Shorter Megan McArdle
Posted on January 8th, 2008 by Gavin M.
Above: Very important lecture that we are listening to
- Here is a test of whether one grew up privileged, which fails, methodologically, on several accounts — allowing me to quibble with a spooky and onrushing realization that I am a Manhattan-prep-school ‘libertarian’ who, by birth, has never had to move a muscle except to further empower herself.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
Penis?
Oh. I get it. She’s trying to use innuendo to get people to read her “article.”
Boobs.
Urgh. Part of why I loathe Megan so is that I’m also a child of privilege, and I had to spend the better part of the first two decades of my life watch those little shits abuse that privilege and create elaborate fantasy worlds where they weren’t genuinely privileged and/or inherently deserved what they had.
The “I didn’t have x!” argument is typically followed up by pointing to someone of truly vast wealth and saying “now they’re rich”. Then they have the servant bring out dessert.
*watching those little shits….
I know, no one cares, but I have to be harder on myself in my writing. Been lazy lately, no iz gud.
The fact is, ooooohh yyeaahhh. That’s the spot….yeeahh.
Shalom gentlemen! Have you ever considered a life in the Mormon faith? I hear it’s all the rage with GOP sock puppets who happen to be running for President.
I call Fake Saul!
Mostly because the comment is intentionally funny.
Oh, holy shit. She “learned to read at an early age”?
Being a good glibertarian, I’m sure she thinks she did that all on her lonesome too, via a perfect Galtian display of her own two year old will-to-power.
Here’s the deal: the first step in literacy is something called “print awareness”. It refers to a child becoming aware of the fact that books serve a purpose, that the symbols in books represent spoken words somehow, and that there’s a right way and a wrong way to use a book – that in English, words move up and down the page from left to right. For the children of the privileged, this stage in literacy is usually achieved well before kindergarten – because their parents both implicitly and explicitly teach it to them. Children of the privileged have plenty of opportunities to observe their parents reading – whether books, magazines, or newspapers. They live in houses where reading materials of all types abound, and they can observe what people do with them. They’re given those cute little vinyl “books” as infants to chew on. All of these things set the stage for later literacy.
I bet she thinks that because she can’t remember ever having her diaper changed, she was born pooping in the toilet, too.
All that money her parents didn’t squander on trips and cars for her, instead choosing to invest in her education – I wonder if there’s any way they can get it back?
Many of the things on the list have nothing to do with “privilege”, and in fact, I didn’t get them, because my parents poured pretty much all of their disposable income into educating me: vacations, for example.
Because, of course, the underprivileged also got vacations to visit far away relatives every year.
Well, I learned to read at an early age too, but it was because my conservative fascist parents didn’t have a freaking television set, & there was little else to do when I wasn’t toilet training myself.
If only I’d had television, maybe I would have been adequately socialized, & wouldn’t be posting on a commie website @ 0224. Whatever.
morning, Bouffant!
Pierre Bordieu, Distinction.
He was of course stupid & French and totally wrong because he did his stupid big head studies empirically by like talking to people and getting facts and stuff when instead he could have just like wrote the whole history of everything by being central to his point.
Sorry, he even spelled his stupid French name Bourdieu in that long face f***ot way like French people do. Stupid head. At best he was a liberal fascist, he was no real fascist like Daddy used to make.
McArdle is an ass, to be sure.
What I don’t get, though, is that on some blogs, Scalzi is getting just as much stick for his post as she is for hers. But Scalzi’s piece is rather good (especially its penultimate paragraph). This “privilege test” is stupid, even though Megan McArdle says it is.
To be filed in the “This cannot be for my personal experience has not been so” file.
So many “p-words” seem to fit this person….
pointless?
puerile?
petty?
pretentious?
paltry?
provincial?
prosaic?
preposterous?
plodding?
platitudinous?
pathetic?
pompous?
prissy?
phony?
pedantic?
piddling?
priggish?
Where to start?
From the comments on mm’s post is this gem from, presumably, the prof of the course that posted the privilege checklist:
Generalizing one’s experience to everyone’s experience is probably not the best way to understand difference.
Bwahahahahahaha! Oh, you mean little Meggie’s experience is not in any way representative of anything other than her own, in-no-way privileged childhood? Awesome.
It’s weird. When I was in grade/high school the kids engaged in prolonged pissing contests over whose daddy made the most money, who had the biggest house etc. When I got to college there was a correlation (among the rich kids) between wealth and appearance of wealth. If someone was always dressed in the same sweat pants and borrowing money you could bet a fucking chauffeur would come collect them at the start of break. But they would never talk about it.
I don’t know if I went to grade/high school with a bunch of jr. dickheads or if they were just the lower ranks of the upper class or what, but I associate discussions of privilege (what I have, didn’t have, don’t have, want) with snot nosed kids, not semi-adults who were always willing to serve a thirsty freshman drinks.
lolz!!zzzz (at 05:34 PST) – bien fait (if i remember french)
oh yeah fuck Megan and every other dishonest or willfully ignorant wingnut – even tho SN is teh funniez – these people get my blood boiling because someone somewhere takes them seriously….
It IS a pretty lousy test, actually, with too many dopey little problems and muddy little questions to overlook. I’m really not sure what the spatial representation of privilege is supposed to add to it, other than creating animosity in the room and causing those who advanced the most to become physically uncomfortable and get immediately defensive.
I’ve gotta figure that everywhere this exercise has been used, the person at the head of the room immediately turned around and started quibbling about books and vacations and televisions just like MM.
Most of yer underprivileged kids end up at Harvard.
Especially the ones like Megan, with anemic high school GPAs.
After all her nitpicking she acknowledges that “the circumstances of my birth and upbringing made it relatively easy for me to choose my path in life.”
I think maybe what people like McMegan are objecting to is the notion that an empirical outline of ‘privilege’ could be obtained through some cheap survey or poll or questionnaire.
Obviously, such a subject can only be explored via
(1) Sensitive reflections audio-recorded for an NPR featurette, preferably themed as a reflection prompted by a walk through one’s grandmother’s garden, one which involves a cute word-play on the word “privilege” which refers both to fortunes and to permissions, and of course very, very clear yet calm pronunciation of vowels with soft sibilants;
(2) A combination book review, poetry reference, and autobiographical essay for The New Yorker;
or
(3) A specially designed graduate course.
I don’t get the point about “being read to as a child” . . .
As a little kid during the 50s and early 60s, my Mom read me Rand’s Anthem and Asimov’s I, Robot. You’d think that woulda made me kinda sick and twisted.
Oh, right. It did.
McArdle: “I wasn’t read children’s books because I learned to read very young.”
Scalzi:” I learned to read when I was two; I read my own children’s books, thanks much.”
Wow. I never heard of spontaneous literacy before. Did this knowing spring fully-formed, in each case, from the tops of their pointy little heads?
And let’s see if I’ve got this straight: McArdle was not privileged growing up because in her set, to have a brand-new car at age 16 and a TV in one’s room were considered too “vulgar”? Huh.
Naw, I won’t get into how my family of five didn’t acquire a second car at all until I was in high school, and it was a real beater at that. Or how The Spouse and I managed to transcend our lower-middle/middle-class backgrounds by working our butts off so that our children DID get to have vacations that included stays in hotels and DID get to have their own TVs, and yet they managed to absorb the notion that to flaunt whatever “petit-bourgeois privileges” they had that others didn’t was sort of, well, vulgar. Or how my degrees come from a state university, which is apparently gauche as well, and yet if I had to, I think I could kick her unbearably smug-yet-clueless ass in just about any way that might be necessary. And that is centrally central to my point.
MzNicky: I learned to read at a fairly young age too; my parents say I started to learn to read around age 2, though my reading material was decidedly less classy (supposedly my parents found out I could read when I walked up to the TV at the end of an episode of ALF and started reading out words in the credits, and then confirmed I wasn’t just memorizing certain words by buying a pack of word flashcards from K-mart).
Then again, my family was pretty decidedly working-class (at the time, my father was a draftsman and my mom was an unemployed hairdresser). Indeed, this is central to Megan’s point.
I would be happy reading just a less gawky McMegan.
Above: Very important lecture that we are listening to
Who the hell ends a caption in a preposition?
“to have a brand-new car at age 16 and a TV in one’s room were considered too “vulgar”? ”
Just as it was in poor taste to force the servants to use the back entrance. You’re enlightened, you let them use the front door just like regular people. Megan’s family probably even let the maid call them by their first names. Megan is just like everybody else, except she understands how the world truly works, and that’s why she’s a libertarian.
I dated someone like this in college: she grew up in Manhattan, went to Horace Mann, and then to Princeton. She’d grown up in such a way that she thought of herself as middle class. She frequently wanted to do things that I could not afford to do (bear in mind that we were studying abroad in Northern Italy) and would get upset with me for not being able to do them. She felt I was using money as an excuse. I came from the Green Bay, Wisconsin, attended a public university, and had worked in a cabinet factory to save up money for the year. My financial limitations were real, but incomprehensible to her. More than ten years later, I’m still annoyed about this.
Later, I moved to Brooklyn, NY and I met many who came from a similar background and learned that New York City is the ultimate bubble and anyone from there who attempts to generalize from their experience there should be laughed out of the room. Anyone who isn’t struggling financially and lives in NYC is privileged to a degree; the city gives you a kind of access to things that isn’t available anywhere else.
It strikes me from reading both Megan and Scalzi that they’re so concerned with making sure everyone knows that they’ve “earned” their places and achievements that they miss the entire point of the test. It’s a tool for college students, who, as teenagers, tend to be a bit self-absorbed and unaware of things like “privilege”, so, in simple, graphic terms, it shows how people get a leg up, literally. They and their commenters seem to be stuck in a teenaged “It’s all about me” mindset. “I didn’t have x therefore I’m no privileged and therefore privilege doesn’t exist.” I’m sorry, if you have a house full of books and grew up reading, you’re coming into the world with a leg up on someone who didn’t. Not that one can’t overcome that and that there aren’t contributing factors, but in raw terms, you got a head start. Which is why there’s a program called Head Start that gets kids reading at an early age.
“to have a brand-new car at age 16 and a TV in one’s room were considered too “vulgar”? ”
Even though my family was decidedly middle class, I was fortunate enough to be blessed with a tiny B&W TV for my room and a used VW Beetle on my 16th birthday. It was not vulgar, or even because I was the spoiled youngest child (as my siblings like to suggest)–but because I was sickly. My parents were just happy that I was still around after the Dr’s told them I would never seen 14.
Just for the record, I was reading at a 5th grade level when I was a womb-baby. That is West by Northwest to my point.
That’s really bizarre, given what we know of libertarians and their typical broad, civic-minded thinking patterns.
You know, I thought that more people might be able to understand the point of the questionnaire here than on Megan’s circle jerk.
The point is that the questions are stupid, trivial and pointless in actually determining the state of “privilege” and instead it generates a heated and clarifying discussion amongst students that would normally just sit in the back of the class and attempt to absorb the gist of the lecture.
Discussion has been sorely lacking in academia, especially at the freshman level. This kind of face slapping questionnaire is exactly what is needed to break them out of their shells.
I think I got the points both of the questionnaire & the McMegan complaints. Hence my NPR parody suggestion.
Jillian, Jillian, Jillian…
You can’t assume to have rational arguments with Megan.
For the record, McMegan is by no means trying to claim she wasn’t priviledged. What she’s saying is she most definitely WAS priviledged, and yet many of the items on the list don’t apply to her.
It was Scalzi who was saying he wasn’t priviledged, and yet many of the items on the list DO apply to him.
They’re attacking the same point from two different directions.
-me
…New York City is the ultimate bubble and anyone from there who attempts to generalize from their experience there should be laughed out of the room.
There’s an entire sitcom industry based on generalizing experiences of New Yorkers. I think you’re onto something here.
If your motivation for not giving a brand new car to your kid for his or her 16th bday or having a TV in your kid’s room is out of some sort of aesthetic or socialite attempts at trying not to look like vulgar ‘new money’ rather than because you can’t afford to, guess what, you’re privileged. Sheesh.
My parents didn’t even own a brand new car themselves, they had two used cars that got periodically exchanged for newer used cars, and we didn’t even get to keep one for ourselves when we got in our teenage years because the meager remaining trade-in value was part of the new car budget… And we were a two *unionized* income family, so I’ve always felt quite privileged compared to many of my classmates.
Wouldn’t Jacqueline Massey Paisley Passey (est. height 5’8″*) be the shorter Megan McArdle?
*This is only a guess since her physically self-obsessed blog appears to be with us no longer.
What J said.
Having a television in your own room is a sign of poverty mostly to the less well remunerated castes of the lower-middle class, who always feel they should be pouring the money into something more worthy; it is not an uncommon sight among welfare families in New York City.
Oh, I see how this works.
See – welfare families in New York City live in one room, or perhaps a homeless shelter. So if you’re a child of a welfare family, if your family has a television at all, or if there’s one in the day-room of the shelter where you spend your days, ipso facto, you are a child who has a television in your own room! And thus – privileged! Unlike Meghan, who would consider such a thing vulgar.
Here’s another little-known trade secret: Sometimes, just every so often, professors assign texts whose arguments they don’t necessarily agree with.* Just to provoke discussion, if you can believe that. I’ve seen them do it. It’s wild!
*Behold my mighty sentence-ending preposition! It is central to my point.
I can never get past the ‘Asymmetrical Information’ part. Maybe if someone could explain that…
Aside from a youthful trip to Niagara Falls …
Niagara Falls! Slowly I turn, step by step, inch by inch …
I can see where using the questionnaire would promote discussion, Blinkyboy, but it’s the marching them through the room and turning them on each other that I have serious problems with.
I guess my pedagogical approach doesn’t involve so much “face slapping.”
God, I read both Meghan and Scalzi, and the Step Forward exercise.
Well, yeah, in many ways the exercise is flawed, but even for me – whose age makes the questions based on current technologies and buying patterns moot – I get the point.
Meghan and Scalzi seem to be arguing against it on the point of details. “My parents didn’t read CHILDREN’S books to me – they read BOOKS, so it doesn’t apply.”
Gotta love Meghan – her ability to read books at two came fully blown from her own mind. Right. Little tyke wanders off to Borders on her own one day and – the rest is history.
Compare this quote from the WSJ-
“A nation in which the poor are defined by an income level that in most countries would make them prosperous is a nation that has all but forgotten the true meaning of poverty. A nation in which obesity is largely a problem of the poor (and anorexia of the upper-middle class) does not understand the word “hunger.”
With this-
“John Scalzi has a rather scathing post up on the subject of the “privilege checklist” apparently deployed by professors at Indiana State to show their charges what a bunch of pampered sissies they all are.”
It’s not the poor students that are privileged it’s America’s poor & hungry.
Megan is a horrible person.
Also both Meghan and Scalzi can’t seem to understand that privilege and wealth are different things.
I’ve gotta figure that everywhere this exercise has been used, the person at the head of the room immediately turned around and started quibbling about books and vacations and televisions just like MM.
Yes, I’d bet on that.
MzNicky:
“Wow. I never heard of spontaneous literacy before. Did this knowing spring fully-formed, in each case, from the tops of their pointy little heads?”
First, my head is not pointy. It is delightfully slope-y, all the way around.
Second, the actual notation on the exercise was whether one had children’s books read to them by parents. I noted I have no recollection of my mom reading kid’s books to me, because I have no memory of not being able to read; however, mom did read books meant for adults to me (I remember particularly “The Good Earth” and — ugh — “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”) One of my criticisms of that particular “privilege indicator” and indeed the whole exercise is that it’s poorly written.
Re: spontaneous reading ability: Pretty sure I had help. But as I don’t remember not being able to read, I don’t remember what form it took. That said, certainly today one can learn to read without books. My daughter Athena received most of her pre-literacy help via computers and educational software; we gave her piles of the stuff because she had an early interest in playing with the computer, which we encouraged.
J:
“It strikes me from reading both Megan and Scalzi that they’re so concerned with making sure everyone knows that they’ve ‘earned’ their places and achievements that they miss the entire point of the test.”
Can’t speak for Ms. McArdle, but as for myself I’m well aware I’ve gotten a lot of lucky and unearned breaks and advantages in my life, nor have I been shy about owning up to that fact. I see the point of the exercise just fine: I merely think it’s very poorly done, and therefore, not likely to produce a genuinely useful discussion about class. It’s that old “garbage in, garbage out” problem.
My god, Megan McArdle ought to be thankful she lives in a country where a woman with the face of a horse’s ass is taken seriously for nothing more than having money.
I share a number of Scalzi’s objections: like him, for example, I wasn’t read children’s books because I learned to read very young.
“Learned to read very young”?
When was she planning on learning to write?
.
I think you guys are being a little too hard on Megan. I mean, nobody capable of typing a complete sentence would seriously use a phrase like “my ultra-privileged private school classmates” to argue that they were not themselves at least privileged (if perhaps not actually ultra-privileged).
But really, complaining that a brief questionnaire is woefully incomplete is like complaining that a bumper sticker or a rhyming protest chant lacks nuance.
Those of us like Scalzi and Meghan who went to elite coastal (or sort of coastal) universities will have fun picking apart why the questionaire “isn’t really a good metric of class.”
However, in context– presented to a bunch of students at a midwestern state school — it is an interesting barometer of the basics of privilege. The important point of the exercise is to point out that the environment you grew up in didn’t reflect “what everybody had.”
Scalzi and Meghan are trying to play “working class hero,” and in some sense, it’s not necessarily inaccurate for Scalzi, but he’s willfully trying to ignore the fact that he obviously had more cultural and social capital, starting out in life than a lot of people. What’s the problem with acknowledging that?
No doubt I would have been indignant at these sorts of exercises when I was a college student, but 15 years since my freshman year, I’ve stopped being so insufferable.
COME AND PET THE PUSSSAAYYYY
HEY HEY HEY
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COME AND PET THE PUSSSAAYYYY
HEY HEY HEY
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John Scalzi, nice use of “nor.” Did the WSJ leave out the bit on articles when it was teaching you? Also, work on adverbs — “merely,’ “poorly.” Not good writing! But we understand. You learned from grownup books.
Mr. Scazi: So, your point is that being read to from adult books rather than from children’s books somehow negates the idea that having been read to at all as a child counts as being “privileged”? Is that it? Or what?
And yeah, however you acquired that particular skill, you had help.
“…it is not an uncommon sight among welfare families in New York City.” That really pissed me off. One, it stereotypes the poor that reinforces their little libertarian fantasies. Two, what the fuck does she know about welfare families?
The hell with all that. Check out this episode’s podium.
Now THATS a real upgrade…
mikey
“presented to a bunch of students at a midwestern state school”
Because those who go to midwestern institutes of higher learning can’t be privledged? I think my friends who went to prep school at Hotchkins before attending university in the midwest would beg to differ. And those who came from old, old money.
Not all people who go to a midwestern state school are dirt-poor D+ students.
This is teh funny. I think that Scalzi thinks that since he doesn’t remember being helped to learn to read – he musta done it all by himself.
You’ve got wingnut logic (evidence by anecdote is fine by me), rationalization (well, my daughter plays with the computer by herself too!), gap-fillerz (phase one- be born. phase two…? phase three: READING!), mindless meaningless objections that are not germane to the point (my parents read me Johnathan Livingston… blarggh Seagull).
The full range of the North American Grasping Wingnut in 500 words or less… nicely done.
The fact that he named his little girl Athena (she who sprang fully-grown from Zeus’ melon) and uses her as an anecdote is pure wingnut comedy gold.
My anecdote: my family were from dirt poor backgrounds. My dad was a no-shit son of immigrants from a dirt poor country where everyone’s name ends in a vowel. My mom’s dad cleaned cars at Chula Vista Chrysler for thirty years. My dad went to a state college that taught him how to drive ships (previously he had been a fisherman, and the son of fishermen, for like 500+ years). My mom dropped out of the state teachers’ college.
They bought a book when I was born called “Give Your Child A Superior Mind,” and my mom labeled every damn thing in the house, and went around the house reading the labels to me. I too, learned to read at a young age, doubtless thanks to this kind of help. I got a scholarship to a fancy-pants private college on the west coast with lots of trustafarians.
Somehow I still fucked it all up and ended up enlisting in the Army to play with explosives. You can’t escape your origins, I guess.
Because those who go to midwestern institutes of higher learning can’t be privileged?
No because of the precise opposite region– that in such environments, the differences will be starker and simpler.
People with academic background like Scalzi, Meghan, and I have no problem picking apart the subtleties of how the test might “fail” under certain conditions we’ve been exposed to (is the child of immigrants from Queens who attends a catholic school and visited her relatives in the old country several years ago more “privileged” than the child who went to Beverly Hills High School and vacations in Tahoe? Or how about the child of middle-income professors who went to an elite private school? Is he less privileged than the child of investment bankers?)
In simple terms it works. Scalzi and Meghan are claiming that, by virtue of their own provincial experiences, that it’s unfair to point out the difference in “privilege” involved when in a lot of cases, as you mention in your own example, it works pretty clearly.
Hey,
I like slamming megatron as much as the next sadly noster, but a lot of the commenters are way off base. In that post, Megan was making the point that she DID have a privileged upbringing, even though her family didn’t take vactions, buy her a car, etc. She’s actually making a reasonable point.
MM provides more than enough fodder for ridicule, there’s no need to make stuff up.
Hmm:
Your snark is adequate, but comment thread grammar pedantry is so 2002. Please try harder next time.
Tyro:
“Scalzi and Meghan are trying to play ‘working class hero,’ and in some sense, it’s not necessarily inaccurate for Scalzi, but he’s willfully trying to ignore the fact that he obviously had more cultural and social capital, starting out in life than a lot of people. What’s the problem with acknowledging that?”
Well, again, I’m not sure how I’ve not acknowledged this; I went to an excellent private boarding school and the University of Chicago and since then I’ve led a pretty much charmed life. I’m pretty above board with all that. That said, I don’t necessarily agree that this exercise is indicative even for for benighted current or prospective Indiana State University students. I currently live in a small, rural and largely poor town in Ohio; most of the teenagers around here have cell phones and wouldn’t see having a phone in their room as an indicator of privilege (because why would you have a landline when you a cell phone).
This is one example, but it’s an example indicative of a larger issue with the exercise, which is that I think many of its privilege indicators are outdated, and some useful current indicators of privilege (for example, adequate health care) are neglected entirely. The issue isn’t, as Grand Moff Texan notes, that the exercise is incomplete, but that what is there isn’t, in my opinion, very accurate.
MzNicky:
“So, your point is that being read to from adult books rather than from children’s books somehow negates the idea that having been read to at all as a child counts as being ‘privileged’?”
No, my point was that particular example was badly worded; as a result, an exercise meant to identify privilege missed something it one assumes it would consider privilege. One of the several structural problems with the exercise, which would lead to bad results, which would lead to poor discussion.
Err…
Make that Hotchkiss and privileged.
Darn work interfering with my blogging.
Even shorter McAddled: “Screw you, buddy. I got mine!”
Political unrest stabilizes society yes.
and I must confess
When you step to it, step to it hard
it’ll open up so don’t bogart
The p- the u- the s- and another s- y
pet it and you will decide
The fate of this entire nation
when it comes you’ll get total elation
Step to the l.i.p.s
pucker up and press
Your lips to the lips of the funk between the hips
Naw, this ain’t no dis
Time to stand erect and gain entry
to the richness that waits within see
We gotta work hard if we wanna groove it
and I’m in it to win it so let’s do it.
I have my own problems with that test. It’s a good idea for provoking discussion, but leans heavily towards two things–educational background and, less importantly, material goodies–which I guess are good indicators of whether you’ll do well in school but not whether you are actually privileged.
A family background that’s middle-class and values education or a working-class one that really values it could account for what the test calls “privilege.”
Goodies like a credit card, a new car or skiing vacations indicators that your parents have money or are willing to spoil you.
Marks of real privilege would be things like:
How much leisure time you and everyone around you had growing up
How you all spent it
What social connections you, your friends, your parents, and your parents’ friends have
Are you and your set deferred to or at least listened to in general?
Are you and your set deferred to by traditional authority figures (teachers, cops, priests, etc.)? What about if you get into trouble? Does the problem “go away?” Can you expect it to do so in the future?
Vague, I know, but those things explain how a kid can grow up to be vain, stupid–an absolute waste of space–yet still make a comfortable living and perhaps even find an audience.
She can grow up a sociopath (or even a psychopath) but never see the inside of a jail. He can be dumb as a bag of broken hammers and still get into a good university as a legacy or into a college of the dumb rich (HT to the late Spy Magazine) if he’s not one.
Aw, man, KOA. When my dad packed us into the wagon for a road trip from Houston to Sacramento (to see relatives), I really, really wanted him to detour to Kingman because the KOA there had cabins that looked cool and Fifties-y in the watercolor-wash illustrations. They looked like campers without wheels in a Lileks kind of way (it was 1971 or so), but Kingman was too far out of our way. Then our health dropped to zero and we died of cholera.
The KOA still exists and it has cabins but they just look like little log cabins now.
Look – privilege is real.
The exercise, while I can nitpick all day (I’m good at that, so are most people I know) is good to get 18-22 year-old to talk about the kinds of disparity present in our society.
One of the interesting points in the materials for the course (and which I found interesting b/c it was a little bit of self-awareness I didn’t get until Basic Training (past age 30 for me) was the bit that went:
“you’re all in the same place now, but you got here by wildly different pathways.” Or something like that. My drill sergeant was more succinct. He used to say “Nobody joins the Army for the hell of it. Everyone’s got a reason.” I had mine.
But one thing I never did learn at my fancy-pants college was that college wasn’t the end of privilege. Yes, I have a fancy-pants degree. B.A. Whoopee.
If you can tell me what Periclean Athens has to do with the way an M60 fuze functions I’m all ears, otherwise I’m going to stick to my conclusion that I’m not really using my education, other than in the sense of being all educated and shit.
Anyhoo- yeah, working off-campus sucks at a college that prides itself on its academic rigor and you’re the only person out of 1,500 students that has an off-campus job. And then when you find out that there are these things called internships, which you can’t take because you’re working for free, and you can’t afford to work for free because you have to earn money to pay bills and your share of the tuition + fees + room/board.
I can sympathize with the person who worked in the cabinet shop, because I had pretty much the same experience, only with more people.
And, yeah, I joined the Army to pay off my student loans (the scholarship didn’t cover everything).
My mom taught me to read with Dr. Seuss books.
I have fond memories of “Green Eggs and Ham”.
I think many of its privilege indicators are outdated
No argument with you there. Also, your first thought was the same as mine– after reading the post, I immediately remembered my independently wealthy English teacher. I’d mention the specific upper-class passtime he was apparently a world champion in, but that would give too much of my identity away.
If you read some of the later versions, however, you can see that the professor updated it to keep up with the times (specifically regarding the landline thing).
Class is a subtle thing: anyone who’s experienced class tensions with their friends and acquaitences can certainly find examples where two people differences in income level or even education quality/reputation might have opposite differences when it comes to class.
But I still don’t think the class exercise was wrong or even an unfair demonstration of many of those differences, in gross terms.
Not that I’m bitching. I get to blow things up on an almost daily basis, fulfilling almost every child’s dreams.
I’m sure I’ve written this before but everyone should read Class.
A family background that’s middle-class and values education or a working-class one that really values it could account for what the test calls “privilege.”
To a large degree, that is the point. Children of middle- and working-class families might remember growing up and think, “our family didn’t have a lot of money. we weren’t that privileged,” when, in fact, they had a lot of advantages that lots of people didn’t have at all.
I wonder, though, if you could do a two-dimensional exercise which differentiated both social/academic privilege and economic privilege.
Incidentally, I don’t think privilege is bad. In fact, I think that there are a lot of privileges, like easy access to books, high value for education, and encouragement to follow the most challenging academic path you can that all people should have.
Cool. I only get to do that on New Year’s Eve!
The good thing is that at best, some Americans will become vaguely aware of a few varieties of social and economic class stratification, but we will remain determinedly and blissfully ignorant of that bizarre yet somehow important group comprising the actual U.S. upper classes.
This comparatively tiny category of generational centi-millionaires and billionaires, who wield enormous influence over national and international policy, who have created and dominate many of the very institutions which many of us broadly think of as American public life, will continue to go unexamined while the much larger groups will explore in endless detail the microscopic factors which set them apart.
You know, I felt pretty good about my upbringing until I took this quiz. Man, my childhood sucked!
And what’s this question about whether you were the “same or higher class than your high school teachers”. How the hell should I know? I remember Mr. McAllester in geometry used to wear these funky plaid polyester pants, and stuffed his pockets so it looked like he had goiters on his thighs. I’d like to think I was higher class than that.
(X posted at Roy’s place).
A short essay I could have included in the comment above if I wasn’t so disdainful of you proles.
http://www.pbs.org/peoplelikeus/resources/essays6.html
bjaques:
Honolulu is like dat. Oahu makes fireworks legal for like three days at the end of the year and everyone goes apeshit and demonstrates why fireworks are generally inaccessible to the general public here.
Re: that CD.
Fireworks are not technically explosives, but a very-rapidly burning propellant (the distinction is slight to the lay observer… but that’s a topic for another day). So, because what you’re getting is a rapid burning rather than an actual explosion, air and pressure is pushed out pretty close to a perfect sphere – not much breaking or cutting effect.
Putting the firecracker in the hole inside the disc was the right call. The black powder pushed the cardboard case (and air) outward, breaking the disc. Another way to do it would be to initiate burning of the disc itself using some medium that burns at high enough temps to ignite the disc (shouldn’t be too much since they’re coated in plastic).
I’m not recommending this, but if a person were to take the balls out of a Roman candle and place them on a disc, pour some black powder over them, maybe with a little lighter fluid, and then stretch a gunpowder fuse three or four feet (a meter) to ignite the whole thing, I bet you could make one of those discs disappear entirely.
Oregon Guy:
“The full range of the North American Grasping Wingnut in 500 words or less… nicely done.”
Why, thank you. Of course, the flaw in this comment is that I’m nowhere close to being a wingnut; you’re pulling that particular assumption out of your ass, I imagine, because I was linked to by Ms. McArdle. You are welcome to visit my personal site to correct your ignorance on that particular score.
As for my argument being anecdotal and relating to my own experience, obviously so; if you were to read my entry on the subject, you’d see that I note that quite explicitly. The problem with the exercise is that it’s written poorly enough that I suspect any one taking it would find it generates inconsistent results — i.e., some things assumed as being privileges being not privilege at all, and vice versa, and any attempts to create a general picture of class and privilege with the exercise will get drowned out in the anecdotal noise.
Coloring all the discussion here, I suspect, is the assumption (based on Ms. McArdle linking to me) that I have some political problem with the exercise. I don’t. I have lots and lots of structural problems with the exercise.
Tyro:
“If you read some of the later versions, however, you can see that the professor updated it to keep up with the times (specifically regarding the landline thing).”
Not to put to fine a point on it, but those updates showed up after I posted about my complaints about it, and the piece I wrote started getting linked to. On one hand, I think it’s nice the professor in question is trying to keep up with things; on the other hand, it doesn’t reassure me that the exercise is at all rigorously constructed.
Which is, mind you, my primary issue with the exercise. If you are going to have a substantive discussion of class, it helps to have tools that are worth damn. I can’t help think this exercise is just slapped-together huggy-feely wallpapering of an issue that should be treated with substantive complexity. The discussion (and the students who are made to participate in it) deserve better.
Doctorb Science wrote, ” … complaining that a brief questionnaire is woefully incomplete is like complaining that a bumper sticker or a rhyming protest chant lacks nuance.”
Yeah, you’ve got a good point. I’m going to stop harrumphing to myself about it …
Not to put to fine a point on it, but those updates showed up after posted about my complaints about it, and the piece I wrote started getting linked to.
Really? In that case, as a product of academia who holds a Ph.D., I want to apologize for my academic cohorts for being so clueless (really? That landline question was still being used for freshmen who were born in 1989?). However, I will blame this not on ivory-tower cluelessness, but rather on terminal grampa-ism of the sort that invariably tends to infect the sort of people who put together “group exercises.”
But yes, you’re right– if you’re going to do such an exercise like that, don’t be clueless and anarchronistic. And when someone points out all the horrid flaws, don’t retreat to using the “well, it accomplished its goal, which was to promote dialog” excuse.
Tyro:
“And when someone points out all the horrid flaws, don’t retreat to using the ‘well, it accomplished its goal, which was to promote dialog’ excuse.”
Agreed.
Sorry John, you came across as wingnutty. And being cited by glibertarians didn’t help. Gotta say its fun to have someone come by and banter. Wish you’d say somethin.
Oregon Guy:
“Gotta say its fun to have someone come by and banter. Wish you’d say somethin.”
I enjoy pie!
There, that should do it.
I’m still personally confused about the “naming his child Athena = wingnut” thing, myself.
There’s nothing objective about the trappings of class. They’re culturally invested, and wouldn’t be useful for spitting on one’s inferiors if they came from some other culture. But, outside that context, they wind up looking pretty stupid. For instance, the northeastern WASPish tendency toward anglophilia looks pretty stupid down here in the South.
.
Scalzi:
“Try harder”? I’m not the one being linked to by hatchetface. Please, you try harder. And get right with “nor.” It loves you. It’s always loved you.
That landline question was still being used for freshmen who were born in 1989?
I don’t have a cellphone. Why should anyone else? They just use them while they’re trying to run me over with their automobiles.
P.S. I don’t have a car, either. Kids these days. Harumph!
Privilege is pretty complicated and very real, and I imagine that all of us consider ourselves reasonably privileged, assuming we grew up in developed countries. I mean, even my students growing up below the poverty line are “privileged” compared to kids working in factories 12 hours a day.
My folks had working class jobs, but they had middle-class values and aspirations, so huge privilege for me. Also, I grew up in Canada with the benefits of socialized medicine (literally saved my life in childhood) and a really cheap secondary education system ($3,000 a year tuition – most of it refuned in scholarships). At no time in my life have I been wealthy (by North American standards), but I’ve been hugely privileged.
Hmm:
“I’m not the one being linked to by hatchetface. Please, you try harder.”
It’s a free IntarWeebThingy, Hmm. People may link to whom they please, and I’m pleased to have whomever link to me.
And personally, I think Ms. McArdle is kinda cute. And a U of C alum!
And personally, I think Ms. McArdle is kinda cute. And a U of C alum!
You’ll have to get in line with Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein.
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©:
“You’ll have to get in line with Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein.”
Well, and there’s also the matter of Mrs. Scalzi. Ms. McArdle is safe from me.
First, my head is not pointy. It is delightfully slope-y, all the way around.
Including the brow, apparently.
And personally, I think Ms. McArdle is kinda cute.
In a “wet shih tzu who just sucked a bagful of lemons after sitting on a tack” kinda way, I’m sure she is.
But hey, I’ve actually dated a woman, so she’s all yours!
I’ve always liked John Scalzi, even though he admitted internet friendship with Instapundit. but on the other hand he and Wil Wheaton are internet friends! Humans are so confusing!
anyway, thanks for coming by Mr. Scalzi. I enjoyed your contributions.
Actor212:
“Including the brow, apparently.”
Thank you! I was wondering how long that soft lob was going to hover there before someone spiked it.
“I’ve actually dated a woman”
Harassing the mannequins at Macy’s hardly counts.
Kathleen:
Thanks!
(supposedly my parents found out I could read when I walked up to the TV at the end of an episode of ALF and started reading out words in the credits, and then confirmed I wasn’t just memorizing certain words by buying a pack of word flashcards from K-mart).
I learned to read from paint cans and boxes of wallpaper paste. But I don’t really like games of Four Yorkshiremen, either; they’re just the flip-side of ‘privilege tests’.
Ideally, in college environments where people come from different backgrounds, you learn and challenge your assumptions by talking to each other in non-academic settings. That’s easier in tighter surroundings, and easier still in places where fee structure, admission policy and campus size mean that a certain amount of clipping hasn’t already taken place.
In a midwestern state school you have a degree of clipping, but also a degree of levelling. So I’d lean towards Tyro’s position: the test is obviously dated, but there’s value to the exercise in a 10,000-student campus where one is likely to see degrees of conscious and unconscious stratification from the moment students arrive..
(Scalzi’s old post on growing up poor is one for the ages, btw.)
tip of the hat to doctorb for bringing the Fear of a Black Hat
Harassing the mannequins at Macy’s hardly counts.
You call those women? I’m not surprised. I’ve seen your latex bill.
Thank you! I was wondering how long that soft lob was going to hover there before someone spiked it.
Well, gee, John, there were so many ways to go with that one that, well, it’s like standing in front of a smorgasbord with a doily and a toothpick. You want to make sure you get the best damn bit possible.
actor212:
“I’ve seen your latex bill.”
Hey, now. That’s a legitimate business expense. That’s what I’m telling the IRS, anyway.
Hey John – I’m in the office today, which means that I can be online but which also means I have to be brief (I work for The Man, you know). I’ll read your blog and comment there. Sorry if I was a prick. I can be a prick sometimes.
WRT “Athena,” the excerpt makes it look like you are claiming that you are self-taught insofar as reading is concerned, and gave rise to an irony freebie.
You mention your daughter, Athena. Wingnuts are unduly fond of the classics (see, e.g. Victor Davis Hanson & Max Boot). Athena is: (a) a classical name, and (b) an individual who is purported to have sprung, full-grown and armed for battle, from Zeus’ noggin. Which struck me as funny given an apparent claim of self-taughted-ness. Cos, see, yer daughter is gonna be self-taughted just like you was, and she’s named after the ultimate in precocity, the goddess of wisdom and righteous battle her own damn self.
And it really sucks to have to explain a pretty obvious joke. It wasn’t that much of a reach, was it?
I mean, really.
Webb and Chicago and that one flew by you, huh.
Well, I might make fun of you here for that, even if you aren’t a wingnut.
But I don’t really like games of Four Yorkshiremen, either; they’re just the flip-side of ‘privilege tests’.
Apologies if it looked like I was trying to be the Nega-Megan by flaunting some bizzarro-privilege. I’ve just always thought it was an amusing story.
Privilege is pretty complicated and very real
I suspect that’s part of the problem with the exercise – privilege is a loaded word, and it would immediately put one’s back up.
If the point of the exercise is to show how some people have “a step forward” fine, but using the “privilege” leads immediately to computations of economic well-being, and I think that shortcuts the issue.
And, unfortunately, my goddam computer refuses up download some of the stuff at that site, so I can’t read it yet.
The quibbling on Meghan and John’s sites highlight how people have short-cut to economic well-being – Someone quibbles about how you can stock your home with books for free or cheap if you want – That’s certainly not the point – the point is that you value books, however much they cost, as an essential part of your home life.
The same person nitpicks the question about having “original art on the walls of your home” – just the fact that one would recognize something as “ART” is a marker – although probably because we here in the west know very little about the relationship non-western people have with beautiful things created by human beings – in fact, our vision of art is probably far more cramped and limited than that of the average person in the developing world.
But by the same token, to compare the range of experiences in this Western society that would produce a classroom of kids at a university – yeah, an art question is revealing. Most people hang purty things on the walls of their homes. Do they think of them as “art?” Does it matter if its a unique piece, or a reproduction?
Oregon guy, I am somewhat familiar with the rigors of getting a pyrotechnician’s license in the state of CA. If you’re a pyrotechnician, my hats off to ya!
I agree that the landline in the bedroom question is probably not pertinent. I propose to substitute it with the following question: Do you now, or have you ever thought Rush rocked?
Oregon Guy:
“Wingnuts are unduly fond of the classics –”
Eh. I guess. Since you bring up both Webb and the U of C in an attempt to snark at me about them, I’d note that both schools make a priority of teaching their students the canon of Western Civilization. As a consequence, I know as many liberals conversant in the classics — and appreciative of them — as I know conservatives who are the same. Indeed, to some extent more so, since most of the liberals I know read original sources, whereas a lot of wingnuts I know learned much of what they know via Ayn Rand and her unseemly Aristotle fetish.
I’m aware of conservatives liking the classics, but it’s not an exclusive thing, and I find the association of the classics with only conservatives to be pernicious. I am as conversant as any wingnut in the classics, as is, say, Josh Marshall, who was my classmate at Webb, or my college friend Howard Wolfson, who is the communications director for the current Clinton campaign. I would be delighted to hear how they are somehow wingnuts.
I don’t see “naming daughter Athena = wingnut”; I do see “naming daughter Athena = classically educated,” but as noted above I don’t see those two concepts as anything close to the same thing. Of course, it could also just be “naming daughter Athena = Greek ancestry,” too; we get asked that a lot, actually.
In any event, my daughter is named Athena for a couple of reasons: One, it’s certainly an aspirational name, and one we hopes she takes to heart, to seek knowledge and also to defeat that those who’d try to tear her down. Two, it’s the only name out of a couple hundred we went through that both I and my wife liked as a girl’s name. It’s a damn good thing Athena wasn’t twins; her sister probably still wouldn’t be named (actually, that’s not true; we probably would have named her Sophia, which if you know your Greek would be thematically consistent).
Also, as an aside, Athena does indeed do quite a bit of self-directed learning; in the last couple of weeks, in fact, she taught herself the names of all the states and their capitals without any prompting from her school or her parents. Why? Because among other things she wanted to learn all the words to this. Needless to say, I was delighted.
I had a dog named Phaedra once.
To be fair, there may be a great difference between the right wing loudmouths who proclaim their worship of Western Culture and Our Great Cultural Heritage and those who bother to actually either acquaint themselves with the works or follow its traditions of discourse and rationality.
It is similar to the wider culture: it is a lot more common for people to express some degree of admiration for Shakespeare, by repeating what we have all heard as well-worn praises and pop culture references, than it is for them to read or listen to or watch or attend Shakespearean works.
MzNicky: And if the doggie was good, and if the doggie was not good — needed we anyone to tell us these things?
Oregon guy, I am somewhat familiar with the rigors of getting a pyrotechnician’s license in the state of CA. If you’re a pyrotechnician, my hats off to ya!
Oregon Guy’s Eleven Bravo, g. You know, troopy mctroops. And I for one support the shit outta him.
I’m an, er, unlicensed pyrotechnician in California. And an amateur pharmacologist. Not to mention a freelance astronaut…
mikey
El Cid: I plead undergrad English-lit major pretentiousness. It still makes me cringe.
Thanks, OG! Man, that sounds sweet! One of these years, if I could afford the time and money, I’d take a fireworks tour of the world–Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, Holy Week in Spain, 4th of July (somewhere in the US), that fireworks contest in Mexico in September, back to Amsterdam for the New Year.
I may try something like disassembling a roman candle next year, or maybe not. It may not *look* like it, but I do try to avoid raining flaming debris down on people on the street. It’s tricky, since I don’t really get to experiment until a few hours before the fun begins. Also, the cops may clamp down since a stray skyrocket (via a window) torched the top three stories of a grand house on the canal. Luckily, nobody was in it.
I think it’s more that wingnuts *fetishize* the classics but don’t actually read them, or they just use them to beat their enemies with. Ayn Rand illustrated both by incessantly ranting about A=A and hating on Immanuel Kant. Speaking of classics, too bad she and Steve Ditko never met.
Anyway, resolved: this house believes the Privilege Test is mostly a failure, for a lot of reasons.
Really off-topic: we’re getting CNN Int’l coverage of the primaries and 1-2 am is covered by Lou Dobbs. *Every goddam night* he’s dragging illegal aliens into it. WTF?
MzNicky: Like many I first encountered the extracted quote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in high school.
Oh ho ho. My child of privilege is out of the house. Which is why I’m trolling the intertoobz for pictures of Britney Spears’ meltdown – I don’t need to pretend to be high brow any longer!
El Cid: Ha-ha! I wondered what you were talking about. I never read that there Motorcycle Maintenance book. And yet I claim the DFH label.
Actually I was referring to the Euripidean drama
Hippolytus.
I was going through my comparative-lit requirements at the time. My friends ridiculed me and insisted on calling the poor dog “Fluffy.”
bjacques: The fact is, Lou Dobbs is an egotistical bloviating racist sack of uselessness. Immigration is his business—his only business.
John Scalzi:
My hoity-toity undergraduate school was in Clareville. I know about Webb. Everyone knows about U of C. Well, a certain *kind* of everyone, right?
Mikey – not 11b – I’m not *that* crazy! 89d – the guys that make the boom-boom go bye-bye. So pyrotechnics are more of a sideline for me. What I find exciting can only be found in high-quality HE. Thanks for having my back, man. I’ll buy you a bottle of whiskey or seven whenever I meet you.
And John, I think you are either intentionally obtuse or maybe just a little bit ol’fashioned obtuse.
Look, if Vic D. Hanson were ever to have sex with a lady, and she got pregnant, and didn’t abort it because she didn’t want to carry Vic’s demon spawn to term, and Vic had a father’s role to play, and the baby girl was born, and she might have even been a cute little baby girl, and Mom though Athena was a cute name (rather than the sports mascot for the ladies’ teams at Claremont-Mudd-Scripps) she might even let him name the little girl Athena.
I’m giving you shit, John, and there’s nothing wrong with naming your girl Athena, and I’m sure she’s a wonderful girl. But if you were a wingnut getting cited by Megan McGlibertarian in a blog post, and you were on friendly terms with the Ole Perfesser, well, you might be a wingnut who fetishizes the classics.
Oh, bjaques – remember, I NEVER RECOMMENDED THAT YOU DO ANYTHING. YOU DIDN’T HEAR IT HERE. (and if you do it, do it on concrete with a water source handy, but don’t pour water onto the roman candle balls b/c they are usually a heated metal that will shatter explosively when you pour water on them. Use wet sand. Much more gooder. Also, I wouldn’t send anything flying unless you were damn sure you knew where it was going to land. That’s why you take the balls out of the roman candle. I’d put the whole shebang on a plastic frisbee on a lake or a pile of damp sand with no one within a 10 meter radius. I’d also use wrap my confection in a thing of duct tape. But then again, I should know better.
Hey, the power went out on post today, and there was nothin’ to do, so we went home. And its a beautiful fuckin’ 85 degree day and the water’s 80. So I’m going surfing, ya’ll.
Is Obama el jefe commandante yet?
Someone quibbles about how you can stock your home with books for free or cheap if you want – That’s certainly not the point – the point is that you value books, however much they cost, as an essential part of your home life.
Exactly – that’s kind of what I said about my folks having middle class values and aspirations. Here’s a clearer example of what I mean. I have two 12-year-old students whose household incomes are about the same. One lives in a somewhat unstable home situation with no books, no trips to the library, no help with homework, and no regular times for meals and going to bed. The parents work hard but worry too much about their older children to pay attention to the middle school kid. This kid has lousy study habits and doesn’t see the point of school. He’s counting the days until he can quit and get a minimum wage job.
Student two also has a large, low-income family, but the family is striving and cohesive. They’re working on creating a small business now and are saving to send the kids to college looking into scholarships. The parents have high expectations for their kids, arrange for free and cheap books, attend school meeting, go to museums and parks – all the middle class stuff. I think it’s fair to say that the second kid is relatively privileged. She looks at the world and knows that it’s going to be tough, but she can succeed. She also believes that she will be better off than her parents, and her children will be better off still.
Hang Ten OG.
And thanks, man.
Charley fuckin Mike….
mikey
Most people hang purty things on the walls of their homes. Do they think of them as “art?” Does it matter if its a unique piece, or a reproduction?
My collection of black-velvet paintings of Elvis are all hand-crafted. They have signatures and all to prove it.
Oregon Mike:
“And John, I think you are either intentionally obtuse or maybe just a little bit ol’fashioned obtuse.”
Possibly. It’s equally possible your “Classics = wingnuts” formulation is just silly and you don’t want to let your favorite pet stereotype go. But in any event, wingnuttery was not in play when I named my kid.
I am, however, guessing you didn’t go to CMC.
What I find exciting can only be found in high-quality HE. Thanks for having my back, man. I’ll buy you a bottle of whiskey or seven whenever I meet you.
Groovy, m’man. We’ll heat some Mì xào dòn over a couple grams of C4.
And drink some 33.
Yee hah.
mikey
If you were read to as a child it reflects two things: that your family members had leisure time in which to read books to children and they valued reading to children and deemed it a good use of available leisure time.
It does reflect a certain amount of privlege and if the question was asked in isolation it would be a useless exercise but when combined with the other questions it is valid.
My parents read to us and valued education a great deal since they are public school teachers. There was also a solid year when my family had no car because the 12 year old AMC hornet finally brokedown. So yes I grew up less privleged than a few but more privleged than many others (globally speaking).
As to the TV and poverty issue TV are cheap especially if they are used and having one means that your children do not have to go outside (where it is not necessarily safe) in order to be kept busy.
You people are such morons. Megan’s entire point was that the list doesn’t measure real privilege, both because some of the items don’t measure privilege at all, and also because her own upbringing was privileged in several respects that wouldn’t be captured by the list.
Great post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new subscriber- me!