Great point. I am personally struggling with this a lot both in my work with less privileged people and privileged coworkers.

I am in a country that has a strong nation building discourse around perceived equality and “sameness” and therefore there tends to be a lot of hostility towards anyone who tries to raise the question of very clear differences in privilege and be taken seriously.

My relatives got very angry at me over the summer when they told me how a person they know has had flooding in their home and as I knew that the person in question is very very wealthy and has several homes I said “Shame, but they will be ok.” This resulted in these two yelling at me about how unempathetic I am and how they feel like they can’t talk about their life struggles at all with me (both are petty bourge). I am myself poor, neurodivergent, fat & a woman.

I replied to them that I would not have been ok had this happened to me and got asked if I am bitter. I am not, these are just the material conditions we have. Technically all involved in this discussion were workers.

Someone once described all this to me with an example of a reality tv show that didn’t manage to “work” in my country the same way as it did in a place like the UK. Here when you sit a rich person and a poor person on the same couch talking about what their everyday lives are like, you will only get sameness related discourse where the rich person is both allowed and socially encouraged to see their inability to heat their hot tub as often as befofe as the same as the poor person not being able to afford food.

This results in a society where extremely privileged people are allowed to have takes on things like poverty, race, gender as equals and fully diminishes the hardships experienced in the margins. And this is at least partially a result of a social democratic model of society where a lot of focus has been put to gender equality and equality of the workers. But only for the majority.

What this does to disabled folks and people who can never work, to people who are outside the scope of being able to do wage work and the way this legitimizes the outrage when calling out privilege is a thing I am trying to figure out.

In my real life work I am trying to raise the class consciousness of privileged people around me by raising the point of all of us being workers and our interests being aligned, but within this cultural framework I feel like this often ends up reinforcing the sameness myth and hiding the clear implications of privilege. So not entirely sure how to get the labor aristrocat to both understand our interest being aligned yet different.

Not entirely sure what my concluding point here even is, but just wanted to say that I think this is an extremely important conversation.

The outrage that pointing this out tends to result in seems like a sort of fragility, one person even admitted to me once that me reminding them of their privilege makes them feel guilty for the things they have. Which I think isn’t a bad thing as long as this doesn’t turn into hostility towards the margins, but to an understanding of what privilege is.