The Privilege Meme

[maevele]

umm, yeah, so, about that. if you've taken that meme and found it in any way relevant to helping you understand your privileged class status compared to others, please go read scalzi's "Being Poor" which I am too lazy to link right now. Because if whether you went to summer camp is what sets you apart from the "poor people", you need to read this other thing.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

I read this and immediately thought, "I should go point Maevele here, but I see now you've already been.

I find it an interesting meme because it pretends to reveal so much more than it actually does.

I mean, I was aware, growing up, of my own privilege, though I focused not so much on summer camp and piano lessons and more on things like, "My parents are still married to each other," "When something in our house breaks, it is immediately fixed," "My parents keep the house clean and pleasant and require very few contributions from me to keep it that way."

As a private-school kid, I was also very aware that the wealthiest families were not necessarily families I'd like to join. Bear is 100% right that the cheery "oh, but you're better off when you have to struggle for everything because you learn the value of hard work!" is total bullshit, but it's also true that there were families at my school where the kids had every financial advantage but whose parents were deeply neglectful and/or emotionally abusive. (Physically abusive, not so much: at this school, the teachers would have noticed and called CPS, which is also a good measure of privilege right there, if you went to a school where the teachers gave a shit.)

As an adult with more meaningful exposure to levels of privilege, I'd say this quiz would be more useful if it included things like, "Either I had a stay-at-home parent, or my parents arranged for a responsible adult to care for me after school and during summer vacation, at least through the end of elementary school." "I always had breakfast, lunch, and dinner." "I always had clothes appropriate to the weather, such as warm boots that did not leak, and a coat." "If I needed braces, I had them." "If I needed glasses, I had them." "I did not have to miss school because a parent was sick."

Privileged college students tend to be particularly oblivious to privilege, because underprivileged kids in high school (especially, I think, if they attend high school with mostly privileged peers) tend to spend a lot of effort hiding their situation from their friends. So they could definitely use some consciousness-raising about it, but thiz quiz, as presented, isn't going to help much.

[raanve]

Thanks for pointing to that thread. It was a good read, and I found it a little troubling that I kept seeing the meme without any kind of context (and not a lot of discussion).

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything you & maevele say about it. In & of itself, it's not terribly useful. The discussions that have popped up have been pretty interesting, especially as I learn more about my friends' lives growing up.

Also, I think the collective response gives a slightly better picture of fandom as a whole -- which, as I knew, seems to be mostly middle class. We're also talking some about what it means to be middle class, and how those markers have changed over time. It's good to see those conversations pop up outside of WisCon; we SHOULD be having them more than once a year.

[emzebel.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I thought, in my initial read of it (before I realized that I was going to be seeing it all over my FL for the next 10 pages), is that it was specifically designed for students who are already in college. If it was, as I thought, designed for students at a mid-sized university in central Illinois (some versions have credited the folks at Illinois State University who created the thing), then it might have some utility for simply pointing out to sheltered 18 year olds that there is some variety in the world.