What do we mean by ‘privilege?’ According to sociologist Allan Johnson, privilege is something one receives based on membership in a social category, that others not from that/those categories do not receive. It is not earned. Being white. Male. Heterosexual. Johnson’s conceptual framework includes four dimensions: a privilege system (male, for instance) is characterized by male domination, an obsession with control, male identification, and male centeredness. ‘White’ could be substituted for male, and the same thing applies. It is important to remember that Johnson was talking about a system. This is structural. In other words, it doesn’t matter so much what individuals are part of the system–individuals come and go, but the rules of the system predominate, and in this case, benefit males more often than females. We don’t choose to be part of a privileged category–all we can choose is how we respond to that reality. We’ll go through this using gender, understanding that race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc., could be substituted:

Male-dominated. If you think about a hierarchy–at the university, in the White House, Congress, large corporation, city or county government, etc., male-dominated merely means that you’ll find more males at the top, more non-males at the bottom. Think we’ll be seeing a female president in the near future? Do people actually think that a woman would be incapable of handling the presidency? Which people? What kind of media scrutiny would a woman with a serious shot at the candidacy have to endure? It will happen some day, and it will take a courageous woman to subject herself to the media circus likely to follow her every move (which we’ve already seen in the campaigns). We have had our first non-white president, so the privilege system doesn’t exclude the possibility that a president could be female, or (obviously) non-white. But the odds are long for women and minorities, and the scrutiny intense. Kamala Harris, whose mother is Indian and father Jamaican, in 2020 is only the fourth woman on a major party presidential ticket.

Obsession with control. Here are some findings from a 1994 study of violence against women by the U.S. Department of Justice.

• Approximately 2.5 million of the nation’s 107 million females 12 years old and older were raped, robbed or assaulted in a typical year, or were the victim of a threat or an attempt to commit such a crime.
• Twenty-eight percent of the offenders were intimates, such as husbands or boyfriends, and another 39 percent were acquaintances or relatives. Women are more likely to be attacked by spouses, former spouses, boyfriends, parents or children than males by a factor of 10 to 1.
• In addition, women with family incomes of less than $10,000 were five times more likely to be attacked by an intimate than were women with family incomes of $30,000 or more.
• Eighteen percent of women who were attacked [by intimates] did not file a police report because they feared reprisal from their attackers. Only three percent of women attacked by strangers did not file a police report.
• As we live through a pandemic where ‘bodily autonomy’ is a term used to justify refusing to be vaccinated (and Covid-19 is now considered a ‘vaccine-preventable disease’), think of the concurrent laws being passed. Abortion was legalized in the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision, and the Dobbs decision in 2022 has made almost all abortions illegal in states with Republican legislatures. So access to legal abortion depends on where a woman lives. Many of these laws have been passed in legislatures dominated by white men, with white governors.

We can also think of control over emotions–it’s not ‘okay’ for a man to break down and cry. Johnson mentions a recently published book about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the U.S. president who escalated the Vietnam War, in which the author suggests Johnson knew two years before the 1968 election that the war was going badly and unwinnable, but he continued the campaign, a war in which over 56,000 American soldiers were killed, for fear that pulling back would make him seem less of a man. Certainly no American president should be asked to jeopardize his manhood for what’s best for the country!

Male-identified. This simply means that males are the standard. Check out the English language and the way words are used. Mankind. You guys, yeah you, the policemen, firemen, whatever. Man up.  Could you man those battle stations, we need more manpower, okay? We don’t really think about this, mostly, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an effect, or origins. What do we mean by courage? It’s often associated with violence, doing death-defying acts. People in our society are less likely to think of a single mother raising her children, going to school, working full time, as courageous. More likely defrauding the government’s meager public assistance programs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is courageous . . .  he’s no girly man!

Male-centered. Spend a week looking at the headlines on the front page. You’ll find that the front page headlines are literally owned, and figuratively occupied, by white men. Look at movies (especially academy award winners)–how many are centered around a female character? She will often play the supporting role. Johnson’s point? White men are in positions of power. White men run the media outlets–newspaper, radio, television. That doesn’t mean that non-whites, or women, can’t be in the spotlight as well. It just means that most of the time, it will be men. Check out your local paper and count photos over a week or two, and see what you find. Check out the sports page–see how boys and girls, men’s and women’s sports are covered.

Dr. Johnson is talking about a system of privilege–he was not attributing the properties of this system to individuals, yet individuals often get defensive when a social category to which they belong is called ‘privileged.’ This isn’t about ‘bad men’ versus ‘good men,’ but couching the discussion in those terms likely prevents honest, open dialogue. No, he’s referring to a social system–in a sense, a game, with specific rules. He used the example of the board game Monopoly–if you play Monopoly, you’re expected to behave in a certain way–you’re expected to be greedy, to buy up properties, to charge others rent when they land on your properties. It’s socially acceptable when you’re playing that game. But when you finish the game, you can leave those rules behind–just because we may be greedy in the game of monopoly doesn’t mean that we’ll carry that attribute into our social world. With respect to the system of male privilege, we know the game, we’ve been learning the rules since we were children. Even if we don’t know the individual players, we still know the game and the rules.

Paths of least resistance

We all know how we’re supposed to behave in a classroom. Be attentive, or at least feign attentiveness, take notes or at least pretend to take notes, sit in our chairs, don’t interrupt, etc. What if we ‘breached’ these conventions? What if students, when they disputed someone’s point in class, got out of their chairs and went over to the student and stared them down, started talking trash? They would be straying from the path of least resistance. For men, the path of least resistance means paying homage to masculinity, being one of the guys. What happens if a group of guys is telling sexist jokes, and one of them objects, says ‘hey, my mom’s a woman. My sister’s a woman. My girlfriend is a woman. Show some respect.’

. . . . we can all probably speculate as to what the other group members, regardless of whether they say it, might be thinking. Women, on the other hand, are not supposed to be pushy–pushy is bitchy in women, where men are seen as aggressive. Pushy is much riskier for a woman in the business or professional world. Staying on the path of least resistance is all that is necessary, Dr. Johnson says, to perpetuate systems of privilege. When we take that path, we reproduce the system with our daily actions. It isn’t like we’re thinking ‘well, time to reproduce that white male system of privilege!’ But there are social sanctions, consequences for following other paths. For instance, in the National Football League a few years back, there was a brewing controversy over gay football players. Not one active player had come out (some have in retirement, but Carl Nassib was the first active player to come out, in June of 2021), and many players have made homophobic statements in the press. The same kind of rhetoric occurred in the early 1990s in the military, where some male soldiers would be quoted saying they ‘didn’t want to share their foxhole with a gay.’ Ironically, the military’s leadership (reflecting the current White House thinking) has tried to get rid of the policy, but political pressure, especially from conservative circles, deferred this until after the 2010 election cycle. After the military tried to downplay any problems, though, the Trump Administration instituted a ban on transgenders serving in the military in 2019 (essentially a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy).

People who take a path of greater resistance often pay a price. The notion that big tough soldiers would be worried about being molested in a foxhole, in the middle of a battlefield, by a gay soldier seems, well, ridiculous? At a point in last decade, this policy required the removal of enough of the military’s Arabic translators to put intelligence gathering initiatives at risk. The other argument is that it would render recruitment more difficult–parents would oppose their sons and daughters enlisting. But these are the conventional arguments opposing protection of gays and lesbians in the military against discrimination. The result? Here’s what John Shalikashvili, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had to say:

The officers who oppose lifting the ban argued in The Post that there is “no compelling national security reason” to let openly gay troops serve. They also say, however, that “losses of even a few thousand sergeants, petty officers and experienced mid-grade officers” — those they believe might bolt — are unaffordable. Under current policy, we have lost more than 13,000 of those people, such as the Arabic language speaker featured in the new film “Ask Not.” In addition, researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have found that nearly 4,000 people leave voluntarily each year because of the ban, and that more than 40,000 recruits might join if the ban is ended.

He doesn’t support opening a ban or changing the ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy without carefully looking at its effects.

Is there an institutional corollary for this path of least resistance that puts males in positions of privilege? What would it take for a more female-centered perspective on welfare programs, especially cash assistance programs used most often by single mothers? Can people from a position of privilege design a welfare system that meets the needs of the underprivileged? What reasons might those in power have for not wanting to do that?  Any insights from Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 article?