Then the correct response is to point out that X is hard/impractical/ineffective, supporting your point with evidence or plausible arguments.
Asserting to know better because of your incommunicable personal experience, quite possibly affected by confirmation bias and whatnot, is not a way of arguing, it is a way of refusing to engage in intellectual discussion.
I can imagine people frustrated from having to explain the same concept online for the hundredth time; always to someone else; often to people who genuinely don’t know, but sometimes to trolls. That’s the moment where people are likely to point to a FAQ. That’s why we have the Sequences here. Etc.
The problem is that the FAQ (or the Sequences) usually do contain the full explanation, and sometimes even a place where that specific explanation can be debated. But the sentence “check your privilege” does not. It is not replacing hundreds of explanations with one, but hundreds of explanations with zero.
(Sure, I could google what “privilege” means, but then I’d get dozens of explanations, sometimes mutually contradictory. And I don’t know which of the versions the person had in mind. Or it can say that privilege means X or Y or Z, and it may seem to me that neither applies to what I have said, and I don’t know which one of them was supposed to apply to me. -- As a loose analogy, it is better to link people to a specific article in the Sequences, than to Sequences as a whole.)
I guess the solution would be to write a good “Privilege FAQ”. One written by a rational person, which would explain ways how to use it but also how to not use it, encourage people to link to specific subsections of it, and perhaps contain a short commentary to the most frustratingly repeated specific misunderstandings.
(Problem is, creating a good FAQ is hard work, and it may not be the same fun as bullying random people online. -- This applies to internet debates in general, not just specifically about privilege.)
Then the correct response is to point out that X is hard/impractical/ineffective, supporting your point with evidence or plausible arguments.
Asserting to know better because of your incommunicable personal experience, quite possibly affected by confirmation bias and whatnot, is not a way of arguing, it is a way of refusing to engage in intellectual discussion.
I can imagine people frustrated from having to explain the same concept online for the hundredth time; always to someone else; often to people who genuinely don’t know, but sometimes to trolls. That’s the moment where people are likely to point to a FAQ. That’s why we have the Sequences here. Etc.
The problem is that the FAQ (or the Sequences) usually do contain the full explanation, and sometimes even a place where that specific explanation can be debated. But the sentence “check your privilege” does not. It is not replacing hundreds of explanations with one, but hundreds of explanations with zero.
(Sure, I could google what “privilege” means, but then I’d get dozens of explanations, sometimes mutually contradictory. And I don’t know which of the versions the person had in mind. Or it can say that privilege means X or Y or Z, and it may seem to me that neither applies to what I have said, and I don’t know which one of them was supposed to apply to me. -- As a loose analogy, it is better to link people to a specific article in the Sequences, than to Sequences as a whole.)
I guess the solution would be to write a good “Privilege FAQ”. One written by a rational person, which would explain ways how to use it but also how to not use it, encourage people to link to specific subsections of it, and perhaps contain a short commentary to the most frustratingly repeated specific misunderstandings.
(Problem is, creating a good FAQ is hard work, and it may not be the same fun as bullying random people online. -- This applies to internet debates in general, not just specifically about privilege.)