A personal journal entry from several months ago begins with a quotation by Primo Levi, which I encountered in an essay by Ursula LeGuin. “It is the duty of the righteous man to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.”
I wrote several paragraphs of not-very-focused rumination about this idea when I first encountered it, and I have thought back to it many times since. And now I find myself thinking of it once again as I read the thoughts of one of my Clarion teachers, Mary Anne Mohanraj, talking about issues of race and its treatment in SF/F on John Scalzi’s blog. (“Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up To Speed” Part 1, Part 2) A fair amount of this discussion concerns genre fiction and the genre fiction community, but there is much here that is a reflection of our culture as a whole. Specifically, it was through the early rounds of this discussion (which has kind of unfortunately come to be known as RaceFail ’09) that I encountered Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which helped focus for me some of the fuzzy edges of the concept of undeserved privilege and made me realize that while my thinking about privilege in terms of class was fairly developed, it was still very rudimentary on issues of race.
I’m still getting my thoughts in order on the subject of subverting undeserved privilege, and how doing so interfaces or fails to interface with rational self-interest. It’s a sort of idealism vs. pragmatism in the face of preexisting conditions argument, and I am struggling to find my own clarity of thought about it. But the RaceFail ’09 discussion has helped me learn to recognize kinds of privilege that were previously invisible to me, and even bereft of conclusions the improved perception is valuable.