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Comment by 67726e | Hacker News Reader

Or you could stop using the fact that someone is white, male, or straight as some kind of attack, insult, or excuse.

There are certainly issues in society, real problems but I'm tired of hearing it. Somehow all of my hardships in life are reduced to nothing, because I'm "privileged".

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"...if you think having privilege means that you’re a bad person, or that you haven’t had struggles, or that you haven’t worked hard for what you have – then I can totally feel why you might be frustrated. If that were the case, then yes, it’d be completely unfair of me to claim that all white people or straight people or men or people of any other dominant group are living easy off their unearned privileges.

But having privilege doesn’t mean any of those things."

Maisha Z. Johnson, http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/07/what-privilege-really-me...

That's the formal definition, used when being scrutinized. The angrier one is far more common in real life debate.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...

Does it being said in anger make it any less applicable?

It's usually used to quash disagreements. As in "check your privilege." It's often used as a way to categorically exclude people from a discussion, and this sense is the "angry" sense. So yes, it's less applicable because it's used as a shortcut to avoid forming a real understanding with someone else.

The definition used in someone's essay means ass all to me. It's he definiton uaee by the common man, if you'll excuse my microaggression.

Then perhaps Ms. Johnson should take that up with 90% of the people who use the word "privilege" in arguments nowadays, because they're not using it the way she thinks they're using it.

I don't think it's solely Ms. Johnson's job to tell people that they're using the word wrong. Now that you know the meaning, you can help us spread the knowledge (like I did by sharing that link).

This sounds like linguistic prescriptivism. For most human communication, the most commonly used definition is the "correct" one.

Cf. "Literally", "I could care less", "Dapper"

Came across this a little while ago:

> “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} system.”

> For [that argument] to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap. [...]

> The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping?

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122

If people are invalidating your hardships because of your privilege, they are wrong. But that doesn't mean the term isn't useful.

"Having Privilege Refers to Systematic Benefits for Your Identity (But the Same Identity Trait May Still Attract Incidents of Prejudice)"

http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/07/what-privilege-really-me...

I don't have a problem with that specific definition. The problem that arises is that we sort of assume as a society that certain privileges trump everything else and are the primary drivers in terms of the experience an individual will, or has had in their life.

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