It's my privilege

I've included a lot of personal stories here. It might get boring, but I think they're relevant.
There was recently a flurry of fuss about a male computer programmer who said that he didn't share male privilege and didn't see why he should acknowledge it, as feminists suggest. I agree with him; male privilege seems to me to be very much like the doctrine of original sin. It's something the preachers have invented for which I should be ashamed and beg forgiveness, no matter what my actions actually are.
    In many ways I had a privileged childhood. I was born into a highly-educated family with parents who didn't stint on books, literary references or pressure to succeed. I went to one of the best schools in the country, did well there and went to the most famous university in the world. A cursory glance at my CV would place me at the very centre of the privilege bullseye. But the whole point of highlighting privilege is that people judge others by superficial characteristics. The feminist side of that is that it's wrong to judge a woman simply because she has breasts, or on the size of them, but the principle is a good one that feminists would do well to follow more widely.
    I was an awkward child. When I was very small my mother asked me to bring the next load of washing down, so I did. She was annoyed with me when she found that I hadn't put it on as well, but not too angry because she remembered what she'd said. She knew that I had difficulty dealing with people, so when I turned up at prep school (having got the highest marks they'd seen in the entrance exam, despite getting very annoyed with myself for having got a question wrong) she told me just to say the first thing in my head. She reiterated this as we arrived; just say what's on my mind and things would be alright. I was unwilling, but I did. As we walked along I saw another boy with very big buck teeth, and I exclaimed "Oooh, ugly!" If only I had seen the ugliness inside him, I'd have run away screaming instead.
    Of course my mother hadn't had that in mind, but it was my first thought on seeing him. I wasn't stupid; I had other thoughts that maybe he was a nice boy and wouldn't like being thought ugly, but I trusted my mother when she said people would accept me. It was one of the three times in my life that my trust was misplaced.
    I was good at school. My mother once got a moment of pure joy when she overheard two other mothers talking. One remarked to the other "James has done very well this year. He could get the form prize." And James' mother sadly replied "No, he's in [my] class." And I was not popular. At prep school I used to answer the teacher's questions, interact and learn. I even corrected our maths teacher, Miss Cooper, on her maths! And I corrected her on her spelling of my name (in private at the end of the lesson), for which she told me off. My mother wrote to the headmaster about that.
    But that interactive approach to learning was gradually beaten out of me. I had a few acquaintances who played table tennis as well, but I was mostly a target for insults and occasional scuffles from my peers. At one point a boy who was normally not too bad kicked me viciously on the shins because he was trying to push in front of me for lunch, and I was outraged enough actually to kick back. He did queue behind me. At that age we didn't normally go in for such vicious assaults. From then on I developed a reputation as violent as well as being fun to pick on.
    During my childhood I was often attacked. One week some older boys tried to hunt me down every break because I was slippery and good at dodging and they felt they already had power over everyone else. I didn't bow and scrape to them or pay my respects to the status they felt they had; I just tried to mind my own business.
    In upper school (11+) I had a hockey ball thrown at me from a few metres away because I was sitting quietly waiting for class and didn't move out of the way when some boys wanted to use my space for a mini hockey game. I threw it back in his face. I was assaulted with a hockey stick because I had the temerity to intercept someone's pass and academic boys like me had no place showing up boys who wanted to be popular and sporty.  I was going to beat him to a pulp but I'd smashed my fingers blocking his blow and went to hospital instead. I still have the scars.
    One older boy had his friend try to hold me while he hit me with a metal chair because I'd been beating them at cards. I cracked his skull with a plastic biro I had in my pocket. Another time we were out on the fields waiting for the rugby teacher and a crowd of boys decided to play the game of overpowering me. They encircled me and tried to take me down. I shook a few of them off and their own fear of what I might do and of being shown up kept them at bay, very much like a hunting pack. When the teacher arrived he just ignored them: I'd have given them all detention at the very least. During a game of British Bulldog one of two catchers singled me out for over 15 runs and failed to catch me before finally getting me in a stand-off. He declared that he was going to ignore the rules (such as they were) and make me suffer. I punched him on the jaw three times and watched his face fall as he started to cry, and then I finished the 'run', but the other boys, quite remarkably for a game of bulldog, called an end to the game and went to check that he was alright. They had a go at me for being so unpleasant.
    Once a baying pack of my 'peers' saw me playing cards with three friends and after a lot of jeering and taunting one of them stole some of my cards to amuse the others. My friends wanted me to ignore it and accept the loss as they would have done, but it irked me. I walked after him and threw a chair at him. He was trapped in a ring of his friends and gave at least some of the cards back. Yet another time an older boy wanted me to do a lot of chores setting up an event and after I'd done more than a quarter of the work that was for 6 of us to complete I said I wouldn't. The others hadn't made any effort to work. He picked up a kitchen knife and came at me, so I punched him in the face too. He was nonplussed for a moment before giving up on me; he at least had only been bluffing.
    These are just some of the highlights of my youth. There are many, many more incidents, a few of which I'm much more ashamed of. The boys wanted me to give them the respect they felt they deserved; it was their privilege. I'm guessing here, but I think that they spent a lot of time and effort gaining status amongst each other and couldn't stand the fact that I didn't acknowledge their hierarchy or the place within it that they wanted to give me. They felt like they had the right to use my body, my space and my property as their playthings, to amuse them on a whim and they never grasped why I didn't accept this give and take of life, in which I give and they take. They wanted my dignity, and I never gave it away. This is why I hate people who talk about being able to laugh at yourself as if it's the height of being civilized. You know what it means to me? It means humiliation; it means degrading myself just for other people's pleasure; it means ceding control of my life to others just to try to fit in. If you want to laugh at me, take a long, hard look at yourself.
    Maybe if I'd been one these privileged little twerps I'd be touting the value of laughing at oneself as an essential part of social life, because for them it was. They never experienced the other side, when being laughed at was all you could expect. They could rely on their social capital to make it just a brief joke rather than incessant abasement. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean I need to join in. No-one else might, but I at least value myself. I preferred the grudging fear I earned to degrading myself. I liked the nickname 'Psycho', which was their way of reconciling my ability to beat them up with my academic success, two things that they didn't think should go together.
    But according to some feminists I'm privileged because I'm a white man. According to them I've sailed through life never experiencing the trials and tribulations of being different, of not fitting in or of being regarded as a social inferior. I have thoughtlessly enjoyed the bounty of life without realising how others suffer. Even though the bullies wanted to control my life and body, I can't share the 'lived experience' of women whose bodies men desire and sometimes want to control, because I'm a white man.
    It wasn't the harshest of childhoods. I didn't grow up amongst dangerous people who might have killed me or seriously injured me. I wasn't terrorised by gangs with weapons or people who had any power over my family or neighbourhood. But I was picked on by people who wanted to humiliate me specifically, to show their dominance and to assert their right to interfere with my life: to assert their privileged status. For much of my school life I was locked in a battle. Outside of school I was part of a well-off family in a lovely area. It sounds nice, but it wasn't all sweetness and light. My alcoholic miser of a father was a horror to deal with and my crippled blind mother was as wise and caring as anyone can ever be, but I still had to help my sister do the housework from a very young age. While my friends were being driven around to each others' houses, getting nice toys and later in life going out on the town with a few notes handed them by their parents I had to cadge lifts and later on cycle around town.
    My school ran a series of field trips abroad, all of which my mother insisted I go on. My father gave her a mean allowance from his income but she insisted, and I got a lot from those trips. But the other boys would fritter away spending money on those trips like it was water. I just soaked up the culture of ancient Greece and Rome and took photos with my camera; I had no choice of stopping for a rest in a cafe, so I walked throughout the day.
    When I was older and went on expeditions I worked very hard on the fundraising. I worked more than 100 hours for both expeditions whilst others did the minimum of 30 or even fewer. They decreed that we would share the funds raised to discount our costs evenly, and decreed that even people who hadn't done the minimum could make up the rest by paying. We accepted one such boy on our trip to Iceland who hadn't done any of our training or previous trips. When we were out on the icecap he lost his food and we had to turn back. Once we were back he found his food at the bottom of his bag, but the expedition was already ruined. I loved those expeditions, but when the third one came round I wanted no part of raising money for other people who didn't even need it.
    There is no recognised category that I can be pigeonholed into that explains my experiences and validates them. I'm not black, female or even ginger. I was specifically targetted because I'm me, not because of some surface characteristic I can blame people's prejudices on. The feminism that I like is the version that says we should treat everyone with due courtesy and respect; that being bad is wrong. I have no time for do-gooding that says that if we offer help to some broad categories of people the issue will be addressed. The problem is wider than any one form of prejudice; the problem is bullying and discrimination for any reason. At school bullying is the problem and discrimination is a problem mostly because it is a reason for bullying. If we leave bullying alone but solve discrimination, so that victims are picked randomly rather than due to a defined set of characteristics, we will still have abused children.
    I might seem like I came out of my school life rather well. I won most of the battles at school, be they of wits or fists. I wasn't cowed like some of my friends and I kept my dignity and pride. It felt like I'd won, but looking back there are clear effects beyond those surface victories. I sacrificed and changed in order to achieve what I did.
    Remember what I said about engaging with teachers at prep school? Modern educators say that engagement and interaction is essential to learning fastest and best. By the time I was at upper school I'd learned not to stand out in class. I never hazarded an unusual answer or one of which I was unsure because the penalty for getting it wrong became so severe. I never experimented with new ideas or bounced them off the teacher; I learned to guess in my head and compare my answers to the teacher's when they were revealed, to explain differences as best I could in the privacy of my own mind. That's because other boys would jeer and taunt if I got things wrong, sometimes openly in class in front of the teacher.
    I remember one confused English teacher who liked to give us rankings for our homework. He'd ask us to shout "yes" or "no" and if we said "yes" he'd give our ranking and mark in front of the whole class. The whole exercise seemed pointless to me because he'd give us the marked work back as well. On one occasion I said "no", but of course enough other people said "yes" that everyone could work out that I'd only come second in the form that time. It was many days before the jeering and taunting for only being second stopped, and even after the next week's results people still harked back to the glory day when I only came second.
    With that sort of penalty I was of course at pains to provide as little ammunition as possible, and mostly I succeeded. I never shared my marks; I learned to keep them secret. I would hide my work as soon as the teacher delivered it back. I hated those teachers who left a pile of work at the front for us to burrow through and nose at others' marks. People always rushed to try to beat me to the pile and get a glimpse of my work just in the hope of being able to make another juicy taunt.
    By the time I left school I was no longer the socially awkward but curious child I had been. I had been schooled to be quiet, secretive and private just to protect myself. Privacy doesn't just protect criminals; it protects every form of social outcast. Anti-privacy campaigners should spend a couple of decades being bullied. My tactics worked, but I wasn't who I had been. I had learned to watch for threats at all times. People laughing usually meant they were laughing at me, unless I knew what the joke was. Sometimes they hoped I'd join in but I wasn't fool enough to pretend. I'd seen and heard them play that trick on others, of laughing at people when those people were joining in and trying to fit in but didn't understand the joke. I didn't give them that pleasure. Every push, shove or borrowed piece of property was an attempt at exerting or displaying dominance that needed to be forcefully squashed because if you give an inch, they'll end up taking a mile.
    It was with that outlook on life that I came to university. There I met people, men and women, who genuinely were privileged. They'd never been bullied; they'd had rosy and pleasant childhoods. A standard topic of conversation was how useless someone was at household chores such as washing clothes or cooking, things I'd been doing for over a decade. Did the quiet, awkward boy who trusted no-one fit in? Of course not. In our first week someone gave me an almighty hit in the back in the queue for a club. He'd been a bit unpleasant earlier, but probably was just childishly acting out or maybe trying to impress a girl. But I came from a world where that was a grievous affront; where allowing myself to be hit set a dangerous precedent that could spiral out of control, especially in the back. My body isn't for hitting, ever. I punched him a few times before the shocked group of students caught my eye and then the bouncer led me away.
    It turns out that a lot of the time when people are laughing it's not at me, but I still hate the sound of laughter when I don't know the joke. You can't unlearn a childhood's lessons that easily. And you can't fit in with a group of people when you're suspicious that everything you didn't hear is a snide comment about how funny it is that you think you're welcome when actually they all hate you. I never fell for that because I was suspicious, but learning to be suspicious is itself a mental scar that I'll never completely shake. People who know me might not notice it, but even if I mostly trust them I'm still alert for signs that things are not what they seem; that I'm only being tolerated as an unwitting amusement. I see such signs all the time, but each time I consciously force myself to ignore them. Rejection and ill-will are no longer standard in my life, but I can't help still watching for them. It could be classed as the mental illness of paranoia, except that when I was a boy the suspicions were entirely warranted. I still have trouble with what some people see as banter. Is it picking on me; is it bullying again; how much of it is meant? At what level is the joke?
    This is my privilege: of being trained to trust no-one, of not forming nice and easy social bonds because it's so rarely worked out for me in the past. I don't have other black people or other women to trust as compatriots in oppression. I'm one of the misfits from school and undergraduate life who knows that anyone and sometimes everyone might be against me. I've seen the ugly faces of the mob, including normally friendly people, as they came for me, and I've felt alone. And although I fought back on my own where some victims feel terrible and lost, it still doesn't feel like privilege.
    I don't need to delve into my personal experiences to make an abstract argument, but I hope they help illustrate my point. By describing my lived experiences I hope it makes the argument that much more visceral.

    And even though I'm an adult with a job, I still don't feel privileged. Life still doesn't open up for me. Some young adults like myself have houses already, helped by their doting and helpful parents who have put up deposits and guaranteed the mortgages, or in some cases bought the house outright. My father rented out my old bedroom and gave me two days to come to the house and clear it out, when I have no car and had other commitments. He left my childhood in bin bags on the side of the road and I rescued it because I came as soon as I could and the binmen were late that day. It's now in my father's garage, and he leaves the door open all the time. I expect a number of burglars have been through my belongings and already taken anything of value.
    Some young workers live with their parents, and have meals cooked for them, and their clothes washed. Some people just get to go home to relax for a nice weekend when they need to unwind. That's family privilege. One person I know got utterly pampered while she studied for professional exams; I had a life to live. Another person owns two houses because his parents bought one and he made so much money renting rooms in London and not paying for his own accommodation that he rapidly got a big deposit for a second one. That's economic privilege. Many people have their friends and family pull strings to get jobs. We might charitably say that the reason children do so well in their parents' professions is that they learned a lot about the work from their parents,  but connections seem as likely an answer. Fully 95% of media jobs go to people with family already in the media. My parents were well-educated, but they have no social network. Even if my father did, I'm not sure he'd use it to help me, or that being introduced to someone on his recommendation would be beneficial. I have no invisible web of contacts to catch me if I seem to be falling. I have to rely on the hope of a meritocracy, and it's a dream, not reality. I have no social privilege, despite the sound of my voice.
    I'm fit and healthy; I go to the gym a lot and I am, apparently, not too ugly. But no-one thought to tell me so until a few years ago. My life has been a litany of rejection or being too awkward even to be in a position to be rejected. I haven't sailed through life with men keen to bask in reflected glory and women fawning over me, keen to be picked out as my next victim. I apparently have looks privilege, but it's privilege that you only experience if you also have the social arrogance to use it. I had learned never to reach out to people, as the best way to avoid the scorn that always follows. Maybe I should have reached out and endured the scorn, and learned to do whatever people wanted in exchange for human contact, but I was stubborn and independent, and I'm still proud of that. Perhaps if I were ugly I'd get nasty looks on the street or have been even less popular. But I've hardly had a great time; my social experiences of my youth are still in the bottom end of the scale.
    Once I'm in work you might think things would be alright. I've got the job, I'm capable and dealing with adults. But adults aren't as free from bigotry and discrimination as we'd like to think. My last office had quite a few non-white staff, and a lot of women, including many working part-time arrangements. But although we had unconscious bias training about small cultural differences that can lead to misunderstandings, and were exhorted to manage people as individuals with sensitivity, I still don't fit in. The training was for diversity reasons, to alert us to how different cultures behave differently. But my managers clearly didn't think more widely about whether the man who doesn't watch popular television and therefore doesn't engage in team conversations is actually not a 'team-player'. They didn't think that perhaps introverts prefer not to focus their work on as many conversations with people as possible; they didn't think that getting twice as much work done (or more) as others made up for the fact that the client said that they didn't see much of me. That would normally be a good thing when it would have been to waste their time asking questions to which we already had the answers. My managers didn't like me forming my own opinions and, when we disagreed, writing up our conclusion as being agreed by my manager rather than being my own opinion.
    There is a great book out there about how introverts are discriminated against in the wider world, called 'Quiet'. You can't identify an introvert from a superficial characteristic, nor invite introverts to additional help sessions to make up for their failure to be normal. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of traits that are discriminated against but which aren't directly observable. I'm a quiet man who questions how things are done. I don't engage with social hierarchies nor see any reason to work late if I've got my work done by 5pm (or, to be honest, if I haven't; there's always next day for work, barring tight deadlines, and if I've been given too much work it's clearly not a one-person job). I fall through the cracks because the things that rile people about me aren't my skin colour or other surface things. That doesn't make discrimination against me any less bigoted, irrational or unpleasant.
   What about slow privilege? There are hordes of people who saunter along narrow paths and pavements with no thought for those behind or even in front of them. There are countless times that I've had to stop in front of people walking towards me and scowl at their suddenly shocked faces as they find that no, I don't magically disappear if they ignore me. I've been held up behind people walking in the middle of the corridor or path, or walking abreast of each other, so many times it must be in the hundreds of thousands by now. Talk about microaggressions! Is it oppression of people who want to move at a decent pace? Is it privilege of the slow who have never had to think about how they never get held up? Or is it best described as utter thoughtlessness; gross rudeness and sheer lack of consideration for other people?

    As I wrote previously, the problem is that humans are bigoted and thoughtless, not that some identifiable categories are clearly the subject of particular bigotry. The more we focus on one type of bigotry, or escaping from it (which is what 'privilege' means in this context) the less we're focussing on bigotry itself as a problem. It doesn't matter if it's white privilege, male privilege, economic privilege, social privilege, health privilege, attractiveness privilege or anything else. You create a name for your own special interest; the excuse for your mistreatment, and you steal attention from others without names. I'm sure there are blacks, gays, women, and oldies who have had worse experiences. But they will be people at one end of a scale that stretches a long way into experiences more positive than mine.
    Let me drag you all the way back to white computer nerds. Are they privileged? Well, in the sense that they have not been discriminated against because they're black or women, yes they are. But have these men, who were often bullied at school, necessarily experienced less hassle and bigotry than all women? Absolutely not. A high-school cheerleader and prom queen (not a term we really have in the UK, but it's recognised enough) cannot possibly self-righteously complain that these nerds have had a nicer life than she has. Not only that, but the experiences of bullied children are all awful no matter the excuse. I'm sure some people might even argue that being able to blame your bullying on some well-known bias like racism makes it easier to bear than simply being a misfit who doesn't belong in the brutish society we call civilisation.
    So having discussed privilege, I now want to say that we need to stop talking about specific privilege. What matters is any form of judging people by shorthand, biased methods. It doesn't matter if a worker is one of the legally protected categories of people (sex, age, sexuality, race, religion), but that's not all there is to it. We haven't won the anti-discrimination fight at that point. It also doesn't matter if you like one worker and share his interests and dislike another because you don't. We just need to teach people to judge based only on the relevant things. People need to learn to be impartial and disinterested if we want any justice in the world, and that's a really hard thing to get folks behind. But it's even harder if we're only campaigning on part of the subject.