The Politics of Privilege: Entitlement, Advantage, and Reform

• In Event: Equality and Disadvantage

Abstract

This paper is about how different kinds of unjust privilege suggest different strategies of political reform. It builds on Rachel McKinnon and Adam Sennett’s well-known article “On the Nature of the Political Concept of Privilege”. Those authors distinguish between “entitlement” privilege, in which, roughly, the privileged group has exclusive access to a desirable property that everyone is entitled to have, and “advantage” privilege, in which the privileged have exclusive access to something that can’t be universalized in this way, usually because the privilege is zero-sum or positional. Their illustrative example of the first is the right to marry (often a privilege of heterosexuals); of the second, the ability of those with “white sounding” names to be chosen for jobs more frequently than those with “stereotypically African American” names. The authors point out that the two kinds of privilege logically entail different policy responses. Entitlement privilege should be “leveled up” so that all groups get what should justly be everyone’s. Advantage privilege, in contrast, should be met by “taking away” something that no one should have and that can’t be universalized: unfair advantages over others.

This paper will address, however, something McKinnon and Sennet neglect: the divergent political logics that the two types of privilege entail.

Leveling up seems an “easy” reform in that the privileged have no direct interest in thwarting it. The interests of the privileged are unaffected if others obtain the advantages that they already enjoy. However, there are two political barriers the authors fail to note. First, while leveling up marriage may cost the privileged nothing except the discomfort attaching to cultural change, leveling up *other* things that may seem like entitlements—e.g. public transportation, unpolluted air and water, medical and dental care—may cost a great deal. Levelling up may incur opposition not because the privileged resent others having what they have per se, but because they do not want to pay the cost of the leveling. And even taxpayers willing to pay for leveling up *some* entitlement privileges may differ in their priorities as to which are most important. Finally, McKinnon and Sennet neglect what DuBois called the “public and psychological wage” whereby some among the privileged may draw gratification from feelings of superiority to those who lack something they have. The effect of such a wage, I argue, is to induce the privileged to treat an entitlement privilege as if it were an advantage privilege, to make them feel that goods that should be available to everyone can only be savored if they are monopolized by people like them. This is not a counsel of despair; the paper considers political strategies for overcoming both kinds of costs.

As for advantage privilege, McKinnon and Sennet admit that there’s a reason that “people in privileged groups…feel like they’re losing something in giving up that [advantage] privilege. They are losing something! They’re losing an (unfair) advantage.” Again, however, the authors don’t draw political conclusions. I shall discuss three broad strategies for achieving reform when advantage privilege is at stake: (1) increasing available resources (the “possibility frontier”) so that the privileged care less about losing relative advantage since their gains in absolute terms are so great (thus Benjamin Friedman on economic growth); (2) the “solidarity dividend”, which similarly emphasizes overall gains but de-emphasizes growth in favor of stressing the public goods that may be won by a cross-racial social-democratic coalition that prefers common action to social division and the politics of relative status (Heather McGhee); (3) “realist” coercion: overcoming privilege through mandatory action by government, acting from above, and/or nonviolent movements bringing pressure from below (Reinhold Niebuhr). While these three strategies do not exclude one another, there are tensions among them that I shall explore.

Finally, though briefly: an intermediate kind of privilege discussed by McKinnon and Sennet—“benefit” privilege, in which what the privileged group has could be universalized but is no entitlement (their example is the presumption of competence given to white male speakers)—gives rise to some of the most familiar and fascinating kinds of politics: fierce disagreement over whether what’s now the privilege of some should be given to everyone or, inversely, to no one.

This paper illustrates how what might seem like abstract conceptual work both illuminates the essence or deeper logic of political strategies and positions that we are used to—performing the “ontological” kind of political theory once called for by David Mayhew—and, on a more normative and practical level, can help counsel us how to undermine the different kinds of privilege that excellent recent work has done so much to describe.

Author

• Andrew Sabl, University of Toronto