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> just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared chara

> just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals. I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions Removing assumptions about others is exactly the goal of checking ones privilege. The reason for privilege being a focus point is that assumptions arising from social class differences causes more harm in the world than any other cognitive bias When you write "dropping unfounded assumptions about other humans and their experiences", you're describing half of what "checking ones privilege" is about The second part is to find out how and why those privileges are not extended to everyone by contributing to causes that promote and work towards a more fair and equal access to those privileges regardless of social class, race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, etc

beaconstudios 6y ago
> I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions To be clear, I don't think privilege-checking causes more harm than not-privilege-checking. But I think it causes less good than the version of privilege-checking that is applied to everyone regardless of demographic privilege, which is to say, empathy. By being choosy about who deserves empathy, rather than your ideal being focused on general human equality you propagate class divides but simply change which ones you value. I think it's a mixup between empathy and sympathy. You end up valuing the humanity of the disenfranchised more than the privileged, which is dangerous. You can think that people who are marginalised deserve better without either thinking those who are privileged deserve worse, or that they are active perpetrators of said marginalisation. I'm not saying you necessarily make this mistake yourself - I don't know your feelings on the matter - but I see people go down this line of reasoning all the time after acknowledging the concept of class privilege and I just think we can do better than that.

beaconstudios 6y ago

> I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions To be clear, I don't think privilege-checking causes more harm than not-privilege-checking. But I think it causes less good than the version of privilege-checking that is applied to everyone regardless of demographic privilege, which is to say, empathy. By being choosy about who deserves empathy, rather than your ideal being focused on general human equality you propagate class divides but simply change which ones you value. I think it's a mixup between empathy and sympathy. You end up valuing the humanity of the disenfranchised more than the privileged, which is dangerous. You can think that people who are marginalised deserve better without either thinking those who are privileged deserve worse, or that they are active perpetrators of said marginalisation. I'm not saying you necessarily make this mistake yourself - I don't know your feelings on the matter - but I see people go down this line of reasoning all the time after acknowledging the concept of class privilege and I just think we can do better than that.