment of the material largesse showered on the rich little snots who snore through their classes.
To me, privilege is not about how enjoyable your parents were able to make your childhood leisure time. It's not even about material goods: the immigrant construction workers I worked with at the WTC disaster recovery site enjoyed a considerably higher material standard of living than the scions of the upper-middle-class who populate the Northwest DC journowonk community.
Privilege describes how much scope your parents bequeathed you to shape your destiny. This operates in multiple and often subtle ways. It can be reading in the home, or a peer group carefully selected (usually through real estate purchase) to ensure that you "choose" to go to a competitive college instead of dropping out of high school and selling drugs. Or it might be the way having affluent, stable families enables people like me to opt for high-status, low-paying, personally enriching careers, because we know that if something really awful happens, our families can help out.
By my definition--and I think that by any reasonable definition--I was about as privileged as any kid in America whose last name is not "Hilton". The only hurdles I faced in getting into college, grad school, and a job I love were entirely self-constructed--like that low high school GPA1.
But by the standards of that list, I was really rather deprived. My house had two bedrooms for four people, and one television that I was barely allowed to watch. We took no vacations, other than driving to visit aunts, uncles and grandparents. I got out of grad school with about $100,000 worth of student loans.
Which is not to suggest, as a few bizarre commenters/emailers suggested, that I was under the impression that I was deprived, or that my childhood in any way resembled growing up in the rough-hewn arms of the proletariat. Rather, the opposite: that many of the status markers chosen do not, in fact, meaningfully contribute in any way to privilege.
Obviously, any list will be imperfect, if only because wealthy Manhattanites will always be the outliers. But that list seemed particularly inapt.
1 And it really was appallingly low; I shouldn't have been admitted to Penn, or any of the other schools that let me in. I retain the suspicion that somewhere out there is a girl named "Megan McAndle" who was shocked and disappointed with her results in the 1990 college admissions lottery.
Maybe actual rich people don't do it, but at least where I grew up smack dab in middle class suburbia, the better-off kids made fun of the poorer kids all the time. I do say kids though, because that sort of thing was much more prevalent in say elementary and middle school than high school.
I think the real issue is not privilege per se, but the sense of entitlement so many kids these days (kids these days!) bring to college. The Entitled think they don't have to work hard, that they don't really have to know anything, that their ideas deserve respect by virtue of coming out of their mouths, that professors are not learned experts but handmaidens, and of course, that each deserves an A at the end of the term regardless of quality of work. But that said, my experience is that privilege doesn't correlate terribly well with this sense of entitlement. Many kids who grow up in rich environments (financially and academically) are nevertheless plenty excited about learning and willing to work hard. More surprising, in my experience a lot of the kids who come out of less privileged backgrounds--some of whom are the first in their family to attend college, for example--nonetheless carry entitled attitudes one would normally expect of the privileged. This can manifest itself in startling ways, as in the students who think they should get a week off for deer hunting with no penalty, well, because it's deer hunting season. The Indiana State Prof. needs to realize that his issue with the back-row snoozers is not their privileged status but their sense of entitlement, whatever its origin.
speaking as a sociologist who has done research on taste as a class marker, what bothered me was not the exclusion of bobo cultural capital, which if anything i thought was over-represented on the list, but the complete absence of family makeup and neighborhood composition, both of which the research show to be much more important than piano lessons.
Irrespective of the actual list, what I think appalls everyone is the ludicrous certitude and presumptuousness of the earnest left-wing academics who arrogantly claim to be able to assess so much about the lives of people whom they barely know or most likely do not know at all as individuals. It's not much different in kind, only in degree, from the humiliation and re-education campaigns of Maoist China, always for the purpose of belittling the students or their parents for being insufficiently "prole" and "educating" them as to the "injustice" of their "bourgeois lifestyle". And, on the specific instance of Indiana State, I mean, come on, how many kids attending that particular low-budget state school come from an environment of "privilege" unusual in the state of Indiana or the USA? That is also ludicrous.
There we have it. Liberals=fascists and academics=maoists. What about liberal academics? Are they fascimaoists?
Uh, Megan, have you heard of correlation?
I believe that many of those things were not themselves supposed to be privilege, but correlated with it. Yes, your particular situation may not fit, but that is called anecdotal evidence and not really a good measure of a test's validity.
Oh, and academics generally have pretty nice, yuppie living conditions. I don't think many of them gripe about being underpaid. If they cared that much about money, they'd do something else.
Considering that (low GPA) + (private prep school) = (good enough for Ivy League), I would conclude that having the good fortune to attend a really good private school is a HUGE privilege that warrants further examination.
I grew up:
-never once fearing crime agaist my person
-understanding that I was going to go to college, and in fact to not do so would be unthinkable and/or apalling
-not a single time ever feeling like my family's curcumstances would ever be allowed to get in the way of my education
-believing having a stable family life was the norm, and that things like divorce, custody issues etc. where Not Things We Do
-associating primarily with people who believed these same things
Whether my family made thirty thousand or three hundred a year was irrelevant--I was top-tier, 97'th percentile privileged. I didn't have many of the material things on that list at all. Privilege is 90% social capital and internalized beliefs. If you have a roof, a meal, and your shots material goods are not primarily relevant
it was you!!!
Did nobody watch "The Breakfast Club?" That was a great movie that spent a lot of time exploring the nature of privilege and how class divides can create almost insurmountable prejudices on both sides of the lines drawn.
I mean, I really, really dislike Molly Ringwald (as an actress), but her portrayal of the privileged, pampered rich girl seemed dead on to me. And Judd Nelson as the wrong-side-of-the-tracks rebel was the perfect contrast to her.
As Will Barnatt basically said in the earlier thread, you may have methodological quibbles about these tests but they serve a larger purpose. They break you out of your comfort zone and force you to really look at your relative circumstances. Even these disputes over the tests are revealing with regard to the way people view privilege. For example, MarkT's sputtering about "ludicrous certitude and presumptiousness" and "arrogance" and "Maoist re-education" makes it pretty likely that he is one of those people who resent having their self-image as struggling bootstrappers challenged. Is it really "arrogance" and "ludicrous presumption" to suggest that a goodly chunk of university students are from what could be considered privileged backgrounds? Even at lowly Indiana State University, the Harvard of Hicksville? (Sorry, Sycamores, just trying to make a point. I'm sure ISU is a fine university.)
I agree with kishin that the sense of entitlement is a real problem; and I would say that that is exactly what this test was meant to puncture, by trying to force students who might feel that sense of entitlement to take a closer look at themselves.
Megan:
So your answer is, yes, you object to the particular test used by the Indiana State people.
Did we really need all that stuff in between?
You don't think there was high correlation between those class markers and those kids' economic backgrounds? That's a little naive. Not that snobbery of the elite is broadly directed at the poor -- David Brooks made the point in "Bobos on Paradise Drive" that the style of poor third world indigenous people is often considered trendy by elites. The snobbery is targeted specifically to less-affluent whites, which your Catholic school rivals probably were, predominantly.
"And it really was appallingly low; I shouldn't have been admitted to Penn, or any of the other schools that let me in."
How low, exactly? On a 4.0 score, what was it? Also, did you play a varsity sport at Penn? Inquiring minds want to know.
>You don't think there was high correlation between those class markers and those kids' economic backgrounds?
The point is that those obvious class markers had no inherent correlation to money. The girls obviously had money for makeup, perms, and hairspray.
Prior to having attended large state schools for undergraduate and Ph.D work, I had never met someone from a privileged background, nor did I have any acute sense of class and what it really meant. Coming from a very low middle class background surrounded by others with similar lots, I remember a friend of mine that I met in college, who attended Princeton and exclusive private schools, and whose parents had unimpeachable blue-blooded, East Coast elite credentials--attorney at a big law firm, family legacy of political involvement, and many more--who, when describing his home environment, summed up our different upbringings rather parsimoniously without resorting only to materialistic measures (a huge shortcoming of the checklist, I think), and he presaged a finding of Freakonomics: he grew up reading The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and other high-brow literary journals and books scattered about, while I was fortunate to read Highlights, The Hardy Boys, and the Bible. I didn't discover the others until college.
Having a parent who pushes you in the right direction is a huge advantage.
I was reading an article about a man who had been laid off from some rustbelt factory. As a young man, he had wanted to go to college but his father was convinced collage was a waste of money. He convinced his son that he should just get a job at the plant, just like dad.
However, the plant closed, and the now 40 yo man had no skills and no job prospects.
I'd really like to know what we can do about kids who are being given such bad advice?
liberalrob said:
"As Will Barnatt basically said in the earlier thread, you may have methodological quibbles about these tests but they serve a larger purpose. They break you out of your comfort zone and force you to really look at your relative circumstances."
The college kids who go through these exercises are not dummies, and they can see through them just as well or better than we can. In so far as the questions in the exercise don't match the reality that they are familiar with, they will tune it out, much as they tune out other messages from the adult world. Also, within the context of the exercise, the most privileged person in the room is the person running the exercise, who is able to compel a large group to jump through hoops and perform self-criticism.
Will Barratt, not Barnatt. My apologies.
More Megan:
Did you stop to consider that perhaps one reason you "never once heard anyone make fun of someone's lack of money" was BECAUSE you "went to school with pretty much the most privileged kids in the nation?" Was this a public Catholic school (if there is such a thing) or a private one, and if private what was the minority/ethnic makeup of the student body? How many kids from the "wrong side of the tracks" (wherever that is in Manhattan) were there?
Actually, about 10% of my class were scholarship kids from Prep for Prep.
They break you out of your comfort zone and force you to really look at your relative circumstances.
This argument reminds me of a pundit somewhere who bemoaned the rise of self-checkout scanners at supermarkets, because they deprived us of our one chance to interact with somebody who lacked health insurance.
If your personality is susceptible to this sort of thing, maybe you'll be pushed out of your comfort zone and forced to look at relative circumstances. But most of us don't look at supermarket checkers and think to ourselves, "That poor person doesn't have health insurance!" And most college students wouldn't come out of this silly privilege game--or any such game--with a deep sense of class distinctions. They'd come out thinking "That was stupid. Except I got to look at that hot girl's ass the whole time--I'm glad she had a TV in her room!" Or something similar.
The real Maoists were probably right that working in the fields with the peasants was the best way to instill a sense of privilege-guilt in the middle class; playing games just makes professors the butt of jokes.
What about liberal academics? Are they fascimaoists?
That's what you get when connective tissues seize the means of production.
Can someone (Megan) please explain this line to me?
"It's not even about material goods: the immigrant construction workers I worked with at the WTC disaster recovery site enjoyed a considerably higher material standard of living than the scions of the upper-middle-class who populate the Northwest DC journowonk community."
Immigrant construction workers have a higher material standard of living than "journalists" in northwest DC? How is it that you, Matt, Andrew and others have a lower material standard of living than immigrant contruction workers?
What am I missing?
On "rich kids" not making fun of "poor kids:"
Megan, I'll see your anecdote and call with one of my own. I grew up in the eastern suburbs of San Diego County, in a working-class area with a lot of enlisted Navy. Historically, around 10% of graduating classes from my high school went on to college (but we did have the finest Auto Body (Vo-tech) department in the State of California, woo!) My father was a telephone lineman; my mother stayed at home with the four kids. Pretty typical lower-middle-class.
I managed to get into Harvard based on high SAT scores, a 4.0 GPA, and undoubtedly the sheer shock of seeing my high school's name on the application -- [Thurston Howell voice] Never heard of THAT school, have you, Buffy?
That summer, the San Diego area Harvard Club had a nice little get-together for us San Diego area incoming freshmen -- and I will never, ever forget the laughing condescension that greeted my introduction as a student "from east of I-5." No, I wasn't "poor," just working class -- but for that entire afternoon, I wasn't allowed to forget it for one minute.
I'm not trying to argue that affluent kids aren't repulsive snobs. Rather, I'm trying to argue that their snobbery takes forms that allow them to escape the knowledge that they are snobs, and I am all for smacking them in the face with this as often as possible.
"One of the falsest moments in movies and television shows is when the "rich kids" make fun of the poor kids for being poor. I went to school with pretty much the most privileged kids in the nation, and I never once heard anyone make fun of someone's lack of money, or even the quality of their material goods. The snobbery was directed entirely at class markers with no obvious monetary content--in 1980s Manhattan, the heavy, obvious makeup, and permed, sprayed hair popular among the Catholic school girls I played basketball against."
Having seen Megan's last comment, I realize the problem with this post is that its poorly written and not that her ideas are insane, but before I noted that, I found this paragraph remarkably amusing. It still is, at least out of that context.
I've already commented on the use of the term "privilege", and what the authors of the exercise hope to achieve with it, in my response to Megan's previous post about the exercise. But I just wanted to point out that Gabriel hit the nail directly on the head with respect to why the indicators on the list serve as really poor markers of social class.
This lack of utility undermines the exercise's value as a teaching tool.
Journalists working for TNR and The Economist aren't paid very well, despite having fancy degrees. Pretty much the same for a lot of academics.
You can knock down serious bucks in a union construction job and easily wind up with more disposable income than a journalist or many academics
Well, at least the proverbial horse was led to the water. And despite your cynicism, since this was presented as "a student affairs and campus staff development workshop" I imagine most of the participants would be open to taking it seriously.
Well, at least the proverbial horse was led to the water. And despite your cynicism, since this was presented as "a student affairs and campus staff development workshop" I imagine most of the participants would be open to taking it seriously.
No doubt if this exercise is voluntary, it is taken seriously by those who volunteer, which is exactly my point. People who want to feel guilty about their status in life are made to feel guilty. People who don't want to (but are forced to participate, in the case where similar sorts of events are made mandatory) are made to feel that their professors are ludicrous figures worthy of mockery--reinforcing their snobbery rather than lessening it.
I recall something similar from my first week of college; everyone was supposed to say "I am a homosexual" so that the real gay students could "come out" in a totally non-threatening environment. There was a foofaw when some students refused to say it, and the homophobic meatheads spent the rest of the week telling each other "I'm a (*$^ butt-pirate, dude!" and getting a laugh out of it.
To stretch the metaphor to the limit of usefulness, if you lead a horse to a puddle of urine, he might be a tad suspicious of your future attempts to offer him a drink.
Liberalrob asks "Is it really "arrogance" and "ludicrous presumption" to suggest that a goodly chunk of university students are from what could be considered privileged backgrounds? "
If it were a mere suggestion, that ended at that, of course not. It would be wrong (unless you define "privilege" to include some substantial portion of the "middle class" you can't make the demographics of the nationwide college population and certainly not the demographics of Indiana State U's student body support the claim) but it would not be worth discussing. What makes it worth discussing is (a) it is an institutionalized phenomenon throughout 21st century higher education and just like any other intellectual fallacy ought to be rooted out by anyone with an unbiased appetite for the truth and (b) it is self evident that when someone defines privilege to include not only living in a mansion but also "if you had someone read bedtime stories to you when you were a child" they are stacking the deck of their purported proof in a highly biased way to achieve an ideological goal all of which is inimical to the paramount academic value of an unbiased search for the truth.
Furthermore, I respectfully "suggest" that whatever purported benefit is achieved by mitigating some kid's sense of entitlement is at least offset by the adverse effect of subtly discouraging further achievement from people who have been striving to improve their lot in life regardless of whether that lot began in the 20th percentile or the 80th.
Also, within the context of the exercise, the most privileged person in the room is the person running the exercise, who is able to compel a large group to jump through hoops and perform self-criticism.
That's an absolutely perfect statement of what I've always found so enraging about being put through those things at school and at work: everyone sits there, afraid to push back, and gets a lecture about power, privilege and obliviousness from an untouchable, oblivious "facilitator".
That Barratt thinks half his students grew up in a culture that went down on the Titanic and the other half are chaw-munching hillbillies isn't even the part that annoys me.
Even though the professors were at great pains to emphasize that "no one has permission to accuse any one or any group of anything" and "there is no one to blame, it is just the way it is?"
I fail to see how this exercise is primarily about making people feel guilty about being privileged. Read into it whatever you want, I don't see it that way. It's about opening people's eyes.
Maybe some of those who "are forced to participate" against their will might just learn something after all. Spoiled "meathead" types who don't give a rip anyway are going to make a mockery of their professors regardless, so nothing is lost.
I fail to see how this exercise is primarily about making people feel guilty about being privileged.
Perhaps "guilty" is the wrong word. People who want to feel aware of privilege are made more aware; those who (like Amy P in the other thread) were enjoying the chance to reinvent themselves are annoyed at being shoved back into a pigeonhole they were trying to escape. And smart kids look at the criteria and scoff at the warped and stereotypical idea of privilege it presents.
I'm not against making people aware of privilege, I'm just arguing that this exercise (and most, though perhaps not all, like it) is counterproductive because it not only fails to reach the people who most need reaching, it actually reinforces their worldview.
Meghan
"I'm not trying to argue that affluent kids aren't repulsive snobs."
Marshall mentioned that his friend "grew up reading The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and other high-brow literary journals and books scattered about. While he "was fortunate to read Highlights, The Hardy Boys, and the Bible." I often get the feeling that parents avoid "high-brow literary journals and books" for fear of turning their children into "repulsive snobs."
I often find that it's not the rich that keep the poor (or even middle class) down. But their own beliefes - a strain of anti-intellectualism among them - that keep the poor from rising to the most elite levels of society.
I know many parents that would not be at all pleased to come home to find little Johnny reading The New York Times Review of Books.
What? Where'd that come from?
Man, this little residence hall staff exercise is going to destroy the American Dream!
I guess the next step is to have a study, so we can answer that question. How effective WAS this exercise in real life? Sounds like a grant opportunity for Dr. Barratt.
Sounds like a grant opportunity for Dr. Barratt.
I'm certain that the Dr. Fox could use a grant to study henhouse security, too.
liberalrob said:
"Man, this little residence hall staff exercise is going to destroy the American Dream!"
Actually, if you look up "stereotype threat" on Wikipedia, it seems that it is possible to depress test scores by reminding test participants (women doing math, African-Americans doing GRE questions, high-performing White men up against Asians) that their subgroup traditionally underperforms. So, it's not unthinkable that a well-meant but clumsily designed exercise could damage both the self-confidence and academic performance of underprivileged students.
but his father was convinced collage was a waste of money.
His father was right; who's going to hire someone to glue pictures together?
Is there ANY group in society that doesn't have funny ideas about money and class that you don't even know you have.
Of these, it's the lower classes that have the most self-destructive ideas in this area.
They are the ones who need to be challenged.
(And I had both royalty and welfare kids in my private school. And don't ever remember anyone being teased for being poor. I remember the phrase "rich bastard" floating around though.)
Dude, it was only Penn.
Ha, ha. You a funny guy.
"Did nobody watch "The Breakfast Club?" That was a great movie that spent a lot of time exploring the nature of privilege and how class divides can create almost insurmountable prejudices on both sides of the lines drawn"
I saw it. I hadn't realized it was a documentary. Was Donald Sutherland...oh, never mind.
Here's another issue: a student's family might have done all those striver things (read to kids, have books, etc.) while bringing them up within a community that is hostile to education, school, books, etc. (That was the case with my parents, who when I was growing up had little money but lots of social capital.) I don't think the privilege checklist registers that difference. Within some communities, so-called "privileges" feel like a curse, at least up until college.
To me the biggest flaw in the ISU exercise (and in much of the discussion here) is the tacit assumption that wealth = class = privilege, and that all of these lie on some one-dimensional scale. The idea that class in the US has a single linear hierarchy is just so obviously false that I find it hard to believe that someone who is not a University Professor would buy it.
Like Megan, I don't see anything wrong with kicking kids in the butt; telling them that they have led a soft, pampered life; and putting them to work. This goes for the middle class kids at ISU as well as the rich kids at Penn. But the silly exercise at ISU was a recipe for losing the respect of your students in one easy lesson.
The relationship between wealth, class, and privilege in the US is an important topic. The fact that the people who consider themselves experts at it clearly know very little about it should be a warning to all of us to be a little more circumspect in our assertions.
I think Megan's being a little unfair to what was (admittedly) an imperfect exercise.
The point of having those with no school debt take a step forward is not to say that everyone else is "underprivileged" or poor -- it's just to point out that there are differences. Some things some people take for granted are not common to everyone. Maybe that way, the doctor's son won't ask "You've never been to Europe?!" quite so incredulously. Or maybe they'll be more sensitive to the fact that some activities (clubs with high cover charges; unpaid internships; etc.) are harder or require a lot more sacrifice for some of their peers.
Some of these questions will be better at distinguishing the lower-middle or middle-middle class from the upper-middle class. Some will distinguish lower-class from middle class. (Interestingly, they don't seem to ask the kinds of questions that would be really revealing for the latter distinction -- questions like "has your family ever been on welfare;" "have you ever gotten food from a food bank;" "was either of your parents ever on unemployment for x months or longer;" and so on.)
That's not to say that the exercise is worthwhile or not. Simply to say that Megan's "this doesn't apply to all situations in all geographies all the time" is a pretty unfair complaint -- the very nature of the inquiry is that it's impossible to come up with a questionaire that does all that.
And some of Megan's other complaints also seem ridiculous. It's simply not true to say that kids never make fun of other kids' poverty. (You've never seen or heard of the obnoxious high school cheer where the kids from the rich school tell the team from the poor school that "you'll work for us someday" or "you'll be pumping gas"?)
dcuser,
With regard to the school debt question, the debt-free student may be a Marine Reservist and may have been being shot at a few months earlier. (You might want to have a look at the previous thread on this ("The p-word") or at the discussion on John Scalzi's site--in just a few days, commentors have created a veritable encyclopedia of flaws in the checklist.)
I'm beginning to think that the badness of the questions is a feature rather than a bug, and it is the ill-thought out, uninformed quality of the questions that makes them useful as a discussion starter.
No, see, you did it wrong. "Loony liberal" is more alliterative and scores more points. Like "kooky conservative," which is what I would use to describe your position.
Because if they keep driving with their eyes closed, they might hit somebody.
Statements like that one, for starters.
Whatever works...starting a discussion is one stated goal of the exercise.