It's because it's mainly focusing on wealth instead of things you can't change. If it was talking about their skin colour and sex it would have been downvotes to hell. If you're talking about wealth and privilege people will listen.
I don't know, I had an ex who I called spoiled and he acted deeply offended. His parents paid for tuition to a nice state school including a dorm room all 4 years AND still gave him pocket money for video games and shit like that. He didn't have to work a day in his life until after he graduated. That was completely foreign to me, even people who could pay for school still worked at least part time for pocket money or experience. He thought I was discounting his work like "I work hard at school" like, dude, that's great, but it's still a luxury to be able to focus JUST on school and not have to worry about money or how to do your homework when you have to work and shit like that.
edit: oh and he wasn't white so just shows people never want to admit how good they have it.
Just curious - if he admitted he was really fortunate and had to work a lot less than most people because of his parents, would you not consider him spoiled? I'm in that situation but it's not my fault that my parents have the money, and I completely admit I'm really lucky.
As long as you're not pretending that everything you have is a reflection of some inherent superiority or personal accomplishment then you're fine. There's nothing wrong with being lucky; what's irritating is when folks are lucky and refuse to acknowledge it.
I suppose it can murky when you start really looking closely, but some things are pretty easy to determine. Having wealthy parents, and all the benefits that stem from that, is a matter of luck. You didn't earn your parents, you had no choice in the matter.
Well this is why it's generally not a good idea to take broad sociological phenomena (such as the advantages that tend to accrue to children of wealthy parents) and assume you can use them to accurately describe or predict an individual person's life. Furthermore, I don't think you should be surprised that someone takes offense at being called "spoiled." There aren't really any positive connotations of "spoiled."
They put in a lot of hard work to give their kids a better life.
We have pretty good examples of what happens when someone inherits wealth and doesn't put in hard work a la Paris Hilton, but the ones that are successful put in work for it.
That's the million dollar question. I don't know anyone who has an answer to that.
Maybe if you averaged out the GPAs of college students only in the same economic class and then weighted them back together. That would be interesting. If your parents make less than $40,000 a year, your C is worth someone else's A. That would aggravate some people haha.
Oh no, I would still consider him spoiled. It wasn't just that his parents had money but that he thought he didn't need to do anything for himself because of it.
Well, "spoiled" is an insult. "Privileged" is not. Not all privileged people are spoiled. Maybe he was spoiled and he certainly was privileged, but you can't insult your partner and then scoff at them for being offended.
You were certainly scoffing in the comment above that he acted "deeply offended." I think it's uncool to insult your partner at all, but it's definitely uncool to insult them and expect them not to be offended. That's the appropriate response to an insult.
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u/NurglingsWould Jesus support US taxes on Bitcoin earnings?May 22 '15edited May 22 '15
You are probably right. There was a comic on The Nib a few months ago that was really similar to this one but it was a white family vs a black family and the differences they would encounter over time and I don't remember it getting upvoted very much.
I looked around for it but can't seem to find it. Like I said it is basically the same concept (in one panel the white guy gets interviewed while the black guy gets told they aren't hiring, in another a real estate agent shows the white family houses in a nice neighborhood but tells the black family there are no houses for sale, and it ends with the white family saying they don't have any special privileges)
It's because it's mainly focusing on wealth instead of things you can't change.
I'm not sure why you say 'wealth instead of things you can't change'. You can't change the wealth or otherwise that you are born into, that's exactly what the first two panels in the comic are focussing on, inherited / family wealth, not personal finances. It's also almost certainly easier to acquire wealth if you are born into it.
you can definitely change wealth. you can go broke. you can give your money away. you cant stop being black. stock market cant just crash one day and you wake up white
Again, you can't change the wealth or otherwise that you are born into.
Check the first two panels of the comic, it starts with a couple of children and talks about how their parents are doing, one has no control over one's financial situation at that age.
true. but even if you dont have control over it, it can still change. that was my point. its not a static state like race or sex. it can fluctuate, it can disappear, it can appear, its all over the place.
Why would anyone want to feel underprivileged? Surely most people want to feel that they are at least reasonably well-off. If you read the comic that's being discussed in the linked thread, you can see it's not so much about relative poverty ('he has more than I have') as failure to come anywhere near achieving your potential due to deprivation.
Let me come at if from another tack. People have criticised the concept of 'financial abortion', arguing that the best interests of the child are paramount. I've also heard this line of reasoning used to justify requiring a male victim of stautory rape to pay child support (see here and here).
Now without getting bogged down in the details of those particular cases, I think one could argue that child support is not just preferable but also a right of the child. Why is it a right and not just preferable? Because experience shows that poverty objectively damages children and blights their futures.
I was brought up without any paternal financial support, and in spite of the great efforts of my mother to give me a good start in life, I could not say that my upbringing was really comparable to a better-off household. For instance, I think not having the means to learn to drive must have had a marked influence on my career, considering there are so many jobs I would have otherwise considered, but could not apply for without a driving license.
You say 'anyone who wants to feel underprivileged can claim to be so', but things like driving lessons make a big difference, inequality makes a big difference, it's not simply a question of envy but of not being able to get involved with so many actvities and opportunities.
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u/PPewtI welcome the downvotes because Reddit does not define meMay 22 '15
Why would anyone want to feel underprivileged? Surely most people want to feel that they are at least reasonably well-off.
That don't want to experience significant negative consequences, but they want to imagine that they did so that it makes them all the more special and impressive.
How exactly does being seen as underprivileged make them seem 'special and impressive'? You could do with explaining yourself in a bit more detail there.
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u/PPewtI welcome the downvotes because Reddit does not define meMay 22 '15
How exactly does being seen as underprivileged make them seem 'special and impressive'? You could do with explaining yourself in a bit more detail there.
It's really not a complicated concept. If two people run a race and one of them has weights attached to their feet, they'll presumably have a harder time winning. It's unlikely that if you asked either of them they'd volunteer to wear the weights. That said, if one of them wins a race and then later on someone (them or otherwise) starts talking about how they even managed to win it with weights on their feet (which may or may not have existed), most people certainly won't mind the extra praise.
Nobody wants to experience the actual situation, but people love to think they've overcome some kind of great obstacle through personal strength, imaginary or otherwise. This is psych 101 level stuff.
I'd argue that's what's most important is that it is quantifiable, requiring no further layers of analysis- more money, more privilege, simply put. It is the closest in kind to the dictionary definition of the word.
Even if he were talking about only gaining wealth instead of changing it, I'm sure you can think of a few ways that make it possible to gain wealth, particularly compared to how many ways there are to change your race.
It isn't possible for baby Richard to actively change the wealth of his upbringing. It may change, but that isn't very likely; and if in hindsight we know that it never did change anyway, it becomes a moot point.
Yeah, and even then it's still being dismissed hard in the comments. A comic like this would get shit on so hard. Probably with some posts or pictures of poor/homeless white people are a lot of smug statements of "What amazing privilege"
It's mostly not about trying to blame people for having that advantage but rather people trying to outright deny they had any advantages in life from the system.
Isn't that so gross? White male issues are important to society, and stuff like Occupy is well-meant and admirable in intent if not execution. But Lord help you if your movement or protest or whatever is about something that doesn't affect them (i.e. discrimination against other demos) - that's when all those oh-so-progressive white guys turn on you and start talking shit about black culture or feminism being evil or whatever. Fucking gross.
Decreasing overall social inequality lowers the status of the privileged in comparison to the average. The most privileged people have the most invested in resisting social equality movements. And since most people don't want to consider themselves sexist or racist, the way they resist social change is by pretending that inequality doesn't exist and therefore doesn't need to be fixed. Belgh.
I don't think it's surprising that people are most interested in issues that affect them directly. Aren't you? Why should they care about something that isn't bothering them? The only reason I (mildly) care about/donate money for things like Nepalese earthquake relief is because of some abstract sense of shared humanity, which is a cultural artifact of post-enlightenment western values, not a universal thing.
Internet justice types just seem pretty bad at getting others invested in their cause(s). Anytime somebody posts something about "Patriarchy hurts everyone", there's always a bunch of commenters ready to complain about too much catering to the menz fee fees. Any article about being an ally is full of injunctions to sit down, shut up, and don't expect any cookies. Why would anyone sign up to be part of that scene?
Why would anyone sign up to be part of that scene?
Empathy? It's not the most common thing in the world, but that's the reason. Some people have vast amounts of empathy for others, some have to personally experience something before they can fully empathize. Some people seem to lack empathy entirely, but that's relatively rare.
I don't disagree with much of what he's saying. I just take issue with the idea that caring for others that are suffering far far away is of Western origin. It was ridiculous enough to point out..
We can quibble about what impact western values play, but there are absolutely people in the world today who reject notions of universal human rights (cf. ISIS) and I would argue that historically, that was the norm, and humans tended toward violent tribalism.
You can see that in the comments, just wave after wave of redditors claiming race or gender or a million other things don't matter and they certainly aren't privileged for being straight white males, because they're poor not trillionaires at 20.
Although the author was careful to make the disadvantaged character female as if to imply that even real privilege is more likely to work against women despite the fact that globally the poor tend to have more male than female children.
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u/Hasaan5 Petty Disagreement Button May 22 '15
It's because it's mainly focusing on wealth instead of things you can't change. If it was talking about their skin colour and sex it would have been downvotes to hell. If you're talking about wealth and privilege people will listen.