As we head into this holiday season, during which many shoppers will have more contact with customer service shop and restaurant employees than at any other time of the year, allow me to clarify a few things.

• Most people who work at shops, restaurants, hotels, non-union grocers, etc., do not get any sort of paid time off. If they’re sick and they stay home, they don’t get paid for those hours/days.
• They are forced by law to take vacation of at least one week per year, but employers are not forced to pay them. Many seek temp work during that “vacation” week because they can’t live without every penny of their normal income.
• They rarely have insurance benefits, and if they do, they almost surely pay far more for it than the average office worker.
• They rarely get 40 hours a week, which means many of them need to work more than one job to make ends meet.
• When the store needs to save money, it cuts employee hours. This means suddenly the 25 hours you were depending on may become 16 – or you may even find yourself with an unexpected week off. Not good if you’re living paycheck to paycheck.
• If you are terminated for any reason – including a layoff through no fault of your own – you don’t get a dime in severance pay or anything else. You’re just out of a job.
• There’s rarely any sort of retirement account for these workers.
• THESE ARE NOT EASY JOBS. I can’t stress this enough - these jobs are stressful, they demand true mult-tasking and lots of skills, and very often expose workers to confrontations with customers in which they are expected to somehow uphold store policy without irritating a customer who wants to cheat the system. If you’re not an asshole, you probably have no idea how “wrong” customers can be – they even engage in verbal abuse and various forms of harassment. And in most of these jobs, management will not back up the employee – they will instead let the customer run rough-shod over store policies, even to the extent of cheating the store, or get away with sexual harassment, and perhaps even demand the employee apologize for not kissing the ass of a customer who wanted to, for example, return an item a dog had clearly chewed to pieces 3 years after it was purchased.
• Retail workers generally make no more than a dollar above minimum wage.
• Restaurant workers generally make better money than retail workers, but still far less than most office workers make (excepting clerical workers, who are also paid dismally, but sometimes get some benefits).
• A disturbing trend in retail in the past 20 years has been not to pay commissions – which would inspire healthy competition, but to count each worker’s sales and give more hours per week to the workers who sell more. This inspires stress and panic as people compete for the right to “keep” their hours. Companies who engage in this are trying to get $50k/year salesperson quality out of workers making $6.
• These workers usually get a store discount, which is just not as great as it sounds when you’re working to pay rent and put food in your mouth.

If you think people on the bottom of the job ladder enjoy the same stuff you do, only with less income, you are deeply mistaken. Please at least give them some respect when you interface with them – they’re not getting much else. And if someone talks about raising minimum wage or other measures that might improve the lot of these workers, you don’t have to agree with their proposals (some of which are bound to be useless), but at least come at the issue with the understanding that there is actually a problem when jobs that weren’t designed to be someone’s sole living have become that for too many people. Understand there are regions where these are the only jobs available to all but a select lucky few; that there are disabled people stuck with these jobs because no office employers will make a few minor adjustments to accommodate them; that there are people stuck in these jobs because they needed to earn a living right out of high school and can’t afford to quit the job to go to college and can’t get a better job without college; and so on.

And surely we can agree that no matter what sort of work a person does, they deserve to be treated like human beings rather than enhancement tools for your shopping/dining/traveling experience.

Related posts:

1. College has become a barrier for smart poor kids
2. Those crappy jobs CEOs couldn’t do to save their lives

ETA: This post is US-centric, and I should have made that clear. How much or little it applies to other countries, I can’t say.

As soon as employers made college a necessity for jobs of any significant income (and even some of shockingly low income, such as “receptionist”) back in the 80s or 90s, college started increasing tuition costs into the stratosphere. The cost for a four year degree at even a modest state school is now, in technical economic terms, fucking ridiculous.

How can I say that, knowing how much college increases (on average) a graduate’s lifelong earnings and so on? Because not every degree has that effect. Many degrees lead to an empty or low-paying job market. What can someone with a degree in history, English, or archeology do besides teach history, English or archeology? (And please don’t say “write books” – authors make well below minimum wage, unless they are among the very, very small minority who make it big.) There are a precious few degrees that actually pay for themselves in earnings: engineering, for one. Even degrees for doctors and lawyers – which can pay for themselves eventually – are getting tougher and tougher to justify, because the initial expense is horrendous, and the period of working for little or no money after school is harsher than it was for previous generations because the cost of living is increasing every year (forcing young graduates into even more debt than the degree did).

For kids whose parents couldn’t afford a college fund, who are completely on their own to pay their way through school, it just doesn’t make economic sense to become a doctor when you could become a nurse with far less expense. It may not even make sense at all to go to college, when you could become an administrative assistant or a carpenter and earn a modest but decent living without tens of thousands (or more) in debt from which you have to recover, and still have hope of promotion to something better. And don’t bring up scholarships – they’re increasingly hard to come by, the competition gets worse every year, and in some fields they’re not available at all.

Now, employer degree lust is not the only reason college costs have risen to the point where smart, poor kids are being left behind, but it is one that could be addressed very quickly without costing anyone a dime. Employers need to get over the idea that a college degree is necessary in every profession. It is not. Just a few decades ago, employers realized that people could pick up, for example, how to do an engineer’s job without having an engineering degree, and they recognized that a certain number of years of job experience were equivalent to a degree.

Employers need to stop thinking “degree=qualification” and instead establish qualifications that can be met in more than one way. For example, a poor smart kid can learn every skill needed to be an editor in a publishing house. Books and textbooks are readily available, and there’s information all over the internet, which can be accessed for free at most libraries, so self-education is very possible. Instead of requiring an English degree, a publishing house could instead require applicants to describe in an essay what they’ve done to train themselves for editing (whether that’s college or self-education). After weeding out the ones who don’t impress, the publishing house would interview applicants and give them an editing assignment to complete on the spot under supervision (to avoid the possibility of cheating). The publishing house would still get quality employees and poor smart people would have a fighting chance for good jobs.

For another example, certain types of engineering are far more complex – even if someone has a remarkable flair for constructing engines from crap they found at the junkyard, there are solid reasons why an employer might want them to learn the math skills and concepts involved in engineering. But is there any reason these skills can’t be learned on the job, if the person passes a math test which indicates the capacity to learn it?

The problem is that employers are too lazy to take on the work of apprenticeship. That duty has been passed onto colleges. And yet, the people who actually work with 23 year olds know apprenticeship still goes on. It has to – no college can anticipate precisely what your company wants its employees to do. Companies imagine they’re avoiding apprenticeship, when they’re not. And I suspect – based on personal observations – what most kids learn in 4 years of college could be compressed into 6 months of apprenticeship.

There are only two fair solutions: the Federal and state governments must find a way to make college degrees available to everyone at every income level, or we must create alternatives to college degrees that allow people to better themselves and have that reflected in their income. Not only does the second one not cost tax payers or anyone else a dime, it makes more sense.

Related posts:

1. Greed and the end of the middle class
2. No, customer service workers do not have it easy
3. Abused kids can’t really sue their parents

• Once you survive abuse or violation, you have a knowledge of the human capacity for nastiness that others around you don’t share.
• It is your duty to keep them blissfully ignorant at the expense of your own soul.
• When they chatter on about how disgraceful it is for a child not to be on speaking terms with his family, you are a rude asshole if you remind them that the abuse rate in the US and most countries is staggering, so maybe the child had good reason.
• When you’re the child they’re complaining about, no one will take your side if you try to explain to them six ways from Sunday why it’s much, much better for everyone that you have no contact with your parent/family/ex-husband, or eventually give up and tell the person to mind its own business.
• If you try to tell your friends that their latest crush shows signs of being violent or abusive, they’ll hate you. If you turn out to be right, they’ll hate you more.

And so on, and so forth. Honestly, if I go through every example, I’ll get too depressed to finish the article. Most of them come from personal experience.

And this – more than anything – is why I hate human beings. Because out of those of you who’ve had the good fortune not to be abused or violated in your lifetime, maybe 1 in 1,000 can be bothered to muster sympathy for those who have. Oh, if you see an abused child on Oprah you cry your heart out, sure. But I’m talking about putting the feelings of a survivor ahead of your own when they’re right there in your face.

When they’re someone you know; someone very much like you. When you get that crumpled feeling in the gut that it’s only random chance it was them and not you, and your first instinct is to explain away why it happened to them (and could therefore never happen to you). Or deny that it happened at all. Or have the awkward sympathetic moment you find yourself trapped in, but immediately pull back to superficiality with this person you once called friend.

When you make some ignorant comment about abuse and someone corrects you with a story from her own experience and your first instinct is to prove her wrong, maybe the “greenest” thing you could do for the environment is become part of it already. Yeah, I’m so gosh darn mean, but goddamnit, this needs to be said.

Those of us who’ve experienced abuse, rape and other violations don’t keep it quiet because we’re ashamed. Or because it’s intensely personal. The main reason we keep it quiet is because we know how you’ll treat us if we tell you. We know you have a culturally-granted privilege to remain ignorant. To not know, and therefore not to be responsible. Not to bother. Not to think about it.

And certainly not to do anything that might help stop or at least curtail it somewhat in the future.

But you are responsible. If you’re not aware that statistically a certain percentage of the people you know must have experienced physical, emotional or sexual abuse at some point in their lives, you are helping the perpetrators of those crimes keep working in the shadows. Because as long as you imagine the problem doesn’t really touch anyone you know, the problem stays hidden.

I saw on a forum the other day some people discrediting a study about rape statistics. “If this study is true,” one poster said, “then about a fourth of the women I know must have been raped at some point, and that’s just not true.” How can anyone think that because a fourth of the women he knows haven’t told him, “Oh, by the way, I’ve been raped before” they must not have been? The answer is: they can’t. They’re beating the knowledge to the punch. They’re shouting in every way they can, “You will not drag me kicking and screaming to the realization that life isn’t fair and I’m one lucky shit not to have suffered worse than I have!”

He might as well help round up victims for abusers. He’s perpetuating the unfairness by perpetuating the silence.

As long as you’re more concerned about your right to be in la-la land denial than someone else’s right not to go through hell, you are fighting on the abuser’s side.

The fact that this is a privilege you are granted through the culture which dictates that abuse victims should lie rather than tell Nice People an uncomfortable truth says something odious about the culture. We are a culture of abuse. We believe strongly in the rights of the best-funded 5% to rule over the less-funded and harder-working 95%. We convince ourselves it’s only natural if certain people, defined by such superficialities as gender and skin color rather than important traits like capability or good judgment, should rule. We convince ourselves that cleaning lady who works two jobs just to make ends meet couldn’t possibly have had the cure for cancer locked in her brain behind a lack of education, so no big loss of potential there!

It’s all part of the same thing. As soon as you decide it’s okay for some people to carry double and triple burdens so that others may carry nothing at all, you have decided abuse is pretty neat and you’re all for it. And if that’s the case, all I’m asking is that you shuck off your privilege and take responsibility for the decision you’ve made and the side you’ve taken.

Ignorance is not “nice.” It’s not “good people.” It’s not “I was just trying to have a nice dinner party, why’d she go and bring up a thing like that when all we were doing was saying how gosh awful wonderful the person who abused her is and how much we’d all like to see him elected God.” Ignorance is the hammer in the hand of oppression.

Related posts:

1. Niceness privilege
2. Abused kids can’t really sue their parents
3. Extroversion privilege

First of all, let’s discuss the source of your confusion. The most common reason for thinking people are either with you or against you is that you don’t realize that some people actually arrive at their own opinions rather than just adopting other people’s opinions in a show of solidarity. If you’re an opinion adopter, you may tend to assume another person’s shifting opinions are meant to passively-aggressively signal shifting loyalties. You may feel the person is abandoning your team for another team. In fact, some people engage in a process called “thinking” by which they evaluate how much logical sense an idea makes. They may re-evaluate the idea when they obtain new life experience or knowledge. It doesn’t mean they hate you or want your beliefs to fail or want you to stop believing as you do.

Helpful tip: there are other ways for a person to be a good and loyal friend or colleague to you than by mirroring your beliefs back to make you feel good about yourself.

When your adopted opinions and beliefs are mainstream, you feel safe. You believe that everyone feels the same pressure you felt to conform, and that everyone is shares the weakness that forced you to conform. Therefore when someone doesn’t conform, you think they’re some kind of crazed monster – a dangerously fucked up nutjob. You feel entitled to lash out in attack. In fact, some people have a trait called strength which enables them to feel pressure from others without giving in. They know people want them to echo their beliefs back to them like a tape recorder, but they have their own ideas. They’re (usually) not doing it to spite you; they just honestly see things differently.

Critics

Critics break down ideas into chains of logical thought, then evaluate how sound that logic is. For example, the critic will not accept that “the hole in the ozone is for Jesus to come through” as a logical precept because there is no logic: it’s just an idea you’ve chosen to embrace. The critic is not saying you can’t embrace it, nor is the critic (necessarily) saying it’s a stupid thing to believe (though when that argument has been put to me, I have made the argument that if Jesus needs help from hairspray manufacturers to make His Second Coming, perhaps He Is Not All That). The critic is merely saying you have offered no persuasive reason or fact to compel him to agree with you. It would be absolutely inappropriate at this point to spray paint his car with the word “Fornicator” or similar.

Non-supporters

Boy, these guys have it rough. They don’t even want to criticize your beliefs or debate with you. They just want to live and let live. Unfortunately, they’re a Democrap in a Repubican region or vice versa. Or they’re a Muslim in Christian redneck heaven. Or they’re a woman/person of color/gay person/etc. who, when asked for an opinion, gives one instead of saying cheerily, “Gosh, I dunno, but I sure trust Mr. Cracker to know what’s best for me. I’ll just go over here and be harmless, ‘kay?”

My advice here, based on years of personal experience and careful consideration, is simply leave these people the fuck alone. I mean, what damage do you actually think they’re doing to you? They don’t even want to talk to you! You just come over and start telling them your opinions with the expectation that because everything you think is mainstream they will say, “Oh yeah, me too!” and when they don’t, you’re so bothered by the fact there’s somebody on this earth who doesn’t have to agree with everyone else to function, you can’t stand it, so you decide to harass them daily. And even if they say they agree with you to make you go away, you know it’s not true, so you keep harassing them for no other reason than punishment.

Can you not see that you need psychiatric help? You do. Not them – you.

Hostile people

Now, there are indeed people who are hostile to mainstream beliefs just to irritate you, or to maintain the belief they are cool, or whatever. These people are by far the smallest group, and the vast majority of them are under seventeen years of age, but they exist. These are the people you can feel entitled to fight with or dislike, and you will recognize them because:

• Unlike critics, they can’t offer logical arguments about their beliefs/opinions, i.e., can’t tell you why they think what they think.
• Unlike non-supporters, they change their beliefs again if everyone starts agreeing with them
• Unlike both critics and non-supporters, they harass you with their beliefs all the time in order to irritate you. (Note: “harass” doesn’t mean “expresses their weirdass beliefs right out in public instead of in darkened basements, where such ideas belong”; it refers to an actual pattern of intentionally bugging the hell out of you, specifically, on a regular basis.)

In other words, they’re exactly like you. Except they feel they’ve got a score to settle, and their chosen method is rebellion. It’s not a sincere rebellion, it’s just rebelling to annoy people. Because they’re pricks and you’re a prick too, I highly recommend that you guys engage in an escalating pattern of violence until you remove each other from the overburdened ecosystem.

I hope you’ve found this article helpful, and have a wonderful day.

Related posts:

1. One privilege Christians don’t always realize they have

If my needs have been easily met my whole life – not just for food and shelter but for things like dignity and fair chances – I may be less likely to notice that you, in my very same society, are not getting yours met. It never occurs to me that other you could be making the same efforts in life but getting a different result, right in my backyard.

I don’t realize how privileged I am.

And my privilege to be in the favored group creates another privilege: my philosophy of life need not account for the lives of Others, i.e., people not in my favored group. What about all the people working 2 jobs – more if they can get them – and never getting ahead? Are they not “anyone” and are they not “working hard enough”?

“Well, they’ve made bad choices,” I say, pictuing unattractive middle aged women and people of color slaving away in restuarants or factories or as maids and janitors. I don’t even think of potentially lethal jobs in coal mines and oil rigs because I don’t see those places. I picture these Others getting themselves criminal records or unexpected baby mouths to feed, because they made bad choices. I don’t think about the time Daddy got my arrest record expunged so I wouldn’t get kicked out of college. I don’t think about how my sister handled her unexpected high school pregnancy so it wouldn’t affect her future. No, the choices made by people Like Me are justified by the end result. The choices made by Others are condemned by the end result.

But they’re frequently the same damn choices.

The fact is, some poor people do make bad choices. But some of the most powerful, rich and successful people in my country have made the very same choices – drug abuse, running over pedestrians while driving drunk, gambling, wasting money like crazy, unplanned pregnancies. If these choices don’t have a consistent result in the life of everyone who makes them, they can’t be the cause of the effect that is poverty.

But I don’t have to consider any of that. I can just dismiss you as argumentative and go watch some mainstream news channel which reaffirms my view that all is right in the world. There is no mainstream channel that reaffirms the viewpoint of Others: and that’s their own damn fault because they haven’t created those channels or proven themselves a valuable consumer group to market to. All is right in my little world.

Related posts:

1. White Trash Blues: Class Privilege v. White Privilege
2. Gee, thanks, but I’m actually not exceptional at all
3. No, customer service workers do not have it easy

• “Being white didn’t give me all these privileges you’re talking about.”
• “I know plenty of [minority] people who are better off than I am.”
• And the advanced version, which I’m guilty of using myself: “It’s really more about class than it’s about race.”

I am “poor white trash”. I can relate to all of the statements above. I grew up looking the part of Average White Girl, but middle class white people always pegged me as “different”. This left me vulnerable to losing opportunities and even jobs to white people who “fit in” better. Also, after my family made its great escape from White Trash Hell into Middle Class Purgatory, I learned to my surprise that there were black kids in the world who’d grown up with more money than I ever had. And so on, and so forth.

Here’s where the confusion comes in. Yes, I have a legitimate grievance against the system. Yes, I’ve lost out on things because I didn’t have the $20 to invest or know the magic social password that would have marked me “normal” (read: “middle class, preferably white”). And yes, it hurts when you don’t fit in with your own race because of your class, and you don’t fit in with your class because of your race. It’s hard to see privilege around that stuff, but the examples are out there.

Wealth gets you a ticket, but it doesn’t guarantee you a seat

One of the black kids I went to school with whose family was richer than mine? We discovered we’d given identical answers on a test, and she’d gotten some of them marked wrong while I got 100%. When we examined her other papers, we realized the teacher had been doing this for some time: “giving” the black girl a lesser grade. And one of the Jewish girls I knew whose family was richer than mine? When she was absent for a Jewish holiday and missed a test, one of her teachers decided to teach her a lesson by refusing to let her make up that test anytime but on a Saturday – the Jewish sabbath. The teacher offered truly pathetic excuses why after school, during lunch and during the girl’s study period wouldn’t work. Sunday wouldn’t work because it was the teacher’s Christian sabbath! The girl’s mother had to call the principal and threaten to bring the ACLU into it before she got a proper time slot to retake the test.

I’ve never been pulled over for “looking like you’re out of your neighborhood” (unless you count the time I was lost in a snotty part of Beverly Hills in an American car, gasp!). I’m not nearly as likely to get pulled over for traffic violations as black or Latino people, even if they grew up with more money than I did. Taking things a step further, I’ve never felt pressured to join a gang just to survive. I’ve never worried I’m going to get shot in my own neighborhood (and I’ve lived in some neighborhoods the white middle class considers “bad”).

That white skin would get you a seat, if only you had a ticket

My approach is to look at all the types of privilege that affect an individual. Take me, for example. I have white privilege and heterosexual privilege and able-bodied privilege working for me; I have class privilege and male privilege working against me. In the case of poor whites, the class privilege often takes more from them than the white privilege gives them (i.e., the college admissions board prefer my skin color, but if I can’t somehow pay tuition, I’m not getting in). In my personal experience, white privilege may be a total bust, and I have the right to feel that way: I do not have the right to muddy a discussion of white privilege with all my anti-privileges. But before I learned to separate the types of privilege, I’m afraid I probably did that once or twice. Not in the “minorities have it so easy” tone that marks one type of troll; I just couldn’t figure out which part of this stuff I wasn’t getting.

Not a credit to our race

I will probably write a whole post on this someday, but I’ll leave you with one last point to consider. In my experience, poor whites are one group of people that even PC folks think it’s okay to take potshots at. Make a “dumb blonde” joke, and someone sooner or later will call you on your sexism; make a “you know you’re a redneck when…” joke, and chances are everyone will take it as good clean fun. This is something that makes me generally distrustful of the supposedly “progressive” thinkers out there, and I assume it affects other poor whites simiarly. See, we’re an embarrassment to the white race. We’re proof that whites are not invulnerable to the repressions they’ve visited on other races. So we’re taught to keep quiet. On one level, we know we shouldn’t take that crap. On the other hand, experience has taught us if we take a stand, we’ll stand alone. I don’t know how many times I’ve endured jokes about my homestate when a potential new friend asks me where I’m from. And if you know me, you know I’d never let an insult to my gender go by without comment.

And if we have an accent of any sort – many of us do, since by definition it’s the higher classes who get the privilege of their accent being declared “no accent” – we’re supposed to put up with being made fun of and/or being fetishized. Or being expected to change it, if we’re “serious” about getting certain jobs or promotions. We’re vulnerable to class assumptions that we’re ill-educated, lazy, immoral or even criminally perverse (only in redneck jokes is incest somehow a topic for humor!).

While these points still aren’t germaine to a topic about white privilege, I’ve seen them get dismissed in discussions about privilege and bigotry in general, and in those cases they are relevant. Hopefully, something in this post will help someone weed out trolls and/or communicate more effectively with sincere poor whites who mistake a lack of class privilege for a lack of white privilege.

Related posts:

1. Greed and the end of the middle class
2. White guy asks: why do you need to bring race into it?
3. Gee, thanks, but I’m actually not exceptional at all

This all started from a comment made by DNi on my post, Personal Privilege List. I started thinking about it, then some stuff happened, then I thought some more, and then I reached a conclusion: yes, there is a definite privilege extended to extroverts for no good reason.

First, a definition session since people often use “introverted” to mean shy and “extroverted” to mean friendly.  It’s not that simple. Extroverts are people who need external stimulation from others.  Introverts are people who are stimulated by their own thoughts and ideas, and sometimes need to limit external input because they’ve got so much going on internally.

When I tell people I’m introverted or that I enjoy time alone, I tend to get a couple of negative responses.  The first is boredom, because I’m talking to an extrovert and my response to “what did you do this weekend?” isn’t providing them any external stimulation.  They have every right to find me dull.  Unfortunately, society takes it one step further, inviting them to judge me as lesser because I don’t provide the stimulation they want.  It’s considered normal that introverted kids who do well in school – “nerds” or “geeks” – should be bullied by extroverted jocks or popular girls.  It’s considered okay to promote a less qualified employee with a “better personality” (read “extrovert”).  And so on.

The other negative reaction I get is the assumption that I’m emotionally damaged, and that’s why I’m introverted.  This assumption rests on the assumption that everyone is naturally extroverted.  In fact, there’s data to indicate that extroverts and introverts may simply be wired differently; brain chemicals in introverts may simply be a lot more active than in extroverts.  They’re more often in output mode than input, while extroverts are the other way around.

Furthermore, while I agree that emotional damage can lead to introversion, in my observation it leads to extraversion even more often.  Ever met someone who can barely function without a romantic partner?  Will lie to people to maintain friendships just so they always have someone to hang out with?  Constantly steps on people to get with a “better” crowd?  These aren’t exactly functional examples of extraversion.  And what about functional introversion?  Introverts are less likely to engage in damaging relationships because they’re content to be alone.  They’re less likely to get bored and frustrated when there’s not much going on.  They’re not going to create drama just to get something going on.

As I see it, the world needs both kinds of people.  My theory on why extraversion is considered normal and introversion aberrant in the US is that introverts are independent thinkers, and that doesn’t make for good little consumers, obsessed with “keeping up with the Joneses”.  It doesn’t make for the preferred type of voter, either – one who puts candidate likability ahead of capability.  One who votes for what their friends or family vote for, instead of examining the issues.  Introverts are likely to notice those rather simple solutions you’ve been avoiding out of laziness or because your real motive has yet to be revealed.

And most offensive of all, introverts don’t want your approval badly enough to torture themselves to get it.

Related posts:

1. Extroverts provide a privilege demonstration
2. Non-survivor privilege and silence