I really hate the whole "privilege" meme that's been going around online, lately. I can't disagree with the substance of their issues, but their conceptual frameworks and the prescriptive stances they take from it are just so fucking dishonest.

The major objection I have to this is the semantic slight of hand revolving around the notion of racism. Namely, that it's now an institutional and cultural structure, i.e. "prejudice and power", and that by participating in it unknowingly, unwillingly, and unconsciously, we are now "racist". Granted, some people make the pro forma distinction that one's statements or actions are racist, but it quickly dissolves into yelling and accusations. The fact is, they are exchanging one definition of racism for another, very different definition, and but using the rhetorical force of the former definition to gain traction in argument.

They delight in decrying people as "racist", seeing them scramble and apologize, and expect all right-thinking people to conduct their bile at them, but most of this comes from the older connotation of racism that involves the conscious and deliberate belief in race, racial inequality, and furthering that inequality. Their invective would gain significantly less traction if they made it clear that people were insensitively and unconsciously participating in a cultural structure or worldview that was prejudiced. When people who haven't been made privy of this paradigm shift to being called racist, they are of course branded as evil privilege mongers who Deny Racism, despite the fact that they object to an entirely different concept, all the while utilizing the leverage that the baggage of the term supplies in the argument.

I think at heart though most of the people advocating this worldview identify the two concepts. Intention and conscious deliberation have no role any longer, and it's all about they system one participates in. It's very, very similar to original sin in this way. I find that particularly amusing, since this was Foucault's reduction of Derrida, and god knows that the above worldview reeks of the worst of post-modernism.