The following exercise* has been going around the sociology blogosphere in recent days, and is designed to see how ‘privileged’ your childhood was. Never mind for now the obvious problems with the test (such as its cultural and generational biases), the task is to see how many apply to you. Then what, I’m not at all sure – I have not done the research to see if there’s a scale or anything like that to help you interpret the results.
[*The exercise is “From What Privileges Do You Have?,” by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. I picked it up from Anomie's site but it's on a number of different blogs by now, and there's also a discussion at Scatterplot that's worth reading.]
Here are my results:
1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home It’s close, but assuming that it’s 500+ for the whole family and not just my own books, I’d say we probably met it – my mother was an inveterate book buyer, as I am.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18 I suppose two years of piano lessons at gunpoint count.
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.
It’s hard for me to interpret this one, since I grew up as an American-educated, English-speaking Japanese-American in Japan, and thus was linguistically but not ethnically? isolated. Still, I didn’t have to suffer daily stereotyping in the media or in person, so I’ll say yes.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.
16. Went to a private high school.
17. Went to summer camp.
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Not always since many vacations were family visits – but otherwise we stayed at hotels.
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.
25. You had your own room as a child.
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course.
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.
31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.
19 out of 34.
Just offhand and thinking about my own family’s history, I can’t but credit the strenuous efforts and sacrifices of my grandparents and my parents’ generations to secure a comfortable middle-class life for my generation – for me, my brothers, my cousins (this is the sansei Andrew coming out). Even though my grandparents came to the US from Japan already equipped with certain advantages – they were literate, experienced teachers and community leaders, and thus already had a certain amount of social capital and cultural authority that they utilized upon arrival in Hawaii – they nevertheless started out in still fairly circumscribed straits. I was shocked when a few years ago I got the chance to visit my father’s childhood home, and realized that he and his six siblings and two parents lived for years in a one-room house that’s significantly smaller than the one-bedroom apartment I now enjoy to myself.
So am I privileged? Even without this test I was well aware of the abundant privileges, however defined, that I enjoyed as a result of my unbringing: caring and financially secure parents, safe neighborhoods, good schools, etc. That being said, neither I nor my brothers will achieve the kind of financial success as our father did – though it’s hard to say how much of this is due to our squandering of certain kinds of opportunity (passing up law school for grad school, in my case; flitting about restlessly from job to job, in search of a ‘challenge,’ in the case of my oldest brother) on the one hand, and to ‘objectively’ changing socioeconomic conditions on the other. Certainly, no tears to be shed for me or my brothers/family in either case – far from it. For the most part, I find the choices that I and my brothers made to be uninteresting and unilluminating. But I do find the changing social environment in which ‘privilege’ and ‘advantage’ are defined to be of some interest. That the skyrocketing cost of sending kids to even a good public university, for instance, is placing both of my brothers (whose kids will be college-age in about 10 years) under certain kinds of financial burdens that even my parents didn’t have to worry about, is surely relevant to their perceptions and strategies.
Thinking about this makes me believe that to talk about privilege as basis for evaluating one’s motivation or, even worse, character alone is quite seriously deficient; there’s a complex and dynamic relationship between degrees and types of motivation and shifting structures of opportunity and constraint that are historically and culturally conditioned. Many of my nieces and nephews and their cousins will score fantastically on this list because the items on it reflect certain conceptions of how privileged or advantaged children are either properly raised and/or indulged – the difference now is that that these conceptions are now matched by an social environment that’s commercially, pedagogically, and organizationally structured with acute sensitivity toward meeting and fulfilling them, and reminding parents of their obligation to do so. How well does the concept of privilege map onto these shifting and relative senses of entitlement, obligation, advantage, burden?
I’ve never really thought sociologically in terms of ‘privilege,’ and have been chastised as a result: not because I didn’t realize it existed, but because it didn’t seem to get at in the most productive way the problems we discuss in educational sociology – poverty, discrimination, and equality of opportunity. The increased importance that we now tend to place on cultural capital and like factors, however, may change this and make privilege more central to our mobility narratives.
I think “privilege” is a pretty vague term to define what’s going on here. My preferred lexicon is Bourdieuan. These items are forms of capital that are defined in relation to a changing set of fields of competition. They’re related to, but not strict determinants of, logics of action (i.e., habitus).
No disagreement from me on the vagueness of the term ‘privilege’ and its limitations as a sociological concept – and I also think that Bourdieuan framework is vastly preferable.
Still, what I think is worthwhile considering is the *narrative* aspect implicated in agents’ strategies, perceptions, and evaluations; people adopt different kinds of stories to explain to themselves how ‘privileged’ they are or aren’t in relation to a given social background or context, and Bourdieu’s concepts are not quite part of those meaning-making efforts. Are these stories worthwhile investigating?
Sure. An interesting example of this is Heather Beth Johnson’s book The American Dream and the Power of Wealth: Choosing Schools and Inheriting Inequality in the Land of Opportunity, which demonstrates the scope of American ambivalence about the advantages that wealth provides when juxtaposed with her account of the American Dream.
Sounds like a good read that I should check out. Thanks!
[...] anomie, Scatterplot, the New Prof, Union Street and other socio-bloggers have done this test circulating in the socio-blogosphere in recent days. [...]
Social Privilege
Via Wicked Anomie, this list of social privilege markers has been making the rounds of the sociological blogosphere. Every time you answer yes to one of these propositions, it adds to the amount of privilege you enjoyed. Of course, the maximum is 33.
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Isn’t the “then what” supposed to be a guilt that manifests itself into working toward “social justice?”
The only thing that would’ve elicited a longer, more tired yawn would’ve been a question like, “Do you frequently categorize people as “others?”
Hey Matthew, welcome back to the blogosphere following your break. Hope all is well.
Re: your comment about the ‘then what’ – not necessarily. I’ve always regarded myself to be tremendously lucky in my childhood circumstances and upbringing, but I don’t feel particularly guilty, though I leave it up to other people to feel what they want. In reality, I think social justice considerations are as much clouded by a so-called guilt mentality than they are clarified by it. And, the fact of the matter is that I just don’t particularly take this meme too seriously whatever its purposes.
I would accede to the first comment, “privilege” seems to be very vague. I would have scored less than 10 points, but actually I think I had a very privileged childhood.
Thanks – I feel invigorated and look forward to getting back in the mix.
My comment was probably too much snark and too muddy at that. I find this meme – along with the privilege discussion – to be banal and, what’s worse, tendentious. I find little academic or specifically sociological value in it.
It’s alright on blogs [though I wish it wasn't titled with privilege, maybe something about your childhood instead?]. It’s an interesting enough meme because it tells me a bit about the author and I appreciate that. Like you, I don’t take it too seriously, but spending half an hour reading a few debates on other sites made me think this is a fine example of why sociology isn’t always taken seriously.