Exorcising Privilege

A useless prop in our language games

Apr 21, 2024

I am required to recognize two concepts as Truth as a professional-class woman. First, I am complicit in the crimes of our country/the West writ large. Second, I must acknowledge the privilege of having a steady income from a knowledge job. As an American of Indian ancestry, I am also required to recognize my ‘Asian privilege’ of ‘white-adjacency’. These two statements are akin to a religious confessional, and I argue that we should stop saying them. We do so to make us feel better about our reality not matching our beliefs and values, as philosopher Liam Kofi Bright has observed about how college-educated white people react to the world around them being incompatible with their stated beliefs.

The maddening ambiguity of our position is what leads to the titular white psychodrama. One cannot reconcile oneself to this society because it constantly pulls in two directions - it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of equality, and a material structure that witnesses rank inequality. At some level this society just does not make sense to itself, its own ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence.1

The purpose of privilege acknowledgment is unclear because I wouldn’t be doing so unless there’s another person in the room who also has the privilege and expects me to note mine. I especially am disinclined to bow to the rules made by college-educated people because it is a regime that polices manners and language. I speak their language and have their manners, but I struggle to maintain the facade; it is why I get in trouble for being direct. This confessional, self-effacing posture is a classed norm to which women particularly are expected to adhere. Unironically, perhaps, this reflects the stereotype that women must always be caring and grateful and not forget the system is rigged. However, we enforce this regime of manners as women have enforced cultural norms for ages; we are not revolutionary.

Anything for which you have time and money that is denied to others is a privilege for you to be doing. Writing these sentences is a demonstration of my middle-class heterosexual cisgender ‘(South) Asian’ privilege. Here, I must insist that brown people with ‘South Asian’ ancestry are not white-adjacent; there are some groups among us who are disproportionately wealthy (Indians) and others who tend to be working class or below (Bangladeshis and others); this is not the same as being white. To make us white when most of us want to preserve our ancestral culture and find financial security is simply insulting, and if you’ve said this out loud to a brown person, maybe stop.2

Confession and privilege signaling

There is something about being a middle-class woman that requires constant guilt, shame, and victimhood while simultaneously requiring confidence, only as long as we don’t make people angry with our personalities. Each of these internalized norms contradicts the others, and I’m sure most of us are exhausted by these strictures on our psyches.

The confession of privilege allows you to excuse yourself today from being the sacrificial lamb, but your day may come in the form of an Internet mob demanding your head. But today, you escaped with a confession. This confession affirms your membership in the bourgeoisie.

This is a useless exercise meant for people rather than oneself. It is a demand to be seen as a morally upstanding woman who is always grateful but is so broken up about all the injustice. Imagine speaking to a working-class woman and acknowledging your privilege of not having to worry about paying bills. People from different economic classes don’t interact much, but if they did, your interlocutor would think you downright cruel for so blatantly stating that you can live without worry while she works multiple jobs. You would feel ashamed before confessing your privilege in such a situation because it would be terrible manners. If you’re around people with degrees and money, these declarations of your prior membership in the group are necessary.

The trappings of middle-class life aren’t privileges; they should be available to everyone, but their not being so is still not a requirement for people to confess before going about their lives in polite society. Demonstrating membership in the college-educated middle class is foremost about manner, taste, belief, and pedigree. Actions are irrelevant, unless they involve online reputation destruction.

The price and privilege of class climbing

I am a class climber, and I have no shame about it, especially because it is, supposedly, the American dream to have more than your parents did. Acknowledging class climbing would raise an eyebrow among the elite even as they say they want to support increasing social mobility for the bottom twenty percent of the wealth scale (where my parents were most of their lives).

One need look only to the founder of Bumble being called ‘the first self-made female billionaire’, except she’s not. She went to an expensive university, co-founded a company with three other men with degrees, and was then backed by another investor for Bumble. What is it to be self-made? I argue that only someone who started at the bottom can claim to be self-made, but this is a story we like telling ourselves to manage our guilt for having had a leg up. To start with nothing and become a billionaire is near-impossible, so we conveniently ignore that these people we consider self-made largely came from comfortable middle-class or above households.

So now, I chafe when people around me talk about privilege. Any person who grew up precarious would want economic security. When we finally find it, why are people like me also required to acknowledge that we have privilege if we started with none? I’m pretty proud of the life I’ve built, and even more so for beating depression. I was able to make this life because I somehow managed to climb despite not having a network to begin. Not much discussed is the fact that one must have disposable income even to access psychiatry and therapy, so even mental health care is only available to the well-off. In this vein, I’d have to say that I’m privileged for accessing the care even though it’s a right.

This is a call for anyone else who feels under siege by these concepts, especially if you are a white person who had to climb classes like I did, to argue against it loudly, even if you’re called names. This is because the left has succeeded in erasing the majority of the working class as irredeemable, which I find to be morally reprehensible. The impact of class comes before race and gender (I will make a more forceful argument in another essay), a point on which I’ve vacillated before under peer pressure, but no longer. Letting go of the idea of fitting is how I truly liberated myself in a way none of these paradigms could.

If it’s something I earned, I’m not going to pretend I didn’t; unspoken in the privilege confessional is that it was unearned. But a person who worked hard for a middle-class life and didn’t come from money has the right to live as they please, without guilt and shame. Most of us aren’t complicit in the systems that exploit labor but instead try to manage its effects on ourselves, whether we come from money or not.

Complicity with the system

Privilege Olympics are a form of self-absolution from the exploitative economic system in which we are all compelled to participate. I said economic, not racial, because exploitation today can only be located in the material, not the ephemeral power purported to predetermine every outcome. The effect of race being the impetus for discrimination is still material deprivation. For example, housing discrimination based on race results in deprivation for the black working class and depressed home values for black homeowners compared to whites. Losing one’s job because of racially motivated discrimination results in financial disaster. Financial position is a better proxy for disadvantage than the arbitrary categories of race and gender, the effects of which are not measurable or falsifiable. Logical approaches to these problems are essential.

Some of us are not compelled but choose to participate anyway. But there is no ethical capitalism, so can I blame the children of the professional class who go on to be McKinsey consultants? Maybe I can, because degrees of difference matter. I am not doing nearly as much harm to the world by implementing technology for hospitals as insurance industry lobbyists do. It’s not great that I participate. But in a society bifurcated by educational pedigree, it’s especially irrational for a socially mobile person to choose a field that pays too little to subsist. The best-paying jobs are often exploitation adjacent. But, I also argue the topmost of the managerial class is responsible for those things we blame corporations for doing, like polluting. The minuscule amount of people who decide what happens in the world are those whom the rest of the top twenty percent want to impress. Corporations don’t act; the people helming them decide what happens and the rest of us execute like the cogs we are.

A particularly hilarious example of the professional class choosing to ignore a person’s exploitative professional actions is from the 2020 protests when an Indian- American, Rahul Dubey, who worked as a lobbyist for America’s Health Insurance Plans at the time, housed protestors and was hailed as a hero for racial justice3. It’s emblematic of how we, the bourgeoisie, completely ignore the effects of our professions and attendant class solidarity while telling ourselves we’re compassionate by being ‘against racism.’

Suppose your position in the economic structure depends on the oppression of the working class. Are you doing right by black people at all, who happen to be disproportionately of that class? What does it mean for a working class black woman that we are against systemic racism?

Perhaps this is one reason a surprising amount of black and Latino men, mainly, are likely to vote for Trump; they, like Sanders supporters, might realize that race politics is a veneer for the managerial class’s efforts to transfer wealth ever upward to benefit the top echelon whom they hope to one day join. The price of admission is good manners and a pedigree. The Republican Party wants to fashion itself a working class party without a working-class agenda, but they’re winning the marketing game with black and Latino men.

I used to see myself as ‘brown,’ and now I can’t believe I ever did because I’m taking on a category that the educated imposed on me, which is a legacy of the racially discriminatory immigration legislation of the 1960s and later demographic classification efforts.4 Much like the British created Hindus and Muslims through censuses where the people would have used more specific, indigenous categories prior, the U.S. government gave us a race, which is really a mashup of national origin, ethnic ancestry and skin color. I’m not arguing for colorblindness but pointing to the absurdity of creating a taxonomy by mixing national origin, ethnic ancestry, and a socially constructed concept of race. It’s also unclear why race and ethnicity are separate concepts. These are not logically coherent categories if they’re examined for a moment, so I argue we should reject them entirely.

We still act in concert as an economic class, but it’s invisible, so we grasp that which is immutable and perceptible - melanin levels. Race is a social construct, and yet we insist on making it natural rather than, ahem, deconstructing it.

The adverse mental health effects of being ‘complicit’ with crimes you did not commit

I don’t usually comment on current events, but one is salient for illustrating why naming oneself as complicit is terrible for mental health. I’m not making a statement here about who is morally superior or what should happen because I purposefully never paid enough attention to formulate an argument about this conflict.

I am not complicit in Israel’s war crimes, nor do I bear any responsibility for the ongoing human tragedies that were not a result of my actions. I see everywhere online and in the media the mantra ‘we are complicit,’ particularly regarding the war in Gaza.

This might seem like a straw man, but all I keep thinking about is a woman I met at a party who admitted she is addicted to TikTok, doesn’t read5, and insists that people watch the news so that they can understand her ‘trauma’ regarding the war as a child of Lebanese immigrants who grew up in the United States. She also advocated for boycotting McDonald’s because of its pro-Israel stance even as she admitted her mouth was watering for the chicken nuggets someone had inexplicably brought to a party. I thought these kinds of people were caricatures, but I keep meeting them in real life. People claim peak woke is over, but I keep seeing it ‘in the wild,’ as it were.

I think people might benefit from not consuming news about negative events. First, one of the worst behaviors our brains have is to worry about that which we cannot; it creates anxiety and leads to actions one might later regret. Second, being glued to images of war increases anxiety and erodes one’s general sense of well-being. The news is not meant to be informative but to capture your attention, and negative stories are the most effective. Third, you are doing nothing useful for Gaza by calling for ceasefires into the void of social media. You are only harming your brain and signaling empty virtue. Fourth, you’ll end up distorting how terrible the world actually is (it’s not nearly as unjust as it once was).

Unplugging from the news is proper self-care. It’s not a privilege but a necessity for appreciating your short time on this earth. If we are lucky enough to be comfortable and well-fed, spending that time on our phones is illogical. I fear looking back when I’m old to my younger self, regretting all that time I once spent online. Having that perspective when you’re young and your life is ahead is challenging. But consider how your older self will think of your current self putting angry missives out there for likes (yeah, there’s self-indictment there).

You will be glad you did it. Regardless of how this makes me seem as a person, I refuse to consume news about any war, and I’m more emotionally stable because of it. War images, along with shouting into Instagram for likes, would trigger depression; social justice ideology is the fountain from which these mental health hazards have sprung. Try not consuming any news or social media for a bit. You’ll probably not miss it. With all that time, you could read 4-5 books a month.

In this vein, white people are also not complicit in slavery. They are not responsible for the actions of those who owned slaves generations ago. First, most white people didn’t own slaves because that was literal human capital only the richest could afford. Second, many white people of today are the descendants of European immigrants who arrived far after slavery was abolished. To hold all people without melanin today accountable for crimes committed by the ancestors of a small percentage of that population is illogical and creates divisions where we should have solidarity against economic exploitation across racial lines. It is unhealthy to view your fellow humans with that degree of suspicion and contempt. People should only be accountable for their actions. These are distractions from the project of fixing the material disparities around us.

Illustrating my example: I once thought like this, and it probably contributed to many unproductive and unkind interactions with white people. It also contributes to relational strife with those people I hold dear who are white, especially my partner. It takes a particular kind of mental gymnastics to both love and respect him and hate all white people. Brown women in relationships with white men often try to maintain their contempt for white people, something I once did. These mental gymnastics, though, are an expression of guilt and shame for one’s personal life not aligning with one’s stated beliefs. To be with a white person is not condoning ‘white supremacy’ nor is it a betrayal of my commitment to justice, or my somehow trying to be ‘white adjacent’. Letting go of this contradiction if you’re in that position is the healthiest thing you can do for your relationship, which matters more than what the Internet thinks.

In summary, my experience of cultivating a deep life has taught me that I cannot continuously feel guilty about being satisfied and for having access to resources, especially if I started with none. There are many things to discuss other than privilege that might help move the needle in reducing wealth inequality. But, the classed nature of the status games we play take up an inordinate amount of energy. Justice will not spring from confessions, guilt, shame, or linguistic sanitization. Instead, we ought to read about the topics that animate us and discuss them with friends so that the public discourse can improve. One has a right to the good life, but it requires many material changes in circumstance to achieve for most. Instead of wallowing in guilt, perhaps we ought to consider how we can work to increase class mobility like we claim to want; let’s not choose a corporate feminist candidate the next time we have the opportunity to elect a socialist.6

I don’t do this for money but to hone my craft and share ideas. If any of it resonates or makes your blood boil, please do comment or share with others who might find it useful.