Ten years ago, if on social media you talked about a strange event that happened to you, often someone would quip, “Show pictures or it didn’t happen.” Well, I notice that when they want to denigrate something or someone, anti-capitalists on social media use a thought-stopping cliché that I identify as “Privilege, or it didn’t happen.” That is, if you’re praising an achievement of someone whom the anti-capitalist dislikes, the anti-capitalist will chime in that the person was able to achieve such primarily due to the person possessing, before the fact, some social privilege that other people lack. The most common type of privilege is having been born to a family with more money than other people. But there are other types of privilege — white privilege, male privilege, even able-bodied privilege.
I notice that almost every time “privilege” is cited like this on social media, it’s seldom the case of the citer merely asking others to be mindful that the achiever had privileges that others didn’t. For instance, it would make sense for someone to say, “Having been born into wealth made it much easier for the nineteenth-century British chemist Henry Cavendish to discover particular chemical elements before other people did. That doesn’t take away from the fact that he made wise choices, of course, that other rich men had not.” Rather, the citation of privilege is almost always done to deny the achievement outright. It’s almost always along the lines of “The arrogant white businessman thinks he deserves the accolades because of what he accomplished. But it was his privilege that put him in the position in the first place where he could accomplish anything,” and then that’s where the rhetoric concludes.
For example, maybe you will be waxing about how impressed you are by Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak having founded Apple Computer. An anti-capitalist will chime in that this is actually because of privilege. The main reason, that anti-capitalist tells you, why the Steves were able to do this — as opposed to other people — is that the Steves were going to school in an area that was geographically close to the capital of the USA’s engineering talent. After all, Wozniak had the privilege of being the son of an engineer who worked for Lockheed-Martin. That gave him access to tools, equipment, and specialized education that other people did not have. That area had already been Silicon Valley since the Great Depression when Hewlett-Packard was founded.
As promulgated by U.C. Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, “Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money. . . . He got rich on what other taxpayers paid for: the banking system...and the judicial system...” On that account, Lakoff concludes, “There are no self-made men!” That, of course, is the “You Didn’t Build That” Fallacy, which I skewered over here. In the citation of privilege, the implication is, You didn’t build that; your privilege made that happen. At the very least, the credit you receive for an accomplishment had more to do with your preexisting privilege than did any proactiveness on your part.
When an anti-capitalist “corrects” your praise of an achiever like Steve Jobs, you might notice something conspicuous about the correction. Contrary to what the “correction” falsely insinuated, your praise of the Steves’ achievement was not something you were contrasting against other people. You weren’t saying, “Steve Jobs achieved this, as opposed to you. Steve Jobs achieved it, and you didn’t, you dummy!” Rather, you were impressed that anyone did this at all. But rather than be satisfied that the good act was done at all, it’s not unusual for anti-capitalists to misidentify it as some zero-sum game where any one person’s gain must come at the material expense of everyone else.
More to the point, here is why “Privilege, or it didn’t happen” is a fallacy. Even if it is true that the achiever was born into privileges that gave the achiever a head start, it doesn’t invalidate your premise that the achiever still made choices for which accolades are deserved. The reason is that many other people were born into the same privileges as the achiever, but, on account of different choices, did not perform the feats that the achiever did.
In the case of Stephen Wozniak: the fact is that there were hundreds of other white boys his age, who were the sons of Californian engineers, attending schools in the same state that were similar to his own. But those other sons of Californian engineers did not invent the Apple II. Stephen Wozniak did. Even if the “privilege” made it easier for him than it otherwise would be, the privilege was not sufficient. The missing pieces that needed to be added were the choices of Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the initiatives they undertook.
I would argue that there are cases where some people’s privilege can enable them to overshadow others in terms of who gets the credit. I think sexism did play a part in how, for decades, Rosalind Franklin’s role in the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure had gone overlooked. One might say that it was because of white male privilege that James Watson and Francis Crick got more attention than she. But I think such a concession is not satisfactory to someone who keeps citing privilege. The privilege-citing anti-capitalist can say that it was because of Rosalind Franklin’s own privilege that she, as opposed to some nonwhite gentile, was in a position in the first place where she could ascertain an image of the double helix structure.
Unearned social privileges do exist. But when someone — even a very privileged person — accomplishes an important feat, it’s usually the case that there were many other people who bore those same privileges but refrained from that feat. The choices of individuals are still what make the difference. And for that, they still deserve credit. To the degree that you make your own choices — choices not made and risks not taken by people from backgrounds similar to your own, and who have the same privileges that you do — you are indeed self-made in character.
