someone who would (like many of us living in wealthy, industrialized nations) benefit from making a greater effort to understand the effects of power and privilege.
Well, for one thing, privilege is a major source of bias, and when a person doesn’t even realize they (or those they admire) have particular types/levels of privilege, they’re going to have a harder time seeing reality accurately.
E.g., when I was younger, I used to think that racism didn’t exist anymore (that it had been vanquished by Martin Luther King, or something, before I was even born) and didn’t affect anyone, and that if someone didn’t have a job, they were probably just lazy. Learning about my own areas of privilege made it possible for me to see that things were a lot more complicated than that.
Of course it’s possible for people to go too far the other way, and end up totally discounting individual effort and ability, but that would fall under the category of “reversed stupidity” and hence isn’t what I’m advocating.
(And that’s all I’m going to say in this thread for now—need to spend some more time languaging my thoughts on this subject.)
What benefits might you expect?
Well, for one thing, privilege is a major source of bias, and when a person doesn’t even realize they (or those they admire) have particular types/levels of privilege, they’re going to have a harder time seeing reality accurately.
E.g., when I was younger, I used to think that racism didn’t exist anymore (that it had been vanquished by Martin Luther King, or something, before I was even born) and didn’t affect anyone, and that if someone didn’t have a job, they were probably just lazy. Learning about my own areas of privilege made it possible for me to see that things were a lot more complicated than that.
Of course it’s possible for people to go too far the other way, and end up totally discounting individual effort and ability, but that would fall under the category of “reversed stupidity” and hence isn’t what I’m advocating.
(And that’s all I’m going to say in this thread for now—need to spend some more time languaging my thoughts on this subject.)