Friday, May 18, 2012

Video-game metaphor to explain privilege

I totally recommend this article.  It's about "privilege", a term I've only ever heard in the context of feminism.  Basically the post gives a metaphor to explain privilege: Imagine your life is a video game.  "Straight white male" is the lowest difficulty setting.

(Let me add the caveat that this assumes you're in the US.)

I can understand why people don't like to hear the word privilege.  I had never heard anything like that until one day in college one of my friends said something about white people having an "invisible backpack of privilege"- for example, when you go into a store, it's more likely someone will come over and help a white person but ignore a black person.

And I thought, "no, that's not true" and I wondered if they were trying to say that white people are bad.  Because I had never heard of anything like that before.

So, that's all I'll say about that- I'll let you ponder whether "privilege" is real now.

Edit: The author of this posted a follow-up to address the reactions he was getting.  Check that out too.  ^_^

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