On absurd hypotheticals and crude reductionist "arguments" [View all]

Quite often, I see and hear people who are opposed to feminism, or who disagree with the notion/concept of male privilege (or white privilege, or any other form of social privilege), attempt to argue that white men cannot possibly be privileged because there are plenty of white men who are poor, nearly poor, or otherwise not economically secure (which is a true statement, but is quite misleading when taken out of context).

What then often follows is calling racial and/or gender privilege "at best, a wash" or something to that effect, or "not as bad as in the past-we are making tons of progress!" There are also plenty of those who say this whole "privilege" debate is a "distraction" or an attempt by "the 1 percent" to "divide and conquer." I have read these very words on this site so many times, I have come to expect them to be posted whenever issues of racism or sexism come up.

Now, what are the problems with this line of argument? Well for starters, just because there may be a lot of poor white men, does not mean that:

(a) the majority of white men are poor.
(b) the majority of white men are not wealthier than the vast majority of minorities and single women.
(c) that white men do not have an effective stranglehold on political power in many areas (even if there are some women and minorities becoming more powerful in recent decades).
(d) that, as you move up the socioeconomic ladder, the percentages of single women and racial/ethnic minorities do not decrease dramatically.
e) that white men are not far more likely to own their own homes, be employed, have a comfortable standard of living, live in safe or secure neighborhoods, and have accumulated private wealth, both from taking advantages of opportunities available to them as well as from inheritances.
f) that white men have not been both rewarded most of the opportunities in American history, as well as having wrote most of American history.
g) that men as a group are anywhere near as likely to experience sexual violence or assault as women over the course of their lives.
h) that social class, racism, and patriarchy are not, at their core, intertwined.

My point is simply this: you cannot simply reduce everything to a crude definition of economic class, nor can you refute the mountains of evidence, research, and the experiences of the oppressed with absurd hypotheticals (ie "Who is more privileged, Oprah or the white working stiff in a factory?)....

...well you could do just that, but you would reveal your own ignorance and lack of understanding.