The Privilege Trap

 

I find it interesting that one of the things mentioned in the video was whether students had attended a private school. I grew up going to a private Jewish school. It had nothing to do with my parents being rich and us being privileged. One might argue the opposite. As a minority group, we lacked the privilege of being able to attend a public school that was consistent with our values.

This is an example of how context matters. There is a danger with these kinds of exercises that, by focusing on certain privileges, they implicitly ignore other privileges. This opens the door for these exercises to function, not as tools for people to understand how they are privileged, but as an opportunity for some people to pretend that they are not privileged.

Another dangerous aspect of this exercise is that it treats the economy as a fixed pie in which whatever you get comes at the expense of someone else. Imagine that some slow kid won the $100 and refused to share. Would a fast kid, who was forced to start at the back have the moral right to take the money by force? If we agree that the slow kid does not deserve the money but the fast kid who would have won a fair race does then the slow kid is a thief and the fast kid should have the right to use force to get back what is rightfully his. 

Imagine a rich man who benefited from privilege and a poor man who did not. The poor man comes to the rich man's home, pulls out a gun and demands a share of the rich man's fortune. If the rich man goes for his gun and kills the poor man, is he a murderer? If the poor man kills the rich man, is he a murderer? Clearly, for either of them to claim self-defense, we would have to agree as to which of them had a legitimate claim on the money in the first place.    

This is not an idle question. Every day I put my life in your hands on the assumption that we fundamentally agree about the legitimacy of property rights. The moment that trust is breached, the consequences as they play out perhaps over years, are truly Hobbesian.