Check Your Privilege!

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Something Amyss

Aswyng and Amyss
Dec 3, 2008
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Colour Scientist said:
One must never joke about one's privilege.

Besides, you can't tell me what to do #16, you have to be #45 and above to address me directly.
I have #64 Privilege Clearence, don't you know?
Yes, but remember, the minorities are asking for special privileges, so by that very nature the lower numbers indicate higher rights. I mean, it's a well-known fact that the most oppressed minority in my home country of America is the straight, white, cismale. So don't cross me, majority-type-person!
 

Icehearted

New member
Jul 14, 2009
2,081
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You live with 13 out of 100 points of privilege.

You?re underprivileged. The world is not a fair or ideal place and you know that because you grew up with several identities that the world is not kind to. You had a lot of challenges to overcome simply to get on a level playing field with most people in the world. It is not your job to educate the world about its injustices, but if you choose to, go ahead and send them this quiz. Hopefully it will help.
I don't even..

Curious how this doesn't seem to take biracial issues into account more. each of my family's ethnic sides have had issue with me for one reason or another, specifically because of my differing racial traits. I know how it feels to have my gender and my race held against me, to a point that when I've brought it up on rare occasion here that other users have reacted with shock.

That said, I think the whole concept is silly, but then people are by and large impulsive animals given to fear and reactionary behavior and thinking. I'd like to think we're above this sort of thing, that we can take it all subjectively and with open minds, but then I see America regularly rally behind one gender over another, or one race in favor of another. We are, as an enlightened species, shamefully backward.
 

Saltyk

Sane among the insane.
Sep 12, 2010
16,755
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61/100

Somehow using this test to evaluate your "privilege" feels like using Yahtzee to evaluate how good a game is. So many of these questions made no sense or just seemed really odd.

"You can afford a therapist."
Well, yeah. I have insurance through my company. Not sure how good it is anymore since my out of pocket medical expenses went up 500%, but I have it. And I know mental health is part of it.

"There is a place of worship for my religion in my town."
Well, I identify as agnostic, but frankly couldn't care less about the whole religious/atheist debate. What would be considered a place of worship for me? Barnes and Noble? A bar? Gamestop? A Motel 6?

"I have never heard the phrase: 'You have been randomly selected for secondary passport control.'"
Well, no, but I've also never flown anywhere, much less out of the country. I don't exactly make enough money to fly whenever and wherever I want. Which brings me to...

"I have never felt poor."
"I have never had to worry about making rent."

I made contradictory answers here. You see, I don't have infinite money and can't afford everything I want. But I don't try to buy what I can't afford. So feeling poor is something I can say I can relate to. On the other hand, I haven't really worried about paying rent, ever.

When I had roommates in the past, I was the one who had enough money to cover their share of the rent if it was ever needed. Because I kept my stuff in order and always had a cushion. Worry about making the rent? No, but that's because I'm responsible, not "privileged".

When it came to the various disabilities, I can say that I don't have any diagnosed. But there was one...

"I do not have any learning disabilities."
You see, if you knew me, you would understand why this is a bit complicated. When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with epilepsy (its actually more complicated than it sounds). As a result, I took several medications for it. Which slowed me mentally. I was placed in Learning Disabled and even Severely Learning Disabled classes.

I can literally remember looking up at a poster of a circle representing a human head with ears made from "d" and "b" which was explaining the difference. And not getting it. It just didn't click. I remember getting ouster crackers in class. I can probably find the rooms if I ever went back to that school.

But I was taken out of it after my mom took me off the medicine against doctor's orders (haven't had any seizures or anything). Even placed in honors classes in the following years. But I can say that this had a long term affect.

I also was in Speech Therapy due to an ear infection I had as a baby that seems to have screwed up my speech. Imagine saying "Stop" as "Sop" and having trouble with "R" words. I swear I still have trouble with words like "roar", but I've been told it's perfectly fine. Don't think it was bad? My sister was regularly called into my classes to "translate". Yeah, Spanish was fun.

So, where do I stand on that? I put that I don't have a disability, for the record.

I don't know. This feels deeply flawed. But maybe I'm just too privileged.
 

II2

New member
Mar 13, 2010
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"My parents are heterosexual"

Well, at least the once. Funny sounding question.

"I've used prescription drugs recreationally"

Isn't exactly a sign of privilege. Unless you're "anything-will-do" "just-one-fix" addicted, every junkie I know prefers shooting pills to street smack. Hydromorphone (Dilaudid) is about 2&1/2 the chemical potency of the purest heroin and there's just more of it on the streets, owing to user demand and government sanctioned chemical manufactories sythesis without any poppy opium precursor. That's just one example chemical, but there's a lot of synthetic narcotics that are more popular in the whole spectrum from million dollar neighborhoods to blighted high density urban communities. Pills are too ubiquitous to be considered a status symbol (not that they should be).

36 / 100, anyway.
 

JMac85

New member
Nov 1, 2007
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M'kay, privilege checked. Whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. Now what? I'm a broke son of a *****, but I'm a hetero white cis male, and probably like a dozen other made up labels that denotes me as one of "the oppressors". Am I supposed to dedicate my life to helping people who have it worse than me or something?

"Don't step on people you feel are beneath you" has always been my mantra. I know I tend to be an ignorant bastard at times, but even if I think you're a freaking weirdo, I'm not about to deny your rights to life, liberty, or your pursuit of whatever floats your boat. I won't shy away from expressing my distaste for it, however.
 

RevRaptor

New member
Mar 10, 2010
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39 out of 100, Well fuck looks like my life sucks.
I kinda feel like this quiz is too USA centric. Sure it's just for fun buy why would anyone outside of the US know what the hell sallie may is?
And what's up with all the religious questions, I don't think religion is a good measure of privilege for someone that has no religion and there was no option to skip them. Of course I've never been persecuted for my religion I don't have one for people to make fun of.
 

JMac85

New member
Nov 1, 2007
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RevRaptor said:
I don't think religion is a good measure of privilege for someone that has no religion and there was no option to skip them. Of course I've never been persecuted for my religion I don't have one for people to make fun of.
You can still have someone go all Ned Flanders on you, trying to "win you back to the flock". Yeah, those people tend to proselytize in general, but when they hear you're an atheist or agnostic, they see you as unclaimed land to plant their flag in.

Someone I work with says they pray for me every week at church ever since I told them I was an atheist. I think it's just adorable.
 

Sunrider

Add a beat to normality
Nov 16, 2009
1,064
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48 / 100. Guess being a white, heterosexual male is not always life on easymode after all!
 

rutger5000

New member
Oct 19, 2010
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LetalisK said:
rutger5000 said:
The opposite is true. Being fat has way more to do with what you eat than how much you eat of it. If you avoid animal products, than it really doesn't matter how much you eat, you won't get fat easily.
For example if you eat single small bag of chips everyday you'll gain weight and grow fat, but if you eat 7 pieces of fruit everyday you won't gain nearly as much weight.
Basically you'll shit out most of the stuff you eat. Not saying that veganism is healthy, but it's a way to loose weight. A vegetarian diet is much healthier though, and it too can help loose weight.
I don't think it's true that 155 calories(small bag of potato chips) > 721 calories(7 apples). Also, getting fat on either one of those items is not a foregone conclusion and is dependent on how much energy you're spending, but it's the chips that require far less extra movement to burn off. It's actually one of the biggest pitfalls with people dieting: they think they can go bat-shit insane on anything that came from a plant, the ground, or anything marketed as being diet/lite/healthy then wonder why they're actually gaining weight because they've been going overboard with the orange juice, nuts, chicken, and 9-grain whole wheat bread to fill the hole in their stomach. At least in America, what we eat is bad, but we are far and away worse with the quantity we eat. Not to mention reducing quantity of what we eat is easier to accomplish and stick with than completely shifting what we eat(best option being to do a bit of both).

Not to say a vegetarian diet isn't usually healthier than the typical diet. It is, but it's because a vegetarian diet has a lot more built-in and natural portion control than the high-carb, high-fat, low-fiber diets most people have[footnote]I.E. It's a lot harder to eat 7 apples in a day than one bag of chips as even one apple is going to be more filling in the long-term than one bag of chips.[/footnote]. Now, if you said someone with all-you-can-eat chips will gain more weight than someone with all-you-can-eat apples, I'd agree 100%.
Yet that's exactly how it works. The human digest system is a funny thing. The energy in those chips is pure fat, and will be very effectively be transformed in your own fat. The energy in those 7 pieces of fruit is in natural sugars. They converted to bodily sugar if your body is low on them, or simply pass through your body if they don't.
But perhaps there's a cultural-economics difference here. I've had American orange juice (basically liquid sugar), chicken (2 words hormones and antibiotics, don't eat them) and bread (O my f*cking God, I wouldn't even eat that again if I was paid for it). Yet you consider this as healthy, quality food. If that is what passes for healthy food in America, than I suppose there is a case to be made for quantity over quality.
 

rutger5000

New member
Oct 19, 2010
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Zachary Amaranth said:
Colour Scientist said:
You're just jealous because my score was super high. XD
Does that mean you're not only checking your privilege, but reveling in it?
Well why wouldn't one revel in it. I'm super privileged and super glad about it. I don't know if your a tall Caucasian mostly straight man, but it ffing rules. I can enter pretty much everywhere. People trust me way way beyond reason. Nobody messes with me. Plenty of girls are attracted to me (some guys too) etc etc, the list goes on and on. I realize it must suck to be a small, negroid, homosexual woman but that doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy my privileges.
 

Ariseishirou

New member
Aug 24, 2010
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32/100 and "Not Privileged"

...Which is weird because I feel absolutely privileged. I live in the first world. My education has been almost entirely funded through scholarships.

I did grow up well below the poverty line, and was frequently viciously attacked for not sharing my family's beliefs (including physical abuse and threats of homelessness) so... I guess that's enough? I still have enough to eat every day, have a good job, and plenty of technology. Sure I worked my ass off for a lot of that, but I also got plenty of help from the government/my school's donors/etc.
 

CloudAtlas

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Mar 16, 2013
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Blood Brain Barrier said:
CloudAtlas said:
Blood Brain Barrier said:
Privilege doesn't mean anything for how good your life is. Poor people can be miserable, rich people can be miserable, there's no correlation.
There is a significant correlation - otherwise the privilege would be nonexistent - but this correlation is not perfect. Privilege of any kind only increases the likelihood of you having a good life, but this likelihood is not equal to 100%, i.e. you are not garanteed to have a good life.
I think/hope that that's what you meant. And that's what many people who believe privilege doesn't exist don't seem to understand. They don't realize that claiming that their life sucking even though they're white/straigh/male/etc disproves the existence of privilege is about as legit as some dude claiming that because he's shorter than most of the women he knows, women would be on average taller then men...

... indeed a "very doubtful" proposition, to cite my captcha.
What's missing in this equation is a definition of "a good life". What does that mean? Are we talking about a set list of criteria to impose, or the subject's view of their own life? Can you go through your life without realising that your life "sucked"? What if someone tells me my life is good and I disagree?
I'm merely using your exact words, so don't flip it back on me.

Now first of all you seem to believe that life satisfaction, happiness or whatever you want to call it is not related to material wealth. Well, as it turns out, regardless of what you believe Buddha might have said, you're wrong.

We know from countless of surveys from all over the world that (self-reported) happiness correlates with income, both in absolute terms (up to a point; an often-cited ballpark figure is 10.000$ PPP annual income) as well as in relative terms compared to your peers. Not for the money itself, but because this money enables you to pay for things that most people indeed cherish very much: health care, decent food, decent living conditions, education for their kids, and so on.

And frankly, you're (at best) rather naive if you believe that living "a few days without basic necessities" is in any way comparable to living your whole life without basic necessities. Just because I go camping in the wilderness for a week, for example, doesn't mean I understand what it is like to live without a solid roof above my head for my entire life.
 

Blood Brain Barrier

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Nov 21, 2011
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CloudAtlas said:
Blood Brain Barrier said:
CloudAtlas said:
Blood Brain Barrier said:
Privilege doesn't mean anything for how good your life is. Poor people can be miserable, rich people can be miserable, there's no correlation.
There is a significant correlation - otherwise the privilege would be nonexistent - but this correlation is not perfect. Privilege of any kind only increases the likelihood of you having a good life, but this likelihood is not equal to 100%, i.e. you are not garanteed to have a good life.
I think/hope that that's what you meant. And that's what many people who believe privilege doesn't exist don't seem to understand. They don't realize that claiming that their life sucking even though they're white/straigh/male/etc disproves the existence of privilege is about as legit as some dude claiming that because he's shorter than most of the women he knows, women would be on average taller then men...

... indeed a "very doubtful" proposition, to cite my captcha.
What's missing in this equation is a definition of "a good life". What does that mean? Are we talking about a set list of criteria to impose, or the subject's view of their own life? Can you go through your life without realising that your life "sucked"? What if someone tells me my life is good and I disagree?
I'm merely using your exact words, so don't flip it back on me.

Now first of all you seem to believe that life satisfaction, happiness or whatever you want to call it is not related to material wealth. Well, as it turns out, regardless of what you believe Buddha might have said, you're wrong.

We know from countless of surveys from all over the world that (self-reported) happiness correlates with income, both in absolute terms (up to a point; an often-cited ballpark figure is 10.000$ PPP annual income) as well as in relative terms compared to your peers. Not for the money itself, but because this money enables you to pay for things that most people indeed cherish very much: health care, decent food, decent living conditions, education for their kids, and so on.
I'm not saying happiness isn't related to material wealth. All I'm saying is happiness depends very much if not entirely on the subject's idea of what happiness is. If they have the idea that happiness is feeling pleasure, then they'll answer positively if they have nice home, food and sex. Many cultures espouse that God or liberation is needed for happiness, so pleasure won't mean much to them. All that your surveys can establish is what people THINK makes them happy (whatever that may mean for us or them) and how much their degree of 'privilege' satisfies that criteria.
 

wulf3n

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Mar 12, 2012
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CloudAtlas said:
I'd wager that being white in places where whites are the ethnic minority, or form no significant share of the population whatsoever, is generally not worse than not being white in predominantly white countries. To make a statement with a reasonable degree of certainty here seems difficult though, since being white tends to coincide with privileges in the economic sphere. So whether you're generally doing relatively okay because you're white or because you're relatively wealthy... because you're white, this question might be a bit tricky to disentangle.

I mean, most (all?) countries with a significant white minority are nations with a colonial past. Whites there probably enjoy more privilege than anywhere else even though they're not the majority. Maybe not because they're white, but because they're wealthy... again, which they became because they came from Europe and were hence white.
But I mean, I'm open to actual evidence, so if you can point to really relevant cases where whites don't have it rather well in any countries where they're at most a minority, go ahead. From the top of my head, I can recall not that much.

Anyway, that seems to be mostly semantics to me. Most of us here will be from the West, and here the majority is white, so whether we enjoy "white privilege" or "ethnic majority privilege" doesn't really change anything, in particular not for those who are not white and thus not in the ethnic majority and thus do not enjoy this privilege... or does it?
But since you acknowledge the existence of a ethnicity-based privilege, that is, the very same thing quite a few people deny, we're pretty much sitting in the same boat on the broader issue. Or not?
It is a matter of semantics, essentially, and that's something I consider to be important. By removing the racial aspect the crux of the issue becomes clear, having things in common with those with power leads to advantages more easily. However when it is referred to as "white" privilege it not only obfuscates the issue at hand under a veneer of prejudice it trivializes the not insignificant number of white people that don't have things in common with those in power, and don't have the so called "white privileges".

Now amongst rational human beings like you or myself it's not much of an issue, I know what you're referring to. Unfortunately all too often the concept of white privilege or more specifically being a straight white male is used to disimiss the opinions of another. Ironically it occurs quite frequently in conversations on various types of discrimination and how they are bad.

As for how white people are treated around the world I really couldn't say, all I have is rumor.
 

CloudAtlas

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Mar 16, 2013
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wulf3n said:
It is a matter of semantics, essentially, and that's something I consider to be important. By removing the racial aspect the crux of the issue becomes clear, having things in common with those with power leads to advantages more easily. However when it is referred to as "white" privilege it not only obfuscates the issue at hand under a veneer of prejudice it trivializes the not insignificant number of white people that don't have things in common with those in power, and don't have the so called "white privileges".
No. In a world where racism exists, and is generally flowing into certain directions, ethnic privilege matters. Every white person in the West has white privilege. Your life may suck for many reasons, but at least your ethnicity is not one of them, even though that will be of little comfort to you.

You seem to have a hard time wrapping your head around the idea that one can both be priviliged in certain ways and disadvantaged in other. A white woman enjoys white privilege but not male privilege. A straight white man enjoys the triple privilege of being straight, white, and male, but if he's born to poor parents who didn't care about his education, he is off to a bad start anyway. Speaking of whom...

Now amongst rational human beings like you or myself it's not much of an issue, I know what you're referring to. Unfortunately all to often the concept of white privilege or more specifically being a straight white male is used to disimiss the opinions of another. Ironically it occurs quite frequently in conversations on various types of discrimination and how they are bad.
Straight white males really have themselves to blame the most here. Their opinions are not dismissed out of nowhere in these debates. They're dismissed because too many members of this group are terribly ignorant about the nature of privilege, however much that may suck for all others.

You know, I'm a straight white male too. And what is more, I was born to loving, educated, open-minded middle-class parents in a wealthy country. Yet I'm still struggling with finding a job despite having a decent master's degree in a somewhat useful discipline, economics. Does that disprove the existence of all these privileges? No. It just means that I'm apparently not a representative case. But at least I won't be beaten up by Nazis on the station, so I got that going for me, which is nice.

As for how white people are treated around the world I really couldn't say, all I have is rumor.
Well, I doubt they're treated worse in countries with sizeable white minorities, as those are all countries with a colonial past, and as such the whites today still enjoy some degree of privilege from times past, even if only through being born to, on average, more wealthy and educated parents. And you can't make a statement how whites are treated as minority in countries without significant white minority. And I doubt they think too lowly of whites in those countries, what with all the whites used in advertisement and such all over Asia and the like.
 

Deadcyde

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Jan 11, 2011
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30 out of a hundred.

Guess being white, straight and male doesn't pay off as much as it should. Not that any self respecting feminist would think that means a jot compared to women's issues. Clearly because I'm a man I should have used some sort of masculine magic to change that score. One of the questions was even "are you a man?".

*rolls eyes*

I blame myself for falling for this clickbait