Analogies of Privilege

This post is a set of essays that I have read that explain privilege, and specifically poverty/class privilege, in ways that really make sense to me. I’ve tried to put them in approximately chronological order, but WordPress doesn’t seem to appreciate that.

Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Economic Unfairness (1993)

The theory can be found on the L-Space Wiki. It’s a great illustration of how starting off a little bit ahead can have a compounding effect into the future: buying quality things that last means you don’t have to spend more money on lower-quality things that need frequent replacement.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms – Goodreads link

Being Poor (2005)

I read Scalzi’s “Being Poor” in 2005, after Katrina. It affected me a great deal, and – in a lot of ways – really put me on the road to being the person I am today, with regards to how I look at The Meritocracy and so forth.

Being poor is people who have never been poor wondering why you choose to be so.

The high cost of poverty: why the poor pay more (2009)

Great article in the Washington Post, from 2009, that really made me stop and think about my assumptions about thrift. You can’t save money by buying in bulk if you can’t afford to buy 64 rolls of toilet paper in the first place. Or if your apartment is too small to store bulk foods/paper products/etc. The article also goes into the nature of time costs for things.

Hard Mode (2012)

Learning about privilege is a hard thing. You really have to work at it, and you really need good analogies for it to make sense.

Some people refer to having privilege as playing life on the Default Mode, whereas people without a given axis of privilege are playing life on Hard Mode. (I’ll see if I can find the essay – got it!) John Scalzi’s Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.

You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.

Of Dogs and Lizards (2010)

An essay that I absolutely adore, Of Dogs and Lizards, uses the old temperature wars as an analogy for privilege/misogyny. “I would like it if X happened, so why wouldn’t you?”

How to explain privilege to a broke white person (2014)

This is a classic essay from the Huffington Post, of all places: Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person. It explores the issues of class, which are often ignored in the superficial discourse we get about racism and other *isms in America. I do not personally subscribe to the Internet Socialist theory (not to be confused with actual thoughtful socialist theory!) that class is the only axis that matters, but a lot of people will use class as a confounding variable or a smokescreen to distract from issues of race and racial privilege; so it’s important to make sure we distinguish which kind of oppression/privilege we are talking about.

Siderea on Solidarity (2019)

I have a few Siderea essays in my list o’ things to put in this blog. One of them belongs here: Flunking Solidarity, or why Americans don’t talk about their salaries.

It is a deep and unquestioned part of American culture that Americans feel entitled to pass judgment on their fellow Americans’ worthiness to receive the most basic of resources.

Poor in Tech (2021)

Poor in Tech, by Meg Elison, is an essay about social class in the weirdly rarefied world of Silicon Valley and the tech industry writ large. There is also a MetaFilter thread about this one.

I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I never got over not having to punch a clock.

Five Stupid Habits (est. 2012?)

The John Cheese essay, The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, is a great look at how our upbringing can shape our behavior – something that is very difficult to break.

This is a problem, because that’s actually a very shitty way to manage a budget. You skip over the great 2-for-1 deal on laundry detergent because you’re not out of laundry detergent yet. It’s kind of opposite of the way we bought food when I was a kid — where you should be stocking up because buying in bulk is cheaper and the stuff is on sale, you wait until you’re scraping the residue off the lid. Then you have to take whatever goddamned price the store gives you that day, because you can’t wash your clothes otherwise.