Comment by camperman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camperman | Hacker News Reader

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> Because men – and especially white, professional men – occupy a uniquely privileged place in society,

I don't know any white, professional men who got where they are because of privilege. It was all effort over many years together with sensible decision-making like finishing school, getting a job, not having kids out of wedlock, turning up to work on time, working hard, being honest and so on.

> Feminists have long argued that men see little need to help out more at home because they already enjoy all the benefits of marriage and fatherhood without having to put in the extra work.

What would feminists know about a non-feminist man's perspective on marriage and fatherhood? Non-feminist men also note that women aren't pushing for equality in physically demanding jobs on oil rigs, welding, construction and coal mining - because equality in the workplace is only for office jobs I guess.

> Their status as men is at once so valuable and so precarious that it must be won over and over again.

This is not a bad thing. The man guarding his village's perimeter from bandits can't fuck up or it costs people their lives.

> “Many professional workplaces involve a constant negotiation among men to establish a pecking order,” says Joan Williams, a feminist legal scholar

Yet another feminist quote. Why not ask some non-feminists for their opinions? This pecking order thing is entirely natural among men. Always has been, always will be.

I've never heard anyone claim that priveleged white men never work hard. Consider that other less privileged people may work just as hard yet see fewer opportunities for success. This is the concept of privilege as I understand it.

After getting vocational training, my aunt had to sue to get a job as a welder. After she was hired, she did well at it.

The privilege they are talking about is not some kind of explicit handout. It is a cultural background. It manifests as other people's exceptions, preconceptions, and even things like word choice and shared conceptual familiarities.

For instance, if you've ever seriously considered starting a business, then you're probably privileged. Because for someone like me, it is simply not a consideration. I don't know anyone who cares about business, let alone owns one. Never had any friends who know anything about business. I have no business vocabulary, and I have desire to acquire one. My concept of self-worth is more anti-business than it is business-driven. So I'm never going to start a business.

Does this mean I've not finished school? No. Didn't go to business school though. Does this mean I'm not hard-working? No. Don't work hard to make money though. Etc.

Now if my father had been a businessman, or If I'd grown up in a place where people cared about business, I might know a thing or two about how to do it. That background of experience is the privilege they are talking about.

I am privileged in that I understand machines, art, language, and education. Those privileges have directly and indirectly resulted in almost every success I've ever had. I am a white professional man.

Now you know one. And you probably know many others, if you'd come at this discussion from a position of understanding rather than from a position of defiance.

>What would feminists know about a non-feminist man's perspective on marriage and fatherhood?

What would someone who doesn't even seem to understand the concept of cultural privilege have to add to a discussion about cultural privilege?

>>What would feminists know about a non-feminist man's perspective on marriage and fatherhood? >What would someone who doesn't even seem to understand the concept of cultural privilege have to add to a discussion about cultural privilege?

I think what we seem to keep pointing out is that: the idea of cultural privilege is bullshit. It hasn't been proven. It doesn't exist. They won't even give us a solid definition that we could apply a scientific method. Therefore, any knowledge of the subject is moot. And, you ought to realize that the fact that you sit around thinking of ways to describe the chip on your shoulder is what's keeping you from this "privilege", not that someone has a wealth of opportunities that you do not.

There's been a few studies where identical resumes have been sent out with "white-sounding" and "non-white-sounding" names, with the white names getting more follow-up.

> They won't even give us a solid definition that we could apply a scientific method. Therefore, any knowledge of the subject is moot.

Geez, don't ever ask about a bus route in a new town. The person isn't going to be able to do a blind trial with a null hypothesis in order to tell you that the route 5 goes downtown, so you can't trust them.

Seriously though, you're talking nonsense. Cultural privilege has been shown time and time again. Hell, the whole 'colonialism' episode in global history revolved around the idea.

> There's been a few studies where identical resumes have been sent out with "white-sounding" and "non-white-sounding" names, with the white names getting more follow-up.

IIRC, that study finding didn't survive the replication crisis - the most recent resume studies didn't find bias against "non-white-sounding" names.

An optimistic interpretation of the discrepancy is that the earlier studies had picked low-class "black-sounding" names. It's hard to do this kind of study cleanly since names don't merely signify race, they also signify other things like socioeconomic status and age so to do it right you'd need to carefully validate that the specific names used don't differ in implications other than race; I don't think that has really been done yet.

(more here: http://datacolada.org/51 )

> if you've ever seriously considered starting a business, then you're probably privileged.

I under that definition: We can consider a huge percentage of minorities to be privileged. Business popups where there are needs.

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