The guy whos embracing his white privilege right now is acting despicably, but the resonance that hes found also points to a level of failure in critical education. The message check your privilege in some ways works against the aim of understanding privilege as unearned, structural advantage. Check your privilege can be taken to suggest that privilege is at once an essential trait and one that is subject to the individual agency of the bearer. It seems to me that when people say check your privilege, they are responding to the need for both micro and macro-level interventions. The micro could be summed up as dont be an ass. That is important but also not enough. The macro: realize that your situation is determined by historical forces beyond your control that are organized to give you advantage over others for no good reason. When I think about teaching, I feel like the hegemonically pressing task is to show empirically how privilege has been constructed over time, both deliberately and through the implicit alignment of interests. Obviously action to check this history is needed, but it also cant happen until (Im channeling Spivak here) educators have helped instill and expand the desire for justice.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 14:36:10 +0000
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