Privilege

Week 3: Hold My Tongue One of the Most Awful Articles I’ve E...

Privilege

Sometimes, we forget to do our life accounting.

I am so, lavishly, amazingly privileged. I won’t deny it. If I were to deny my own privilege, I would be denying the blessings and gifts that have resulted from no merit of my own – which are many.

But we have to be careful. The discussion of privilege on campus at Davidson has gotten so unbelievably toxic that people are willing to sacrifice everything – including facts – to manipulate their narrative according to their beliefs.

Am I privileged because I am Asian? Hard to say. We have to be very clear about what we mean by privileged here. On one hand, Asian Americans beat even white Americans in many major indicators of social status, such as income ($77,000 per year against $62,000 per year, per the Census Bureau) and level of education (70 percent to 59 percent with at least some college). But on the other hand, Asian Americans experience spectacular social stratification. Economists Christian Weller and Jeffrey Thompson of the Center for American Progress highlight the fact that Asians experience wealth inequality to a greater degree than even white people. So my skin color alone cannot account for my so-called “Asian privilege.”

A more likely scenario is that I am privileged because of the hard work and the assimilation of my Asian family to American society, and the immense value my Asian parents place on education. Even among the “typical” Asian I live in a special case. My dad was one of two students in his class of twelve who managed to graduate on time from the Georgetown Ph.D. program – all while still learning English. He had to spend countless hours working his way up the corporate ladder while my mom invested an immense amount of energy raising me and my sisters. My parents’ marriage is another immense privilege of mine. Economists from the Right (such as AEI Economist Nick Schulz) and from the Left (such as Harvard educator David Ellwood) can all agree on one fundamental fact: two-parent families develop children with greater social capital (knowledge, willpower, habits) than corresponding children from single-parent families. When all is said and done, I probably owe significantly more privilege to my parents’ stable marriage and their values, not to some abstract concept such as race.

Am I privileged because I am male? Far from it. More likely, I am privileged because I had mentors whose lives modeled social respectability, who taught me to maintain values of leadership, honor, and temperance. Being a man hardly solidifies your position as the alpha dog in society – today, fewer men work that ever, and even fewer men get degrees (especially compared to women, who according to a TIME study now get Bachelor’s degrees at a rate almost 30 percent higher than their male counterparts). Furthermore, a much higher percentage of men are fringe members of society (incarcerated, blacklisted, etc.) than women. Am I saying this as some kind of men-rights activist? Hardly. I’m saying this because the presumption of a Y chromosome as automatically conferring inherent privilege is probably incorrect. More correct is the notion is that male mentorship, critically important in developing a healthy sense of masculinity, is the real privilege here. The mentorship role is a role in which the various pastors and teachers (and most importantly, the father) have influenced and continue to influence me today for the better. The key connections in my network to men of character and leadership have projected upon me pro-social values that, for example, a poor child in rural Kentucky or urban Detroit is less likely to receive. This is the privilege not of maleness, but of male mentorship and exposure to a healthy socialization. For this I am immensely grateful – not to be a man, but to have been able to learn from very good men.

Am I privileged because I am Christian? Definitely – but not in the sense that the Marxist would prefer to say that I am privileged. The Marxist says that the Christian is privileged in America because he is in a social power structure that prefers Christians. Maybe if I was in, for example, Lincoln County, NC, this argument would have more weight. But I go to a secular liberal-arts college composed of many diverse religious groups. Before I came to Davidson, I went to a largely Jewish, secular public high school in Princeton, New Jersey. So while I of course value these diverse experiences, I don’t believe my Christian privilege shows in that regard. On the other hand, I know where I am truly, unequivocally privileged – in the ability to express my faith freely, in a country that tolerates all of its expressions. The United States is the first country in the world to adopt total religious freedom as its credo, and to this day it is still the freest. And I’m not just talking relative to oppressive autocracies like Saudi Arabia or China. I’m talking France and Germany, which at present day still maintain laws banning public expressions of faith, including the hijab and many forms of evangelization. Indeed I am proud to have the privilege of living in a country where religious freedom is a guaranteed right – no ifs, buts, or wells. Now that’s a privilege.

What I’m trying to do here is to get you to see a picture of a different attitude towards privilege than we currently have at Davidson College. At Davidson, the common dogma is to repeat, over and over again, the same Foucaultian critique of privilege and oppression based on only a couple irreducible characteristics – Race, Gender, and Sexuality being the top three. To focus solely on these inherent, largely non-negotiable characteristics of people imparts a certain degree of fatalism in the idea of privilege – you can’t change your race, and you (generally) don’t change your gender or sexuality either. If someone is born a white, heterosexual male, one will likely stay a white heterosexual male, and when people throw insults at you for being the colonialist scumlord of society, it’s easy to get frustrated because you can’t change these characteristics. Or let’s turn this the other way: say you’re a black, lesbian woman living in the inner city. If someone comes up to you and tells you that you’re a victim, that you live in a white supremacist nation full of white supremacists, that your status on the social hierarchy will forever be determined by three unchangeable characteristics of yours, then what incentive would you have to even attempt to change your situation? To even try to make it up the totem pole? All this bends towards a truly deplorable push towards sad, spiteful identity determinism.

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[image error] The first issue of The Davidson Mirror, where this article was published.

And yet this is the rhetoric going around campuses all over the nation. I see it with my own eyes, in the words of rich $44,000-a-pop speakers like Ta-Nehisi Coates who make a tidy profit preaching the bitter sugar of black bodies exposed to a white hell. I saw it last Saturday, at a symposium on tolerance, when a girl I knew said directly to me: “Kenny, I’m sorry, but women are just oppressed. They just are. You can’t deny that.” But more importantly, I saw it in the eyes of a younger friend I knew, who told me that she didn’t want to apply for Carnegie-Mellon University’s Computer Science program because she thought she wouldn’t be able to survive in that environment because of her race. I had to tell her that with an attitude like that, she wouldn’t be able to get anywhere. I’m not saying my parents have never experienced any racial barriers. They did. But what I am saying is this: if they ever thought, if they ever succumbed to the odious idea that their destiny was tied up into the oppression of their race or gender or sexuality, they would not be where they are today. The privilege rhetoric we have today is nasty, it’s bitter, and it has real consequences on our future. Most of all it’s untrue.

Because the true privilege that affects us day to day comes from the privilege of choices. My parents chose to immigrate to America. My pastor chose to take me up as a mentee. My Asian-American friends and I chose to reject identity determinism and live a liberated life apart from the stereotypes and pressures of our race. What the privilege of choices should teach us is that our lives are immense blessings given to us by the sacrifice of others. This should give us immense joy, not frustration. We should be thankful and generous with our time. We should work to give to those who are less privileged than ourselves. But we should always recognize that in the end, it’s our job to be good stewards of the blessings that we’ve received. That is the privilege that can unify, rather than divide, heal our nation’s wounds, make our next generation even more privileged than ourselves.

This article was originally published in the first issue of The Davidson Mirror.

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