Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Evolution of Privilege: From the French Revolution to Modern Social Justice with Stephan Bertram-Lee
Have you ever wondered how the concept of privilege has evolved from the French Revolution to modern times? Join us as we sit down with Stephan Bertram-Lee, a PhD student who has just completed a groundbreaking dissertation on the history and limitations of the concept of privilege. We trace its origins, revisit Peggy McIntosh's influential work on white privilege from the late 1980s, and explore how these ideas have seeped into UK parliamentary debates, particularly concerning education.
In our conversation, Stephan sheds light on the pivotal role of clear and concise academic writing in shaping popular discourse. We discuss how McIntosh's straightforward texts have streamlined complex ideas without the usual academic contradictions. We also delve into how the definitions of intricate concepts like racism shift within different theoretical frameworks, touching on perspectives from critical race theorists like Robin D'Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi. The broader implications of applying terms like racism and anti-Semitism too broadly, potentially diluting their effectiveness, are also unpacked.
The episode takes a critical look at the reduction of systemic issues to individual cognitive interventions and the curious adoption of American-centric discourses in Europe. Stephan highlights how modern privilege discourse often shifts the focus from tangible inequalities to changing internal perceptions, which can obscure economic struggles of minority groups. We conclude with an insightful discussion on the future of privilege discourse, its intersections with social justice, class, and race, and the political implications of identity politics. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the nuanced and evolving landscape of privilege and social justice.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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Hello and welcome to VarmBlog. And I'm here with Stephan Bertram-Lee, phd student. I guess in the United States we'd say you're a candidate because you're past your coursework, but in Britain it doesn't matter so much. So, phd student, and you just completed your first draft of your dissertation.
Speaker 2:I did a couple months ago, but yeah.
Speaker 1:So have you defended it yet?
Speaker 2:No, that'll be in the winter. I'll submit the finished thing at the end of summer.
Speaker 1:Fun, fun. And it's on this topic, which is the history of privilege and its limitations as a concept, and so we're just going to go straight into it. Stefan, what the history of privilege and its limitations as a concept? We're just going to go straight into it, stefan, what the fuck is privilege and where does it come from?
Speaker 2:My elevator pitch was to go back to the French Revolution, the bourgeois revolutions of that time, where there was a lot of discourse around privilege at that time, but the French announcement of the abolition of feudalism. They were like we've done privilege, we've defeated it, it's gone, it doesn't exist anymore. And by that they meant the abolition of these kind of peculiar rights which existed in pre-bourgeois societies where you know, in France they had rules where aristocrats could, only aristocrats could, only aristocrats could own certain kinds of birds and stuff like this, and very consequential restrictions, like peasants weren't allowed to mill their own grain, they had to mill it at the mill of a landowner, which is obviously very useful for them. But it wasn't just aristocrats that had these kind of unfair, privileged laws behind them Cities, guilds and so on. The feudal network of laws is not the kind of laws as we understand them now, where basically they're these kind of universal things which apply equally to everyone and everything. And this is an innovation of the French Revolution and other developments in visual development. So this kind of revolution happened. They took that privilege was defeated.
Speaker 2:The kind of what happened in France spread out, either violently.
Speaker 2:It happened in some places, or it happened like it did in Britain, where there was this slow bourgeois capture of the country and that came along with these ideas of universal laws, the end of privilege as it was understood by the French revolutionaries, and kind of exactly at the time where these peculiar laws were totally defeated, then this new idea of privilege appears, this new idea of privilege which is based on the kind of the social inequalities between persons, not based on formal inequalities and often not referencing anything to do with economics, but kind of the small humiliations of public life, like a famous one from the original McIntosh is, you know, black people getting folded around stores while white people don't, these kinds of social humiliations.
Speaker 2:But interestingly, and notably from the beginning, privilege Talk was not just interested in talking about these sorts of things, these kinds of social inequalities of the social sphere, these informal social qualities, but talking about them from the perspective, allegedly, of the group on top, the, the beneficiary group, the alleged beneficiary group who don't go through these things. So it wasn't just a focus on these kind of informal inequalities but an attempt to kind of invert what has been going on for at least a century in discourse inequality, where you focus on the discriminated, on the downtrodden and so on.
Speaker 1:So we have a shift from formal to informal and from legal to social uses of the term privilege, and this happens shortly after the French Revolution. Where does this initially come from? France, england, the US, like? Where is it bubbling up from first as a primary discourse pattern? Where's it bubbling up from first as a primary discourse?
Speaker 2:pattern. Well, the revival comes in the late 1980s, just as the Soviet Union is coming to bits. From this academic, peggy McIntosh, and it's really quite amazing. I really had an easy job in my PhD because normally you do this kind of discursive research and you see all these kinds of sources each author of the 21st century is drawing from a different author of the 20th century. But that's not what I found in my sample at all. What I found in my popular sample and my academic sample is everyone just references McIntosh. There is this little knapsack piece.
Speaker 1:that's pretty much where it all initially comes from. Mcintosh is an academic, but she's kind of an interesting academic for this to come up from, because she's a pedagogist she teaches teachers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and a lot of the drama subsequently is focused on the fact that it has this presence in teaching. The biggest drama we've had about privilege in the UK came from a parliamentary select committee, which I don't know if there's an equivalent thing in the US where MPs from both parties get together to kind of make a report on how some social issue is going wrong and the one where white privilege came up. Privilege, white privilege, and yeah, notably we should say that in this discourse while it's portrayed in such a way as it applies to everything, any equality between anyone, between any groups, to any degree counts as privilege. But despite that, interestingly, 90% or 95% of the focus is on white privilege, on racial inequality, which is obviously not entirely expected considering the current mood of the United States. But the drama in the UK happened in Parliament over the issue of working class white children, who working class white children in schools in the UK have the worst educational outcome of anyone apart from travelling people. Anyone apart from traveling people which I guess is not really an idea you have in the US and other places that aren't Europe but, as in Roma and Irish, traveler like nomadic peoples who obviously have terrible, terrible educational outcomes because they often don't go to school and when they do go to school they're only there for one term or something before their family moves on in their nomadic lifestyle. But these terrible educational outcomes for white working class children.
Speaker 2:The Tories then tried to complain about the fact that in at least some schools people are talking about white privilege. And then the Labour people were like, well, you're the guys that brought this up. Then obviously the problem here isn't people in school talking about white privilege, the problem is a decade and a half of underfunding and so on. And then the head teacher's union was like both of you idiots arguing over white privilege have managed to totally dismantle because for very rarely in this case they managed to put out a report where the labor, the labor mps, refused to sign on to it, which never happens in parliamentary select committees. You're meant to form a consensus report. And so the Head Teachers' Union was fuming because they had this report, which was meant to be about kind of helping white working-class children, but because of the circumstances it was formed under, because the Tories tried to insert this clause about white privilege, complaining about white privilege, the report basically didn't go forward.
Speaker 1:So the Macintosh piece very much comes out in the 80s. The only thing I can find about white privilege before that is white skin privilege in Marxist-Leninist circles around WEB Du Bois and people such as him. So how do we get to? You know what is the nascent prehistory here? Where did Macintosh get this discourse pattern idea from?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's interesting. At least McIntosh kind of narrates it as this purely kind of self-discovery thing where she was just thinking about the fact that men at her university allegedly are benefiting from the disadvantage of women, but then had the thought that well, that well, actually presumably the the case is the same about me in regards to my black colleagues, but actually, at least probably, she did get some inspiration from these new left texts, especially, um, what's it called white skin privilege?
Speaker 2:oh, white blind spot uh white blinds but white skin privilege. Um, which is this new left text which is interesting both in how it's different from the later privileged texts and the way that, in the ways that it's similar, it's different in that it's a marxist, leninist test. It actually has a clear reasoning. It's in privilege just because it's really often unclear, like why privilege exists. Who's enforcing privilege? If there is such a thing, like why does it exist? What are the mechanisms that uphold it beyond? Like the most kind of just most vague possible sentiments? Um, but regardless of how plausible what they're saying is, in White Blindspot they're very clear on kind of what's causing it, that it's basically kind of like a conspiracy by the elite and it does go off this WE Boy's idea of kind of this white spiritual wage as well as like an actual wage advantage which basically allows the ruling class to divide the working class by capturing the white portion of the working class with relative advantage based off discrimination of the back population, which is this quite kind of standard argument.
Speaker 2:Oh, shut up, happy. The thing is I can't even kick the dog out Because the back door has a cat flap and she's small enough to just go through that. So you have to live with it. Hallie's 17 but goes running with me.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow, alright.
Speaker 2:So this white skin text, white blind spot Basically, yeah, it says, you know, our efforts as the new left so far have failed because we haven't talked about race enough, which is quite a funny idea.
Speaker 2:But, um, maybe it made sense at the time and it basically positions itself as is, you know, a way forward for the marxist lenders working glass struggle in the united states. But there are kind of the prefiguring featuresenders working glass struggle in the united states. But there are kind of the prefiguring features of what we see in later privileged discourse where the focus is on they say like you know, we don't, you shouldn't go to white workers and be like we're going to take away your shit, but as regard like the vanguardists, they do start. Even here we can see like the psychological features that are so present in privilege discourse where they're like you need to engage in like this 24 hour vigilance against your white privilege, you need to constantly be aware of it, like psychologicalize it. There's a real focus on awareness and constant self-vigilance and kind of a specific kind of cultivation of the self.
Speaker 1:So we have this turn towards self-focus. In the case of WED Du Bois, and in the southern context of the United States, what he's saying does make some sense. But why does this get appropriated by the new left so much? I mean, is it just because the new left in the United States was in the United States? Is it because, and thus universalizing what was something very particular to the US, or is it something larger than that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess the kind of. Again, the positive thing about white blind spot compared to later texts is that it's probably not universalizing these features. It seems to be saying, like you know, these are peculiarities of the situation of the class struggle in the United States, as opposed to later works of privilege which see privileges existing in every moment in space and time that's ever existed Never will exist, because there's often, in privileges course, no clear way where it could possibly end. Yeah go ahead In these. Sorry, what was the question?
Speaker 1:No, I was asking like. So this initially comes up in a US context. Does it spread to the new left in Europe or does it remain in just the American new left?
Speaker 2:I think this kind of discourse didn't even become prominent within the new left. I think kind of these guys were writing it like the very tail end of it, end of it. Obviously there was an increased focus on kind of racial issues in the new left as it kind of degenerated. But I don't think this discourse happened around white privilege. I think basically this term was founded then but largely fell out of the discourse until it was revived by McIntosh. But then even then I don't think really it was until the early 2000s that people started really reading McIntosh. And then comes along her later works where she attempts to kind of clarify what's going on here. After these 1989 works, these two 1989 and 1988 works suddenly become enormously popular.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when I was in teacher's college in the mid-aughts around 2005, we went through the Macintosh checklist and it was still not yet even that late as codified as it would be like just five, ten years later it really seems to have caught a life about a decade after.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that I remember just going through the checklist is some of the assertions are not true, like like any white person can live in it, like there is very much an assumption of economic neutrality amongst racial groups I mean, there's a bizarre one where she says like oh, an example of my white privilege is that I can get like an academic piece published on white privilege which is like that's, that's not because you're white, that's because you're a professor right?
Speaker 1:um, so so we have Macintosh. Why do you think Macintosh comes to such prominence? I mean, it felt like for me when I really started seeing it. I mean, she was taught in pedagogical school. As I said, I learned it in teacher's college, but I didn't see it in public discourse until just before the election of Barack Obama. But it may have been simmering, you know somewhere. So what did your research find?
Speaker 2:I think a notable thing about McIntosh and White so, for instance, what happens often in discourse is that you'll have something in academia, then it'll be translated by someone into kind of like a middle discourse and then that kind of middle discourse, middle text will be taken up by popular populizers and often there'll be various middle texts which take this original text, translate it into more understandable language and then it enters the popular world in a more disparate form. But I think what's notable about mcintosh's text, as I'm sure you know from your experience, is that they're super, super, super short, super super simple and super super clear. You know, I think it's obviously, you know, not a project you should do if it doesn't work, but if you're kind of like a movement, you want to get an idea across, you're trying to summarize like dialectic materialism or anything like this. If you can get it on two sides of A4 in simple language that anyone can understand, you 100% should, because I think an enormous part of the success of Mick and Josh's work just comes directly from that fact of.
Speaker 2:The works are incredibly theologically light and they can be taken up by anyone and this leads to a discourse which is surprisingly not riven with contradictions. I think lots of popular discourses are a complete mess, for understandable reasons, because people, people have this idea that you know racism is bad or whatever, but they haven't read wd boys, for instance, and they don't really have, and they have a vague understanding, that kind of like. You know there's this racism, discrimination against some people and maybe like it benefits other people, but there's no way that they have like a clear theoretical background and certainly if anyone does, then it's not shared by nearly everyone else, and even the people that do have a clear theoretical background have a different one to someone else's. But McIntosh, his text is really incredible in this way. It's so short, it's so clear, it's so direct that instead of having to go through discursive translators, her work is directly taken up by the popular walkbooks that became enormously popular after the killing of George Floyd.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because I think this is one of the few times where it benefits that it came out of a teacher's school, because if you've ever read teachers intellectual preparatory material and I don't mean to insult my colleagues, but it's written like it's for for, like they write to teachers, as if they are the students that the teachers are teaching, and that's going to be my nice way of saying it I recently got some digital liturgy tech books and I was like man, this is like at a sixth grade Lexile level or something. This is ridiculous, but that that you're right. Like. If we take racism, and still now, even between critical race theorists, there's not one operant definition of racism. There's so many out there. I mean, my favorite thing recently is discovering how Alexander Dugan uses racism which is to out like Robin D'Angelo Robin D'Angelo, but there is. Those are contested definitions Like popular ones. When I was in college, which would have been in the late 90s, early aughts were like racism is power plus ploverage, all right, which?
Speaker 2:And then what is power Like? That's something I think power is probably much more difficult to translate than any of the other words involved there, you know.
Speaker 1:Right, privileged people know, but then like people like OK, but so the reason why it was worded that way is so that black people are people of color. Could not be racist.
Speaker 2:You're just always trying to construct a definition in which that is true. That was the whole.
Speaker 1:You're just always trying to construct a definition, which that is true, right, a definition where it's only it's only unidirectional. And then you had there was, there was a backlash that even within critical race theory, where they're like, okay, well, that's not really coherent um, we can't figure out what power means. So then then you had the split between the three kinds of racism implicit bias racism, systemic racism and bigotry. But then there is a movement, critical race theory, reincorporating this privilege discourse. Actually that um just said, well, no, those are all the same thing and what's at stake here is privilege. I mean, abraham X Kendi just said there's not systemic racism in it, there's just racism. I'm like, well that, and no time in my life has been made better for going from going more specific to vague.
Speaker 2:So but go ahead and Kendi then goes yeah, no, black people are racist, or at least black people can be racist. And Kendi then goes yeah, no, black people are racist, or at least black people can be racist. Correct, he goes the other way, where he's just like yeah, actually we're all just racist, which then Finkelstein is like makes the important point and it's very clear that this is also a massive thing with privilege is that when you just apply a word to everything, this doesn't give you this incredibly powerful discourse which allows you to just defeat everything, but just totally debases the word. It totally debases the word and and it's like it means what's going on with anti-semitism presently, if you insist that everything is anti-semitism and you insist that these various things that people think are good are anti-semitic, some people are going to stop doing that thing or be you know, question it, but some people are gonna go okay, I guess I'm anti-semitic.
Speaker 1:then yeah, well, yeah, structural anti-semitism and the expansion of anti-semitism would be, uh, anti-zionism, criticism of banking at all, um, that's. You know that? I've been told that's structurally anti-semitic. Um, uh, just bringing up that someone's rich yeah uh, yeah you hear this in liberal discourse whenever there's this conspiracy about a rich person, they're like it's a stand-in for jews and I was like sometimes it is, but a lot of times it isn't like.
Speaker 2:Why you, the proud, lovely liberal of the d'angelo class, why are you thinking about Jews whenever anyone brings up money?
Speaker 1:So one of the things I think that your research gets to is that if we go back to the initial impulse of critique of formal privilege in the French Revolution, the goal is to get rid of it. Right, I'm not sure that's the goal. And if it is the goal, there's two ways to do that, and one of them is to just make everyone have a shitty, a shittier life, instead of improving anyone's lot. That is one implication, but I wanted to how? What are the rhetorical usage? What are the like? So we, we have this very clear concept and I agree with you. One of the things about Pulitzer's course is it's clear, it's relatively easy to understand the it's when people object to it, unlike other things, it's not because they don't understand what you're saying or they have a different definition.
Speaker 2:It's because they're like, you know, usually like well, most people understand the concept and hate it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Like it's really unpopular when you do empirical testing on it, which has just happened. I couldn't really include it in the main bit of my PhD, but I just talk about it in the introduction. Um, when you you give give the word to people, it just makes the discourse worse, it just makes things worse, it makes people upset, it makes people refuse to engage, and that's not because they misunderstand it, but it's because they they really do understand it. Um, but yeah, I think you highlighted kind of the two main kind of discursive things going on with privilege. One is in terms of like a solution. One is, yeah, downgrading, which is we can solve problems like white people having too much dignity by making sure the police are indignant to them, by making sure the police are indignant to them. And the other side is to conclude that getting rid of privilege is impossible and the only thing we can do is maintain a lifelong vigilance against ourselves, against how we've been raised, against how we've been made To do this for our whole lives, to constantly guard against ourselves, to engage in this weird self-help thing where we're constantly engaged in this struggle of self-improvement but the end goal can never be reached. And it's very interesting, there's this constant reframe in privilege discourse to the idea of the systemic or the systematic, but it's never well actually. I mean I did eventually kind of work out what the idea of the systemic or the systematic, but it's never well actually. I mean I did eventually kind of work out what it, what the origin of it in Mikotosh is, from her later works, but they always talk about the systemic and systematic, but then all their solutions, all their kind of concerns are raise awareness about privilege and kind of just engage with privilege, like inside your own mind, which, yeah, goes into this, this neoliberal moment.
Speaker 2:We're in where we've gone from. We're at a point where, like it's now completely acceptable for for the government to be like you need wellness training if you're going to be a functioning proletariat or whatever. The, the previously like walled off and hidden away internal mind is now just an open target that the state, ngos and whatever you know racial educators are seemingly you know it's this amazing thing where it's apparently impossible to change, like the actual physical world, but it's really easy allegedly to change people's internal cognition, which is a complete reversal of of you know, I mean seemingly the truth of things, but also how discourse has operated until now where changing the insides of people's heads like if we talk about like the 1960s and whatever they were saying okay, like people are really racist, but through congress and stuff we can achieve at least relative reductions in inequality and then, when we're not so poor, people will hate us less. We've gone completely to reverse, where the focus is on intervening in our minds instead of intervening in the physical world.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting to me because I think it kind of gets to something that Adolf Fried and Norman Finkelstein have both brought up, but something that I really thought about too how, when you focus in on racial privilege, one thing you can do is a race class amongst minority groups and also, simultaneously, project poverty is only a minority problem, project poverty as only a minority problem.
Speaker 1:So it serves two functions it gives you a reason not to help. It turns white people against anything that would actually disproportionately quite often help white people and, conversely, on the other end of the same spectrum, it hides the fact that often, when we're talking to like, say, black or Indigenous academics, we're literally talking to people richer than their white counterparts in the general culture, which is both a proof of some kind of systemic racism but also a way to flatten that out so that these people can receive benefits, as if you were helping poor black people in Detroit and what, what, what confused me about the teens is somehow this makes it to Europe, and I am just baffled by why Europeans would pick up this discourse at all. So but let's yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Have you seen the recent drama in the UK with David Tennant?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've seen some of it, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, the great thing is that the black woman he was criticising, who then instantly turned to Id Paul to defend herself, to be like a man can't tell a woman to shut up. She's meant to be like the grand crusading, heroic anti-identity politics figure of, uh, our right wing.
Speaker 1:Oh, I mean honestly.
Speaker 2:The tories have kept up the tradition of george w bush and making sure that they have enough people of color, uh, in their leadership that it's harder to critique them for that, but it makes the kind, makes the whole discourse in the UK like we had a brief moment where every single leader in the United Kingdom and Ireland were all POCs, while at the same moment it's still apparently the main problem in Britain, according to woke people, is us being racist.
Speaker 1:So Macintosh has a distinction in her privilege categories. Can we talk a little bit about that here?
Speaker 2:Well, she tries to make one In her early work. It's really fascinating to be in 1988 and 1989 work. In both, in both pieces, at some point she says, actually, maybe privilege isn't such a good idea, which is insane. It's as if, as if she's reacting to this previous discourse, but the only previous discourse is her own work like it's this bizarre thing where as soon as she introduces privilege, like 500 words later she's like, okay, maybe, hold on, maybe there's a problem here, like.
Speaker 2:But she does try to address this initial problem in her early works by saying you know, let's try and make a categorization of things that we would wish to universalize and things we would wish to abolish. So, you know, you can talk about a privilege that male academics might have, where they're basically free to kind of, or were free to kind of engage in like low-level sexual, sexual harassment of female staff. That's a kind of privilege we want to abolish. And then there's kind of the ability to for male academics to do their own research without people constantly questioning well, why are you doing that, why are you doing this, why aren't you doing this instead? And that's kind of a privilege we wish to universalize. And so she introduces these categories, introduces the possibility, introduces some language that we could use to describe it.
Speaker 2:And then this bit maybe because it's on page two of these very short texts and it's not read by anyone disappears. And disappears not only in the works which are of McIntosh's inheritors, of the people of quota that cite her, but it also disappears in her own work. She makes a series of texts in the late 2000s and the teens discussing. She's trying to update privilege discourse. She's trying to cope with the fact that her early works became enormously popular. But as happens with every single author that has an early popular work, even one as simple as hers, it's not taken up in exactly the way that she would want.
Speaker 2:Holly shut up that she would want Ali shut up, Not taken up in the way that she would like. But what happens in these texts is she tries to clarify these kind of minor things. She has a metaphor of a bank account which has been roundly critic by the other theorists for basically disappearing, uh, the actual process of racial accumulation. And if you kind of take it seriously, there doesn't seem to be any way it could operate without blaming black people for basically oppressing themselves. Because in privilege discourse it's a very important part of privilege discourse uh, normal white subjects, until they're made aware of privilege, are alleged to be completely ignorant that racism exists, that privilege exists, that advantage exists, but she just doesn't. This more complicated language which would, I think, make privilege into a discourse which could at least possibly have a possible effect. Obviously it's very plausible, it wouldn't. But this idea that we have some privileges which should be universalized and some which should be abolished would make the discourse so much better. But it simply doesn't exist in these later works, even of Macintosh.
Speaker 1:Do you have a theory as to why it disappears?
Speaker 2:I, I think to go back to this theoretically light thing, um, it's too complicated. There's like three things there. Like if you just stick to the first page of these texts, there's just this one thing privilege. That's very, very simple. It's easy. But also because once you start talking about, I think, universalizing and abolishing and so on, then you have to actually get into policy questions. You have to actually like how would we go about doing this sort of thing?
Speaker 2:And to people who want to write basically like racial self-help, this universalizing, this abolishing stuff, that's no good, because subjects, particular subjects, can't universalize or abolish anything. The only thing they can do is work on themselves, and so making this distinction isn't useful to them, it's not useful in this discourse, it's not useful to the writer nor the alleged subject, because they can't actually universalize or abolish anything. So I think it gets dropped because, you know, it's this very slight complication on this very simple discourse, but also because it doesn't serve the sort of racial kind of discourse which which wants like one thing I found in my popular sample I I got the these top 10 books that were hit the new york times bestsellers in 2020 after George Floyd was killed, um, and I found half of them, it was five to four. Half of them didn't use privilege. Basically, they would use it just a couple of times per text, um up to you know, a couple of dozen in a hundred thousand words. And then there's another set which used privilege a lot.
Speaker 2:Um like almost every page, privilege should be talked about. One had a whole chapter on privilege. One used, and each used, privilege for something that was very important. Um like, for instance, um in d'angelo's text, she defines racism through privilege. She talks about in terms of. She defines privilege as basically the process by which there is privilege, or something like this. And another privilege is the way that she tries to get around the thorny issue of who is white and white, passing this idea where she just defines it, as you know, white, white people with white privilege. That's the subject she's addressing. How you're meant to find that out, I guess it's, you know. Again, it's up to your feminological engagement with the world, your personal sort of judgment yourself about whether you have white privilege or not yeah.
Speaker 1:So this is the thing. It's not just that white passing, it's also recognition of white passingness, which makes it very, very subjective. So instead of because you know white passing traditionally, even in like white skin privilege discourse uh, that wasn't decided by you like, your racial identity was not relevant to that, so there was none of this idea of like, for example, if you're Latin, whether or not you pick to be Chicano or white Latin or whatever, and in the United States that's presented often as almost a personal choice Sometimes. Sometimes it's not.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:You put it on the census and then you get your racial card in the mail well, I mean, it was a way to get around the racial it's interesting about, about us things here, because the reason why it's voluntary in the united states is because there used to be legal codes around this and the grounds for those legal codes were made unconstitutional by the supreme court. So like, for example, in the legal codes of the southeast uh, I didn't count as white um until those were abolished. Now I was not alive during that time so it's irrelevant to me, but but you know, it was the whole run drop rule thing like um, and that was not. That wasn't even socially constructed.
Speaker 2:That was legally constructed, so it's right and often like it was quite a struggle to enforce because it's quite hard to tell right, right, like it's quite hard to tell that in this one drop rule that you wouldn't be white. It's this interesting thing there's several members of the English football team who would be black in the United States, would clearly be black in the United States, but in the United Kingdom are considered white. A very clear example is Andrew Tate, who's basically only white because he's British, even though he has an American black father. And if he had an American black father and he grew up in the United States he'd be black, but he grew up in the UK, so he's white.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tate's an interesting example, and what I also find interesting is that that isn't debated in the us either. So, like, whatever the perceived social code is from, whatever country that you're from is actually how the world perceives you. Because I mean to be quite frank and to make people uncomfortable andrew tate has the same claim to being a black man as barack obama does yeah, like legally.
Speaker 1:I mean, like you know, uh, our socially and uh, yes, tate has slightly more white passing features, but um, it's, it's, yeah, but it's very clear. I was uh recently reading a book by sam delaney who's a black man and I flipped on the back. He looks just like my white stepfather. So it's just like it's, it's, you know, it's like. This stuff is very, very, very, very. It gets very tricky and vague and we know that and it's just uh, who's?
Speaker 2:who's the one guy that isn't allowed to be black in the united states who actually gets his blackness questioned? We would call him talcum x. I forget his name oh uh, the person that I look like um sean king like he's the only person in the united States who isn't just allowed to be Black. He's the one where people actually question it and say, no, you're not.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting too, we can get into privileged discourse in academia, because it does seem like academia is the only place where I significantly see people faking their racial categories, where it's happened a bunch that we know about, I mean there's very direct incentives in academia which are like deliberately structured right.
Speaker 2:Which even like in other places where, where black people are prominent, it's not a factor of like. Black people aren't prominent in sports because of like discrimination in their favor no, if anything, it's if anything, usually in american sports.
Speaker 1:Uh, the people who do it are from whatever the poorest ethnic group is. I mean, like that's why it was associated with like the Irish and like Germans in the 19th century.
Speaker 2:So yeah, especially because in the United States I mean the bizarre thing actually I mean that doesn't work. I was going to say with the college system and players not getting paid, that doesn't make any sense also, players do sometimes get paid now, but so Macintosh seems to want.
Speaker 1:But um so, so Macintosh, uh, seems to want to. You have that first the universalizable, non-universalizable. There's also like an attempt to work out other kinds of privilege. Although you're white, it almost always gets linked to race oh, yeah, she and she.
Speaker 2:She starts the kind of narration is I, I wanted to talk about male privilege, which was? Male privilege was, uh, in like a prominent discussion in the mid-2000s sorry, the mid-teens and I assumed, going into my research, that's kind of where I first got interested in privilege. Um, through this idea of male privilege and I assumed, going into my research, that you know there would be a lot on white privilege but there would be a lot on male privilege too and she talks about, you know, probably there's also this thing called heterosexual privilege or whatever though I don't really know about it.
Speaker 2:But then actually in my research and in McIntosh the focus is almost totally, entirely, especially in the past few years, on race about male privilege before I learned about white privilege in my in my university.
Speaker 1:You know uh, foray and uh now 20 years ago. But, like I also noticed that as soon as we started talking about racial privilege, the, the, the male privilege discourse kind of faded out and it was I remember that more as a as a 90s like third wave feminist discourse and I do whatever you know, the quote intersectional uh. It's funny when we we literally teach these now as if you know uh, because I used to teach social studies and as early as 2017, we were talking about like the waves of feminism and how we're now at the final good wave, the intersectional wave, for all the contradictions of waves one through three, don't worry guys you're right and this was in like a conservative state textbook, so you know it's.
Speaker 1:it's an interesting thing to look at. So is it just because of the debates around the art teens Like one of the interesting, weird things I remember from two years ago, so this is more recent, but watching Starmer's First Labor campaign use American privileged language and American DEI language as it was already becoming unpopular here, but using it in Britain, but not even using it in a specifically British context. It seemed like it was aimed at an American audience and I was like why the fuck would you do that? Like that doesn't make any sense, like we're not your electorate at all.
Speaker 2:Like what's going on here? We need to help out African-American British people.
Speaker 1:It's just, I was just like. I was like I mean, yes, there's racially targeted policing in the UK, but like pretending that it's the same as the US is kind of nuts.
Speaker 2:So both in who it's targeting and then the extent, like how many people have been killed by British police versus how many people have been killed by American police, and you're looking at an order of magnitude difference or maybe two, Right it's interesting because especially, like in the whole, like a statistical issue, like in Britain, in terms of police deaths, because we have so few we count every single person that's come into contact with the police and then died within like the next 24 hours. So if you die in in like cell, if you die in a jail cell from suicide, that counts, while in the us that the figure is much more like a policeman shot him and then he died, though often, like especially in mainstream media, they struggle even to make the connection there where it's like okay, like the policeman shot him and he died, but like can we really blame the bullets?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, it's, uh, it it's kind of um crazy. Also, you keep the statistics on it for you do sociological research. So you know, on most things the american government keeps great statistics not on cop deaths, like. It is really hard to actually figure out. Um, usually it's like journalists tracking things and sometimes they're wrong and they don't have the same criterion on how, on how they're tracking it, um, and also who counts. I remember. I remember there was this bizarre trend in the teens about 10 years ago. We had a series of mixed-race shooters and they were recording them as white.
Speaker 2:I thought you were going to say they recorded them twice.
Speaker 1:No, no, they recorded them as white. But there is another one. When you hear stuff about mass shootings in the US and you hear the racial demographics, there's one definition and then you hear the large number and they use a different definition, so the racial demographics being predominantly white and that's actually changing too. But historically that's for random, unmotivated shootings. But when you hear the large number of mass shootings, which is any shooting where?
Speaker 2:three more people shot?
Speaker 1:Yeah, because that's almost always gangland shootings.
Speaker 1:It's gangland shootings. So the racial statistics look more like the racial statistics you would expect, given over-policing etc. Etc. But those two things are cited by journalists side-by by side, without the caveat that they're actually measuring different things, and that was very common to do in the teens. I just remember going through common reporting and common statements and noticing stuff like that all the time. Also, we'd be talking about how privilege kills. Also, we'd be talking about how privilege kills and it led to a particularly absurd statement, not on the Floyd BLM uprising, but on the first ones, the ones people have to mourn a white, a white team being innocently shot. And I was like do you not know racial statistics? Because you know, in the United States, actually the biggest predictor you're going to be shot by police is actually are. Do you have a history of mental illness? Then what's your race?
Speaker 2:um, and that's proportional, but in absolute numbers, uh, there's still a ton of unarmed white men shot right and it, but it is true, in a sense right because, then, because these white young men aren't positioned as white young men, they're just positioned as young men and so there isn't kind of like a white collective mourning of them. So in one sense he's right, but not because these young men aren't being killed, but just because they're not being understood.
Speaker 1:in this sense, you know they're not racial, they are not presented racially and you know, I actually do think there's because of the proportionality. I think there's some legitimacy to talking about that, but it leads to these absurd statements, in the way people would phrase it, that we're also just any any chud, to be quite frank, could figure, can figure out that the, the, the statement wasn't true, like um, which could also and is often used by right wingers in the United States to just be like well, you know, all this discourse is bollocks and also we don't need to do anything about race at all. We've already figured all that. Look, we have Barack Obama's president, and, and Condoleezza Rice was a thing, and Condoleezza Rice was a thing, and so it was you know. So you can see this, this discourse. And yet there's also a discourse that will say that there's absolutely no difference between now and the pre-civil rights movement. And I, I, I find absurd by it was like there's there's been so much change that there's shock over things that were common Even when I was a kid.
Speaker 1:I come from an area of the country that used to have sundown towns in the eighties, which, if for listeners who don't know, in the UK or if you're stupid. In America, sundown towns were places whereby people can be after dark because they would likely get lynched, and they there. There were still some of these places, even in the northeast, as late as the late 80s, early 90s. They were rare then but they existed. Um, and I don't know how many people that I heard learned about that from fucking lovecraft country, even in the black community. It was kind of shocking, like or the if you remember everybody learning about black wall street in oklahoma and like, and I was like, well, that was from a tv show, right, yeah, it was a tv show. And then, and then all of a sudden in the, in the activist discourse, no one would shut up about it and I was just like I'm like you know, yeah, I knew about that, or you know, I read it 10 years earlier in wikipedia right, like, but but like it I had never like.
Speaker 1:It never come up, really like. Even in my civil rights courses. It was mentioned once, you know, and just kind of skipped over, and then it was an obsession for a little while.
Speaker 2:Uh, I find these things fascinatingly problematic, um, yeah, I think, I think you bring up something with this idea, you know, trying to argue as if racism is exactly as bad as it was in 1960, or 1860, which I found very interesting, because in the low privilege sample of these popular texts they would make constant references to slavery, to Jim Crow, and then one of the books, for example, was the book New Jim Crow, which positions the American prison system as like the third great turning of American racism, the American prison system positioned as basically the tool by which the United States materially exploits black people. And so in these low privilege texts you have this complete historicization of constantly referencing back and trying to make comparable what's currently going on to what's going on in the past. And obviously there's a lot of tension in there, because when you're doing a social problem thesis, you don't want to be arguing like things were really really bad then and now they're kind of like really bad but not as bad as then, like you always want to position it as like a growing problem, and so ones that came out a bit later would reference Trump as kind of like a revival of racialism or whatever. But then in the, in the privileged texts I was, I really expected them to go on about slavery, because the low-privileged texts went on and on and on about slavery and on and on about Jim Crow, and the ones that were published after New Jim Crow talked about New Jim Crow, but they just didn't. They didn't historicise it at all, they were just these complete, like floating in a void of like.
Speaker 2:The contemporary moment, like D'Angelo, has this narrative, this narrative where she's visiting workplaces and trying to educate people about white fragility and privilege and so on. She doesn't talk about slavery, she doesn't talk about segregation, she doesn't talk about any of this. These texts are not historicized at all. They're completely alienated from but yeah, privilege is just completely alienated from from any kind of historicism. It's just this and they never talk about, like you know, they'll. They'll often be a story in these books about an origin of racism, which is a very useful thing.
Speaker 2:You want to position your social problem in social problems discourse as something which is a really bad problem. It's growing, but it's also contingent and solvable, because if it isn't contingent and solvable, then people will just shrug their shoulders and be like, well, if we can't solve it, then I don't care. Or maybe I care like what can you do? But in privilege discourse it's positioned as not contingent. It just always was, it always will be. I think that's the really fascinating thing about it and why I talk about and it's possibly the reason why I take privilege to be like a moderately successful discourse. Okay, there are like some dramas about privilege. There's plenty of privilege talk going on, but it's not something like critical race theory which they try to ban in Florida, like I think that's kind of the mark of like a very popular woke discourse is when they try and ban it in Florida.
Speaker 1:And so you know you contend that the privilege here is but it's not a threat, because it is both easily understandable and everyone hates it, because they kind of understand that it's free floating and also it can be used to make everyone's life worse. Um, so it's. I mean, that was the thing that I was when we talked about tony Tony Morrison. That, I thought, was actually the other bizarre implication of that, besides all the statistical stuff that we talked about, is that it wasn't. She wasn't positing a world where nobody got shot by the cops for no reason. She was positing a world where people equally got shot by the cop for no reason.
Speaker 1:And I was like okay it's kind of crazy how is that a liberatory discourse again, like we could actually meet and you heard? At first I thought it was just implicit in the rhetoric.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're like OK, like that's kind of the unfortunate implication, right, but you don't actually think that, Right, but then then I know we actually think that.
Speaker 1:When I saw people celebrating the deaths of despair and the and like the, the decline in life expectancy of of specifically white working class people in the United States. It was celebrated in some discourses Not many. I don't want to say that liberals were all celebrating it. But the first thing I heard is opioid deaths are just about white people, and I was like what, okay? And second was that, oh, this is just what happens when you remove privilege. And I was like so we are approaching equality?
Speaker 1:So we should keep it then. Yeah, so we're approaching equality by making but not lifting everybody up to the same level, but basically saying, well, you know, the world would be fine if you know just people got shot in the right proportions amongst poor people and you go. Well, no one actually thinks that and I'm like no, there's some people who do Like they really do. That's the other thing about privileged discourse. I'm like one of the things I find fascinating about it is once you dehistoricize it and you talked about low privilege text and I guess you're talking about high privilege text. By that you mean who is the audience aimed at? Like low privilege text is aimed at.
Speaker 2:Sorry, I meant when I was talking about low privilege text. I meant texts which don't use privilege or use it only a few times. Okay, yeah, yeah, low privilege text, I meant texts which don't use privilege or use it only a few times. Okay, yeah, yeah, they were historicized, while high privilege text, as in high usage of privilege, um, they weren't historicized okay, well, I what I also find interesting about that is the audience for those are different.
Speaker 1:Like, yes, they're all kind of for white audience, but, like the new jim crow is for is not for people to go and get hr trainings. It was an academic text, like I mean, it's a popular one. Um, it was a popularization of other academic work, let me rephrase that, but it was. You know, it was aimed at the new yorker crowd, whereas d'angelo and co were aimed at the new yorker crowd but also, like activists and people doing HR trainings and the DSA, they had a much broader audience and I also found it fascinating by the end of the audience.
Speaker 2:And it worked right. They pulled out.
Speaker 1:It worked. What I find interesting is it both worked but also in some ways collapsed very quickly, like that whole. Like there's a whole cottage industry that blew up and now has retreated pretty much only into academia. Like there are still academics who talk and think this way, but even in like teacher trainings and stuff and I and I don't just mean in red states this, this kind of discourse is becoming a lot less salient. Yeah, we still talk about it, we still talk about implicit and explicit bias and stuff like that too, but I it's already losing steam as a discourse, even amongst social justice-oriented progressives.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think this is you mentioned kind of selling boots to white people, and I think that's a reason why there is this kind of fascinating reversal which has happened, where basically all discourse up to now in talking about inequality talked about those on the bottom, where basically all discourse up to now in talking about inequality talked about those on the bottom. Pinnifridge comes along and talks about people on the top and if you want to sell books to people on the top, who are the people who buy books, then that's a really useful discourse. To have People like to read books which talk about them.
Speaker 2:When you're trying to have this kind of self-help book, you want it to be addressed in the second person, in the forms of a form of you, and if you're talking about discrimination in those terms, you have this awkward thing where you're always going you aren't, you know, discriminated against, you aren't. You're always like, switching from you, but you don't have. Well, if you talk about privilege, you can just be like you have. You have this, you're like't. You're always like switching from you, but you don't have. Well, if you talk about privilege, you can just be like you have, you have this, you're like this, you're, you have these characteristics, and so on, and so on.
Speaker 1:So this is an easier sell to the audience because it can both play into that want to be.
Speaker 2:Just it'll have the same form as non-political self-help, because non-political self-help won't be talking about this other group, who isn't you, which has some advantage over you, or blah, blah, blah. They'll be talking about you and your like bad traits and your possibly positive traits, and so on. By using privilege discourse, you can talk in the exact same way, using the exact same language.
Speaker 1:So you have argued and I don't think you're the first person to argue this, I actually think Walter Ben Michaels kind of argued the same thing like a decade ago but that privilege also had the advantage of being particularly useful as a way of justifying austerity. Because this whole implication that we're talking about, where you can say, well, we can fix the privilege problem by just structurally removing it for everybody and we don't have to fix anything, we just have to make sure that the injustice is fair the reason why I think that that's more pernicious, and maybe intentional later on, than people give it credit for, is that it is also tied into arguments about austerity, particularly, for example, the Abraham X Kendi argument. I think Abraham X Kendi is actually one of the more reasonable of these figures too. So this is where we're going to get, yeah, but where, like, if I do something economically that would help Disproportionately black people, you know, are dissidents of slaves or whatever, but I do not do it for racial reasons.
Speaker 2:According to X Kendi, that's racist, so we shouldn't do it, which is a really great way to make sure you know if you've got the same policy and you're trying to appeal to the American public. Going on and on and on about how it will help specifically black people and not other people is a great way to make it less popular.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean Adolph Reed talks about this like it like, in some ways, if you actually care about black people, one of the things you don't want to do is make all the social reforms that would help black people just racial, just racial, particularly in a period of austerity, because another thing we know from sociology is racial groups see each other in competition when times are lean more than in other times.
Speaker 2:So like, right, I mean, it's a classic thing where. What do you call them? We call them benefits in the uk, right, like? We call them entitlements here entitlementsitlements which sounds even worse right when basically people will be like we need to get rid of benefits, by which they mean the money, the billions and quadrillions of money that the government gives people I don't like, which are often some racialized group. Especially in the UK, it's focused less on racialized groups, specifically on the status of immigrants.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so this seems like a good way to just make sure that you can't do much and that you could achieve it by the other thing about austerity to link the two kind of neoliberalisms is you have the neoliberalism of downgrading, of being, of degrowth, of saying we have to accept we once thought in modernity. We once thought in modernity that human beings have the power to change the world to our will and that we control technology and that we can use technology and advances in other ways to control the world and to make it how it how we wish it. To control human society, make it how we wish it. Neoliberalism, post-modern neoliberalism, is saying all of that is not true. We can't control the world. We, we can't control these grand things. There's these things like climate change, which are just these total externalities which we can't stop and all we can do is adapt to them and change them.
Speaker 2:And to link the personalism of privilege to this idea of downgrading. It's really cheap. Instead of trying to solve a social problem by hiring a lot of people and spending a lot of money, giving people a lot of money, it's really cheap to instead to tell people change what's going inside your head, focus on the internals of you and try and change yourself and alter yourself. That's really, really cheap. Obviously, it ends up not being, because then you have to hire a whole class of PMC bureaucrats to do this mind-changing, but it can be very appealing to public officials in states and places which continually have this constant, constant budget pressure. These kind of programs which allege these very useful effects but don't require significant funding are going to be very, very appealing. Stuff like wellness is very, very appealing and in the same way, this self-help style privilege discourse will be appealing. In the same way, this self-help style privilege discourse would be appealing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, again to focus on other pernicious effects. If you focus on, say, fairness within the system and you were to achieve parity in academia, for example, like the academic numbers somehow end up reflecting racial numbers, which in the united states has been attempted, but it's been attempted disproportionately through accepting rich immigrants, to meet a lot of the unofficial quotas, to increase the diversity ratios of the school, um, that's not all of it, but that's been what's driving the African Descendants of Slave Only movement.
Speaker 2:There's this fascinating thing in California, where I don't know if it passed, but there was a measure in California to get rid of the amendment to the state constitution which said that you can't discriminate based on race or whatever. They wanted to get rid of that so they could do positive discrimination, but it seems so glaringly obvious that that allows so many disasters in the future oh yeah, well it.
Speaker 1:This was a this also came from d'angelo and x kindy that we needed to allow for discrimination so we could do positive discrimination. Uh, one school district even tried to have racially preference firing. It, of course, got thrown out of court. It hasn't gone to the Supreme Court, but on this one I will just say the law is actually very clear. You can't do that and if you do it you're misrecognizing power, I sort of like. Like it's this weird thing where, where I'm like do you think that only white liberals have power and that they'll actually follow through with this consistently? Like that? This will only be in your favor, I mean.
Speaker 1:And in the us, this discourse I think one of the most fascinating things that I've seen happen is this discourse has been turned against in communities of color as well, like this is no longer a very popular discourse amongst non-elite Black people. To NPR, talk about how to get the Black male community on board with this again, because there's study after study that says that Black men in particular feel like this is a distorting discourse, but also that this leads to interesting other problems, like the increased talk after the Floyd uprisings or whatever. I never know what to call them. They seem like more than protests, but less than insurrection, so it's like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I say George Floyd uprising in my PhD, which I think is a fun phrase to include in your PhD. Yeah, but there is this focus on anti-Blackness, not about this privilege discourse, but it wasn't aimed at white people. It was aimed at internal ethnic tensions within people of color in the United States which are very real, yeah, like light-skinned privilege.
Speaker 1:Light-skinned privilege, the move from POC to BIPOC so that you can separate Black and Indigenous as special categories but still keep it together. And I will admit that change happened. That's probably the fastest racial language change I've ever seen was the shift from African Americans back to Black people, to people of color, to bipoc it like, and it happened I mean bipoc is a great phrase because it's constantly misunderstood as bisexual people of color that's funny, um, and yeah, you're probably right, it would be misunderstood quite a bit.
Speaker 1:So, you know, at risk of you know two white guys talking about privilege discourse, I think it is important to just admit that that this discourse is so simple, it is so understandable. And yet also I want to talk to you a little bit about other things that mystifies. We talked about the downward nature and the austerity nature of the way it can be used, because you can fix it in any number of ways, and the easy way to fix it is check on yourself, go self-help, and also maybe we'll do some systemic stuff to fire more white people, which you know isn't going to lead to racial backlash at all, like it's just, like it's not going to self-perpetuate the problem that we, that we are also ostensibly saying that we want to solve. The other thing that that was shocking, you know we, we it's applied in the last little bit of this uh of discourse that we had about, like people that's working for people, is the amount of money that was raked in and lost and these various DEI initiatives based off privilege theory has been kind of astounding.
Speaker 1:Um, why, why do you think? That is Like what was going on there. Theory has been kind of astounding. Why do you think that is what was going on there?
Speaker 2:What do you mean exactly? What are you thinking of?
Speaker 1:I'm thinking of the XKindi Foundation. Like you, have millions of dollars going into a lab that essentially achieved or did nothing and has now ruined Abraham X as kindy's reputation. Um, or the, even as early as 2014. You know, you remember I don't know how if you're um old enough, but do you remember the council culture stuff? Initially about council colbert, why we moved from call out culture the council culture as the way we talked about this right yeah, yeah, I mean, it was it, yeah, it was before me too, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, it was right before me too.
Speaker 1:It's like the first wave of this it was the council, colbert, because there was a. There was a racist joke making fun of a racist thing, um, and an asian american woman, uh, you know, talked about the racism of it and tried to get cobalt canceled, and that's where counseling came from. It didn't work, uh, and what it came out? That this woman, suey park, who eventually gives up on social justice, becomes a church lady. Her story is fascinating and bizarre, um, but what she was doing is she had a couple of tweets about this. She was bragging about how she gave up thousand dollar speaking fees in 2014 to, you know, harass Colbert on Twitter, um, because she was pulling in, you know, uh, because she was pulling in, you know, five to eight thousand dollars a week doing anti-discrimination training.
Speaker 1:And this was. This was like right before, even first, blm, aware that the that this discourse from mcclintock that's originally used on teachers, have been picked up by by hr, initially in a purely negative way, as just a way to prevent being sued by doing requisite training and saying you've done due diligence, like that. That. So I wanted to talk about, like, that seems to be one of the ways that this became an off-ramp. Uh, I mean, there's two, I think blogs and the aughts is, it plays a big role.
Speaker 1:And then I think, and cultural criticism, because I, oh my god, the privilege discourse around cultural criticism for the last 15, 20 years has been intense. But um, also the fact that the nature of later civil rights law, particularly after the initial ones in 1960s, instead of being positive they became protective, which means that it enabled US grounds of lawsuits. So HR departments started really getting interested in showing that they'd done due diligence on this to avoid lawsuits. And it seems like the intersection of lawsuit and academia doesn't happen a lot, but it really happened here on the privilege discourse. So what did your research tell you about how that affected and changed and mutated all this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I guess to return to the idea of kind of privilege, is a kind of moderately successful discourse that you know it did have the saying you know, you know D'Angelo did get rich on it but then you know she's kind of disappeared since then. I think a big struggle that privilege, as much as it's kind of generally appealing to like a lot of within a lot of kind of woke circles, is there's a really big problem with it. There's a really big problem with it is that explicitly from McIntosh. Mcintosh is saying white woman academics need to focus more on white woman academics and D'Angelo is basically saying a very similar thing, like no, actually white people need to think about white people, need to talk about white people.
Speaker 2:And I think that is the main way that kind of privileged discourse bumps up against like the rest of woke discourse. The main way that kind of privileged discourse bumps up against like the rest of woke discourse, where all the rest of woke discourse is all about centering voices or whatever, it's all about hearing from the discriminated against. But that really conflicts with what's going on in white privilege, where it's like no, you as a white author, need to talk about white people and white concerns and focus on white concerns, which is the crazy thing in why. You know, like in Finkelstein works, he basically says you know, d'angelo is like a pseudo white supremacist or whatever, like that's kind of the road that she's leading down. So I think that's if you're talking about kind of how privilege flared up but now is kind of more struggling, I think there think this significant conflict with the rest of woke discourse is a major problem for it.
Speaker 1:Do you see this privileged discourse staying Of the ways that we've talked about race and gender since I've been alive so the 80s, but really, far as, like me, being aware of political discourse is the 90s um, this one seems to be the one that has not gone away. Like everything else, has gone through cycles and waves and kind of faded pretty quickly. I mean, we're already seeing the collapse, crt. I mean, yes, crt has origins in the 80s but also, like privileged discourse, didn't catch on until the last 20 years. Um, so it's, it's for its first 20 years it was basically a legal theory. Um, where do you see it going now? Because, on one hand, it seems to come straight up against all the other problems of, of, you know, woke discourse, anti-racist discourse, general leftist discourse. There's also been, there has been for America, for the first time in a long time, actual talks about class, for now, for also the same time period, interestingly, for the first time in a long time, actual talks about class for now, for also the same time period, interestingly, um, and you've had the construction of like two opposing lefts one which is really focused on privilege and race and one which is focused on class, uh, and one of those has more centrist uh backers than the other, obviously, um, but it does seem like this discourse seems not exhausted, both within progressive circles and in um and in general culture. But I I still see it as being so simple and so easy to apply and also so mystifying.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that your research talks about is, like you do have to ask who puts the money in the pockets of white people then, and no one ever seems to do that. Um, so, and how is this working exactly? Uh, and I remember hearing stuff about, like you know, racial privilege around harvard and yale and me going like, well, it's ironic that these white institutions. But then I looked at their board and I'm like no, the boards are more diverse than the general population actually, like, like, so I can't even say that anymore. Um, so do you see this as having staying power? Is it coming up on the shores or is it? Is it weirdly going to do that thing that american ideas often do? The european idea. You know, there's often a way in which a european idea will die in europe and be reborn here, and then we'll change it and give it back to you and then it'll die in europe again.
Speaker 1:Um, it seems like privilege discourse is one of these that's actually in the long duray yes, it comes from europe, because we got to go all the way back to the french revolution. But in the long durée, yes, it comes from Europe because we've got to go all the way back to the French Revolution. But in the intermediate durée it actually comes from America, but it seems like now that it probably has more pertinent at least in the English speaking world outside of the United States rather than in it. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing, but it does seem like it's more exhausted here than over there. I just don't know if it's going to go away or not. I mean, what do you see happening in the future with this discourse pattern?
Speaker 2:I think privilege certainly will at least have like a moderate role going forward. I don't think it will die and I think that comes from the fact that it's the only inversionist discourse out there and probably, as things develop, we might get more inversionist discourses. By inversionist discourses I mean when you're talking about racism, instead of talking about black people, you're talking about white people and you know there's whiteness studies and so on. But I think privilege is the main way you'd go about that and it's a universal one. So it's the one where, if you want to talk about men when talking about sexism, you use privilege. And if you want to talk about men when talking about sexism, you use privilege. And if you want to talk about straight people, when you talk about queer issues, you use privilege. And there aren't really any competitors.
Speaker 2:All the other ones that we talk about they're focused on discrimination they talk about when talking about racism, they talk about black people.
Speaker 2:They want to focus in this way and they're all directly competing with each other in this way, while privilege is basically alone, without any direct competitors in terms of being an inversionist discourse, a discourse which talks about the other side, about the alleged beneficiaries of these systems and so on that basis, I think it'll. It'll go up and it'll go down. But until there are more version of discourses, in whatever form that might be, that probably already exist but aren't prominent, I think privilege will stick around because it's the only one that is doing this particular thing, which other discourses aren't fulfilling. And when I highlight the conflicts that privilege has with these other parts of world discourse and the fact that you know it's not centering black voices or whatever, that is also a positive for privilege, because it means if you want to do something in like, if you don't want to center black voices, you want to center white voices, but you want to do it in a legitimate way, white privilege is the way forward in a legitimate way white privilege is the way forward.
Speaker 1:So ironically, it actually assuages a sense of the privileged of the privileged, and I'm putting it in air quotes for people who are watching groups own narcissism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think people are just as not just as willing. But, like if you're ranking discourses, people are much more interested in hearing negative things about themselves than they are about hearing positive things about other people or whatever. You know, people are very focused on themselves, and so there's, if there's a discourse which facilitates that, then it's definitely going to stick around in one form or another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I guess in a way this has stuck around.
Speaker 2:now for the big critiques of a highlight are 20 years old now.
Speaker 1:Right, well, I was just about to say the critiques that we've talked about today. A lot of this was even noted before this discourse pattern became as widespread as it was. Like um, and then there's popular works wafter b, michaels, um, uh, adolf rita, both been talking about this for years, um, and then you can see where this privilege theory can get in even weirder ways um, I know that I have a certain portion of my audience is Afro pessimist sympathetic, but I've always been like, I've always been like well, it doesn't. Eternal victim discourses. I've I have learned the distrust because, frankly, I'm partially Jewish and so, like the, the first time I ever heard an argument about how we were uniquely oppressed and this was never going to change was from jews and that's why we needed our own state I was gonna say it just.
Speaker 2:It just leads to black zionism and not, in the conspiracy theory, just actual black zionism right, um, so it, it.
Speaker 1:It would be a way to, like you know, create a a, a discourse around this. But it is interesting how, how this worked better. And I did notice that you are right in timing this re-exploding again after the floyd uprising, because even in both blm we had a pattern where it moved from from uh, industrial, midwestern, mostly black city streets into uh, and, and the first round it moved into the university and the second round it moved into elite cities, uh, um, on both coasts, uh, which I don't even think I actually don't even think that was all illegitimate, because I don't think everything going on in the floyd uprising was all just cynical id politics either. Um, but we we've seen this discourse wash out in two ways. So the first time it created, like this, focus on black empowerment and like uh getting more like I. I once was at a charter school that had a blm activist talk to it and literally they were talking about diversifying the fbi to uh, to a group of students, half of whom were african african and like didn't understand.
Speaker 2:Also, we need to make it as diverse as the cia right, um and uh.
Speaker 1:The the other thing was that that they're like well, white people have ethnicities and black people don't. And then there's africans in the audience and they're like what the hell are you talking about?
Speaker 2:why we have an ethnicity each.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have like like I have like three different ethnicities actually, so like what do you, what do you want?
Speaker 2:um, I think, I think that'll be an interesting thing going forward as obviously the the population of africa explodes and then necessarily, like the population of africans, um, as africans, massively increases in. Like the anglophone world. And how kind of African-American and British black discourse which are predominantly? Well, in Britain it's mixed, but in certainly in the U? S you have people you know, the, the main group African-Americans have been separated from African culture for generations, generations, generations, and through the process of slavery, like any connection to it was basically completely annihilated. How the racial discourse in the United States, the United Kingdom and so on will evolve as more and more Black people in both these countries are of immediate African descent.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, we already we're seeing this in the united states, in the in the ados split, because the one thing that, uh, we can say in the us is black immigrants tend to come from two groups either come from refugees, like, from somalia, um, eritrea, etc. Are they are the absolute richest people in nigeria and senegal, um, etc, like, and so there's already led and also, uh, not, you know, um relatively well, people from the caribbean kamala harris's family, for example, um, this is, this has led to inter-black, what might be considered inter-black new ethnic tensions, where there there's a tension between African Americans and relative elites on one end, and then also poor Africans on the other, who they also kind of see as other and different, but poorer and a drain on their resources. Um, and I don't want, when I say this, I don't want to say that, like, even most black people say this, uh, but these are discourses that are emerging right now and are beginning to have more and more power, and as more people come and things get worse, of course these things will prosper.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, I mean, uh, we also see this intentions where there's a lot of Black community fear of Latin immigrants as a competitor group for what they see as declining resources that should be theirs from inner cities. This racialization, mixed with this discourse pattern, when you introduce new groups, actually destabilizes it in ways that goes and ways that I think well-meaning, educated liberals, regardless of their race, often do not see and do not think about, like it's not something that they really spend a lot of time thinking about because it's not about them at all. Um, and god forbid, something not about the white people, including their evilness and guilt.
Speaker 1:Um, so it's, you know, um, uh and kind of americans can't even really get on the thing of, like you know, they can't talk about how they colonized africa because they didn't right no, I've actually pointed out that, like, when people like talk about, like like the us and african um extraction, I'm like we do some of it, but you'd actually be surprised we have mostly just not given a shit about africa, like it's not been. You know, the only thing that we've really focused on is africom as a, as a military, a projection. But I was actually surprised myself. I was like, no, a lot of those resources are going to europe. So, like, like you know this, this isn't even totally us um and you know people will say, well, you're, yeah, I've even heard this. I've even heard some, some people of color, say this in the united states. But like europe is just a us proxy state anyway, I'm like no, it's not like, or at least 50 us proxy states yeah, and they don't get along like you know.
Speaker 1:Um no, no like europe very much.
Speaker 2:We have our own issues and our own imperialisms, and so on. Even if we are, in the end, some imperial to the United States, that doesn't mean that France isn't doing something uniquely, and particularly in Africa. I mean obviously the only way you can talk about kind of American colonialism of Africa is to start talking about Liberia, and you definitely don't want to start talking about Liberia if you want any kind of neat racial discourse.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you definitely don't want to stop talking about Liberia. If you want any kind of neat racial discourse. Yes, because that's a history that I actually know and it's one that Americans avoid like the plague, because I'm like oh so we tried to set up a black return state, but it was not in the place where most of the original slaves were taken from, and so, yeah, it immediately caused ethnic tensions and civil wars and we just kind of don't own that, like I was just like, because it's not neat.
Speaker 1:It's not a neat story to tell like on the slightest um, so it's uh, and, and one that I think only only became relatively non-violent in the last you know 15 years. I uh, during the aughts I remember there was, you know, ethnic tensions and civil wars.
Speaker 2:I mean they had a brutal long civil war.
Speaker 1:Right. So, yeah, americans don't like to talk about that. I suppose one thing that I can ask you is do you think this will continue having purchase in europe? Because I just I, I don't understand. I actually don't really understand why it got so much purchase in europe. I'm just like, yeah, you have racial problems, but they're not and and for those, no, europe is not some post-racial utopia, but, um, how in the hell did that our discourse patterns become popular in britain and france? It doesn't actually make that much sense to me, because you don't even define, like even between we speak the same language, but who we call black um is very different, and not just on the mixed question either. I mean, I also, uh, associations with Asian are entirely different and, uh, indigeneity is not a racial thing in print. So, like it's it, it right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I right, I'm. I'm the indigenous person, which is is discourse you only get to into in the United Kingdom If, when you get into in the United Kingdom, if you're incredibly right-wing, right, full-on neo-nazi, is the only way you get into ingenuity discourse in the United Kingdom.
Speaker 1:You're Kelto-Anglo-Saxons um so it's funny I was.
Speaker 2:I mean recently I was getting denounced in the YouTube comment sections as like colonized, and I'm like. I've never colonized anything, neither of my ancestors have.
Speaker 1:Just, you know, we've just farmed dirt for 6 000 years well, I mean, this is, this, is the uh, I mean one. I have sort of been like okay, yes, we are descendants of colonizers, but active colonization has been kind of a completed project for 150 years, um, uh, with the exception of hawaii and maybe alaska, um, and I I don't know how like, when I talk about this, I'm like, I'm like, so what do you want? I mean, I recently went to an Ed Talk and they had our land acknowledgement and then someone tried to include white people, everyone's indigenous to somewhere, and I was like, I'm not Like.
Speaker 2:Where the fuck are you?
Speaker 1:Half my ancestors are from North Africa and the other half are from your cold, of course, an aisle you're like in the North. So, like, like what you're like. Which one do I pick? Like the one with the better food? Like, what relationship do I have with, either you know, the land of the Highlands and the hebrides uh, you know or or like morocco and bulgaria, like it's. It's just, the answer is like fucking none. I have no relationship to that land.
Speaker 1:Yeah it means nothing to you like um, and, and even being obsessed with your ancestry's ethnic heritage seems to be a weirdly american obsession, like it's again, again in in europe, like doing that is for bizarre right wing people right, whereas in, uh, and the post-settler diaspora, whatever, um, we're totally fucking obsessed with like where we came from and like which weird little island and like people like I'm Irish and like your family hasn't fucking lived in the isles for like 400 fucking years like yeah, I mean that's.
Speaker 2:That brings us to what is the important distinction in Europe, which is between people who are immigrants and who aren't immigrants. That's the important distinction. And obviously, being an immigrant in Europe doesn't mean someone who's an immigrant in the literal sense, like German people in France aren't immigrants and French people in Germany aren't immigrants and British people in Spain aren't immigrants and Australians in the United Kingdom aren't immigrants and British people in Spain aren't immigrants and Australians in the United Kingdom aren't immigrants.
Speaker 1:Are Americans in the United Kingdom immigrants? That's the question. Okay, yeah, I didn't think so.
Speaker 2:I guess it would be. You know, like they're part of kind of I don't know what you'd call it, but the the proper sort of people you know, and even it extends like, relatively like, and you know something which kind of American racial discourse wouldn't be able to cope with is the fact that until recently at least, um british perception of indian immigration was positive, as in indian people were, or like at least 40 british.
Speaker 1:They're part of our communal history and and so when they come here it's fine, but bulgarians and romanians were widely, incredibly, hated yeah, I was explaining like that commonwealth people were less problematic than slavs and like in america, everyone was like what I mean there are, there are bizarro sub-communities, like like if you're specifically in oregon, there's been anti-slavic tension, so like sometimes you'll hope people talk in oregon about sloths being people of color, which I'm also like why?
Speaker 2:just like albanians can say the n-word in new york yeah, um, and it's.
Speaker 1:It's just like okay, so I have another out, I guess, if I want to, but to, but as one of these very, very pale people who can casually go, I'm off white, I didn't do it, but in a real sense, this racial discourse is flattening. The settler discourse is flattening. I have always been like so do you guys literally want to get rid of? I have always been like so do you guys literally want to get rid of? Like At the at the most generous interpretation, 80 percent of the population, because it would still apply to Asians and Latins.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the whole land back thing or whatever it's like. Beyond the fact that you're, I don't know, deporting Europeans or make them all live in like high rises on one percent of the land. What on earth are you doing with the black people? Do they just get to be kumbaya with the indigenous people? Because if so, they're going to be 95% of the population?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it doesn't. I don't think people think it through.
Speaker 2:No, I mean they don't, because if you do, then you get really bad results.
Speaker 1:I mean, my critique of Land Back is a little different than yours. Mine is that I don't know what people mean by it, because some of them mean exactly what you're saying and some of them mean like this other thing, that is like okay.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you ever saw me and Ben talking about prison abolition Right, but it's this thing where either you mean what it literally means you're going to get rid of prisons in bourgeois society, which is a terrible fucking idea or you don't mean what you're saying and you actually mean like prison reform, in which case you're packaging a popular idea in the most unpopular jacket you can find. And the same thing goes for Land Back, whether you mean like deporting white people or making them live in like high rises and on no percent of the land, or you mean like respecting treaties with indigenous people, in which case you're jacketing this popular idea in a very unpopular idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, prison abolition, uh, one of those things where, um, uh, you and I probably slightly disagree about it, but I'm also like you can't do it in bourgeois society unless you just want to hang a bunch of people like there's this, uh, um I mean, that's what.
Speaker 2:That's what anarchists will say right, they'll be like yeah, we'll just kill people, which I respect more than like the liberal kind of prison abolitionist people who are like, but it's also nuts well, police abolition is similar, where I'm like, okay, you're going to abolish the police before you deal with the social problems, and you'll hear arguments for it.
Speaker 1:But I'm like, yeah, we could do that if we had equalized wealth and a universal conscription into peace forces. But I doubt you want universal conscription in the peace forces for one, even though it would be fair and just, and two, under current conditions, all that would lead to is private policing by corporations, and so you would have a disadvantage because they have money and thus weapons. If they want to, they can buy them. You can't. So, uh, I don't really understand what you're doing, but you know, I think you and I kind of. One thing I've learned from the palestine uh, stuff in the united states is when you make a demand, that's possible. That's when they crush you. Yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:Like.
Speaker 2:If we're listening to Chairman Mao, that indicates you're on the right lines, right Right. We've made a clear line between when we're attacked by our enemies that shows we're doing the right thing.
Speaker 1:Whereas like.
Speaker 2:Well, if you go to a big corporation, you're like oh, can I teach you about privilege? And they say yes, that's when you know you're fucked up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, something's wrong and I think that has to be dealt with. One of the things that I worry about is I think has to be dealt with. Uh, and one of the things that I worry about is I think it will be dealt with. I just don't know that any of us are going to like how it's dealt with, like, like, like, if we don't come up with answers for this, somebody else will yeah, I mean, that's that's my other big line.
Speaker 2:I go on about things can always get worse. Lots of people talk as if, like any difference, any other solution to the present state of things in regards to prisons or whatever else has to be better and it's like, no, it doesn't. Things can get so much worse, like if you're not currently hearing artillery fire things can get worse and even if you are frankly, and even if you are.
Speaker 2:even if you are, things can get a lot worse. I've had plenty of artillery fire in in situations where I was basically fine and the people around me were fine and the civilians around us were basically fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like.
Speaker 1:I've been basically fine around bombs, so it's one of those things. It's just like. I mean I wouldn't, I wouldn't suggest it. It's not good for your mental health. But I also think, yeah, it can always get way worse, even wars. When I tell people about wars, I'm like wars of attrition are way nastier than other kinds of wars and I think people are being reminded of that right now because we're seeing two of them at once of wars and and I think people are being reminded of that right now because we're seeing two of them at once.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, uh. I mean, really we shouldn't call one of them a war of attrition, we should kind of just call it what it is, which is a massacre, but um, a punishing of the helots is surprisingly apt well, yeah, somebody, uh recently I think it was ben shapiro, somebody like that who was comparing, uh um, israel to Sparta as a good thing, and I'm like I don't think you realize how apt that is.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because when you hear about stuff like the punishing of the helots or what's it called the separation of the plebs in Rome, yeah, you're hearing about events which you presume are kind of pseudo-mythical, that probably something relatively similar happened, but it's not the case that they did it in this kind of formal way. It wasn't the case that all the plebs in rome went and sat on a hill for three weeks. It's not the case that spada had this ritual punishment of the helots every whatever how many years. But then you see what's going on in Israel. You're like, oh, maybe the helot thing was real, because they're doing it in such a literal and straightforward manner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's something else to see. So, you know, I don't know, maybe people will have more things to worry about than their privilege. I think that's the other thing about right now. It's like, well, you, you have, even as white people, you have more real problems, so like maybe you should be thinking about that, um, but nonetheless, uh, stefan, where can people find your work?
Speaker 2:uh, you can find my work. I do a podcast every sunday on this is revolution. Give them an argument, with ben burgess doing popular philosophy. Um, I'm not. I'm kind of in a transition. I'm thinking of reopening my tumblr and putting all my essays on there, um, but I mean, you can find my recently archived articles on sublation, but I haven't published there in a while.
Speaker 1:All right, and I guess you are technically because of that thing. On philosophy, you were part of the TAR crew, but also given the difference in land mass, you often can't be on the live stream.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the only one that I'm awake for is the live stream. The only one that I'm awake for is the Sunday one.
Speaker 1:So there's that Alright. Well, people should look up your work and if this ever becomes available as a book, as dissertations often are, and when you get out and have to unmonograph it and I'm going to try and make it into a compact article that seems like the kind of thing they would like yeah, they would, so people should be looking for it. Alright, thank you so much.
