Privileged Identity Research Articles

Deliberate Silences

This article offers silences to make deliberative democracy more inclusive and diverse. Considering deliberation broadly as conversation, I advance the argument that silence may be the missing link in our democratic theories: that some silences are packed full of meaning, others can be used as temporary tactics for bringing more meaningful voices to the table, and that silent yielding is the most crucial practice for a robust democratic world. Inclusion involves at least two important dimensions. First, excluded subjects must be brought, allowed, welcomed, and embraced to democratic conversations. Excluded voices must become present. Second, and this is the more difficult dimension, exclusionary identities must be transformed in the process. Simply including more voices and meanings does little if there are structural forces that preclude the rearrangement of democratic possibilities. One such structural force is privileged identities that, by their character, are unlikely to hear and be transformed. In this regard, I put forth silent yielding as an enduring democratic habit that, if practiced sincerely, is likely to transform such identities, and transition thin democracies (ones in which citizens participate in order to simply fight for their own self-interests) into strong democracies (ones in which all citizens are welcomed to the table, and all leave the table transformed in the direction of the common). Deliberate silences combine intentionality, meaningfulness, thoughtful engagement, and robust commitment to inclusion, in order to make deliberative democracy more democratic and transformative.

World Englishes and Identity Construction: A Qualitative Analysis of Two Taiwanese EFL Undergraduates’ Viewpoints

This study aims to explore the shifting roles of Standard English and World Englishes in the identity construction process of EFL learners. This was a qualitative study of two Taiwanese EFL undergraduate students in Taiwan, which synthesized the data from (1) three semi-structured interviews, (2) field notes, (3) an opinion survey, and (4) the participants’ reflections on journal articles. The two participants intellectually appreciated the idea of World Englishes but realized it was difficult to have a real sense of owning English. The data showed that the two participants had formed images of English native speakers and differently relied on their own values in order to identify their perceptions and feelings as English speakers within the EFL discourse. One aspired to become, or indeed saw herself as, an English-speaking American, whereas the other emphasized her Taiwanese EFL background. The findings implied that the two participants perceived non-native English speakers’ initial marginality, and thus the value of taking on a more privileged identity, to be followed by either social solitude, or empowerment within a Taiwanese context that did not necessarily embrace learners’ new English-influenced identity. EFL learners’ real understanding of the legitimacy of L1s and native culture, and their genuine and empowering awareness of the rich proliferation of World Englishes, should insofar as possible be placed at the center of foreign language education.

The “Wages of Burman-ness:” Ethnicity and Burman Privilege in Contemporary Myanmar

Ethnicity is one of the primary lenses through which scholars view conflict in Burma/Myanmar. In this paper I examine the dominance of the majority ethnic group in Myanmar, the Burmans, and the ways in which Burman-ness functions as a privileged identity. I draw from the theoretical framework of Whiteness and White privilege in critical race theory to argue that, although there are important analytical differences between race and ethnicity, we can conceptualise Burman-ness as a form of institutionalised dominance similar to Whiteness. I support this argument by documenting the ways in which Burmans are privileged in relation to non-Burmans, while still, in many cases, seeing themselves as equally subject to government repression. This analysis of Burman privilege (and blindness to that privilege) is particularly relevant given the fact that the political reforms implemented by Myanmar's new, partly civilian government since 2011 have opened new opportunities for (mostly Burman) activists while coinciding with increased military violence in some non-Burman border regions of the country.

Interview: Philip Lieberman and the human factor

Security is a good thing and it's available right now. We have the technology, but its use is subject to a number of tensions and conflicts that mean it isn't exploited properly. Philip Lieberman, founder of Lieberman Software, which specialises in privileged identity management, believes that the problem isn't technology – it's us. People are simply all too human, and that means we can't avoid making mistakes. By itself, that's not a problem as we generally know how to correct our errors. But the issue is compounded by the proliferation of technology; a compensation culture in which people are paid for doing – in his view – the wrong things; a corporate environment in which IT and security measure their self-worth by the control they have over systems that, ultimately, they can't control; and a lack of understanding about what terms like ‘efficiency’ mean in a security context.

Leveraging Privilege: Organizing Young People with Wealth to Support Social Justice

Scholars and practitioners suggest that some people with power and privilege organize within their own communities to create change and help shape a just society. However, extant literature offers no model of how those with privilege organize to support these goals while remaining accountable to cross-class movements and avoiding replication of existing, unjust power structures. This mixed-methods case study examines how an organization of young adults who have (or will inherit) wealth alters a transformative model to effectively organize people with wealth. The article extends the literature on community organizing by proposing a model for organizing people with wealth and privileged identities to responsibly leverage their resources and access to elite institutions. Working with these young adults, a cross-class team of organizers uses its collective knowledge and experience to develop critical consciousness, build skills, and create action plans that responsibly support social justice.

Everyday Life, Culture, and Recovery: Carer Experiences in Care Homes for Individuals with Severe Mental Illness

Supported homes or Care Homes (CHs) have become in-services that play a fundamental role in social-health systems, particularly in mental health systems in Europe and the United States. They provide settings where residents' day-to-day routines are supervised by in-house non-clinician professional carers. Ten semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted by expert professional carers of persons with schizophrenia to explore interactions and activities between carers and users living in special "Care Homes". Analysis focused primarily on the functions of everyday life and daily routines in the recovery process. Social positioning analysis was used to investigate meanings and subjective experiences of professionals. The analysis revealed the importance of personal interactions in daily routines for recovery. We identified two main concerns guiding professionals' interactions with users: "Bring [users] to the here and now" and "give them the initiative to start actions". We suggest that CHs promote the construction of privileged identity in western urban societies, forming part of the process towards recovery and better social integration.

Exploring Levels of Christian Privilege Awareness among Preservice Teachers

Based on Peggy McIntosh's (1988) pioneering investigations of white and male privilege, we can, by analogy, understand Christian privilege as constituting a seemingly invisible, unearned, and largely unacknowledged array of benefits accorded to Christians, with which they often unconsciously walk through life as if effortlessly carrying a knapsack tossed over their shoulders. This system of benefits confers dominance on Christians while subordinating members of other faith communities as well as nonbelievers. These systemic inequities are pervasive throughout societies of many nations across the globe. They are encoded into the individuals’ consciousness and woven into the very fabric of their many social institutions, including schools, having enormous implications on all students. The current exploratory qualitative study investigates the relative level of awareness of Christian privilege among preservice teachers who self‐define as “Christian” at a large Midwestern United States research university, and situates this awareness and level of resistance upon Watt's Privilege Identity Exploration (PIE) model (2007, 2009).

Deconstructing Militant Manhood

In this article, we consider how privileged masculine performances within different spaces of (anti-)globalization politics discipline political praxis in ways that bolster, as much as contest, the order that these movements seek to subvert or overthrow. We draw on two case studies: a British ‘anti-imperialist’ organization working in solidarity with Latin America and the emerging British anarchist movement. On the basis of our own interpretive participation within these spaces, we consider how each was structured with reference to a privileged masculine identity – that of a patriarchal and authoritarian ‘Man with Analysis’ in the case of the former and what we call ‘Anarchist Action Man’ in the case of the latter. We reflect on how these dominant gendered scripts set restrictions around which bodies and voices could be included, and within what capacity; and how our own ‘off-script’ performances were reinterpreted with reference to available cultural texts within these activist subcultures.

The management of accusations of racism in Celebrity Big Brother

The 2007 UK series of Celebrity Big Brother drew considerable attention to Britain as a result of the alleged racist bullying of Bollywood film star Shilpa Shetty by four British celebrity housemates. At stake in these allegations was any perception that Britain as a country promotes inclusivity and discourages racism. In this article, we examine, through an analysis of the exit interviews conducted with the four housemates in question, how accusations of racism were made by the host of Big Brother, and how racism was almost made to disappear in the interviews. Specifically, we elaborate on how racism was constructed not simply as an individual aberration, but more precisely as a matter of perception. We then explore how the host of the interviews avoided making accusations of racism herself by implying that it was others who perceived the behaviours of the housemates as racist, and by using other words (such as ‘bullying’) rather than explicitly referring to racism. We conclude by outlining the implications of our findings for future discursive research on racism, and we emphasize the need to further explore how rhetorical strategies aimed at denying racism operate in the service of shoring up privileged identities.

Multicultural Mixing or Middle-class Reproduction? The White Middle Classes in London Comprehensive Schools

Drawing on interviews with White middle-class families who choose to send their children to London comprehensive schools, this paper focuses on the construction of Whiteness and middle classness as privileged identities. The paper explores the contradiction between parents’ desire for multiethnic ‘mixed’ environments for their children's schooling and their fear and ambivalence about their children being ‘out of place’ in these contexts. It examines how various practices and processes set these children apart and result in a reification of Whiteness and middle classness as normative. The paper concludes that comprehensive schooling can do little to dismantle privilege in a wider system of structural inequality.

Standard fare or fairer standards: Feminist reflections on agri-food governance

In 2007 new meat inspection regulations standardizing meat production throughout the Province of British Columbia (BC), Canada came into effect moving food for local consumption closer to continentally harmonized production standards. Critics argue that the economic viability of small-scale livestock farmers is threatened. Small-scale women farmers are central to the creation of alternative local agri-food networks in BC. Using gender as an analytically enabling tool this paper argues that public food-safety regulation can create the conditions for the dominance of private agri-food governance. The discursive creation of a feminized privileged consumer legitimates much non-democratic agri-food governance. The paper argues that more just and ecologically sustainable futures require a ‘gender troubling’ of agri-food governance in which the privileged identity of the food consumer is reconstructed as global citizen in the context of the food sovereignty of the farmers who produce their food.

Working Expectations: Frame Diagnosis and the Welfare Rights Movement

This paper examines frame resonance dynamics internal to the contemporary US welfare rights movement. Frames diagnosing the problems of welfare as rooted in conceptions of caregiving and wage work were popular a generation ago among welfare rights activists. Today, this frame is favored among allies of the movement. Is it favored among grassroots activists? Forty-three interviews with welfare rights parent/activists in eight states around the USA reveal that activists have prioritized the immediate needs of welfare families. In examining the mechanisms underlying this disjuncture in frame resonance, I find that a caring labor frame ultimately lacks both credibility and salience among activists. Moreover, these established conceptions of resonance tend to minimize the intertwined role of power and identity in the perception of framing choices available to activists. This tendency of framing literature to present identity categories such as race, class and gender as ultimately interchangeable masks the critical role of the political and social power associated with each unique identity category. In the case of carework frames, I argue that activists organizing in political environments with both large white populations and relatively low income inequality may find such frames that center on the value of motherhood attractive; these frames may be less strategically appealing in states with both higher income inequality and where welfare parents may be associated with racially stigmatized groups. I argue that examining dynamics specific to privileged identity categories along lines of race, class and gender should be a prerequisite to understanding the established terms of frame resonance in social movement scholarship.

Facilitating difficult dialogues at the intersections of religious privilege

AbstractThis chapter discusses ways student affairs professionals can use the privileged identity exploration model to facilitate difficult discussions at the intersections of religious privilege. Examples are given and practical suggestions offered on ways to create conditions for productive dialogue.

Whiteness as Pathological Narcissism

White, liberal, educated, upwardly mobile people are often thought to have transcended racism. Consequently, they may not think of themselves as white, as possessing any particular white privilege, or as having any sense of superiority about their whiteness. To confront someone about one's repudiated white privilege is analogous to confronting the person about their defensive grandiosity; the person feels attacked and responds with denial and counterattack. We suggest that white racial superiority, white privilege, and repudiated white racial identity are forms of pathological narcissism driven by an unconscious desire to be a triumphant oedipal winner and to avoid, at any price, being a disgraced oedipal loser. White racial superiority, white privilege, and white identity rely on racialized oedipal splitting in which whiteness comes to represent all idealized forms of love and lust while blackness comes to represent the devalued forms.

Privileged Social Identities and Diversity Leadership in Higher Education

In this paper, I examine the desirability and effectiveness of appointing in predominantly White institutions of higher education diversity leaders who possess privileged social identities. I conclude that the desirability and effectiveness of such individuals depends on their ascribed identities (especially in terms of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation), the prospective leader’s degree of understanding of the nature and functioning of oppression, the institutional history and context, and the broader sociohistorical context in which the institution is embedded. Thus, there will be some situations where appointing diversity leaders with privileged identities can be both desirable and effective.

Identity Treason: Race, Disability, Queerness, and the Ethics of (Post)Identity Practices

Relying mainly on Michel Foucault’s conceptions of bodily politics, ethics, and bio‐political understandings of the self, this article provides a rethinking of Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey’s (1996) identity category ‘race traitor’. Here, race traitor is understood as a way in which to distance, subvert, and reimagine one’s whiteness in order to disrupt the power that whiteness maintains. By exploring identity transgressions or, more specifically, identity ‘treason’, race traitor is presented as a relation of power, an act of betrayal and/or emancipation, and a social relation in order to explore the usefulness that identity treason offers to anti‐oppressive work. As socio‐spatial conceptualisations of whiteness also complicate other forms of identity transgressions, the analysis then shifts to a construction of ‘traitor’ in relation to other identities, such as queer disability. The author concludes by arguing that notions of treason can be used to disrupt the ‘privileged versus oppressed’ binaries that predominate in identity discourses. Exposing the ways in which privileged identities are constructed (i.e. whiteness, able‐bodiedness, heterosexuality, etc.) elucidates how resistance to oppressive identity categories is possible.

Hot cats and big men on campus: From this side of paradise to the freshman

Taking as its starting point the so-called college-craze (in films, books, music and fashion) of the early 1920's, the article explores a number of perhaps surprising parallels between Fitzgerald's archetypal campus novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) and Harold Lloyd's 1925 parody of the college genre, The Freshman. In particular the essay seeks to examine the gendered relationship between the narcissistic self and the crowd, whether in terms of Fitzgerald's view of the positive and negative crowd, or Harold Lloyd's obsession with conformity and belonging. The essay argues that the college genre of the twenties marked a key transition in American culture from older forms of elitism and privilege identity rooted in aping older modes of distinction and nobility to new modes of social recognition derived from movies, advertising and consumer goods. It thus explores the glamour and hallowed aura attached to college life in the light of American ideas of celebrity and constructed identity, and reads both Fitzgerald's novel and Lloyd's film in terms of a critical engagement with this nascent mode of belonging.

Politicizing Biographies: The Forming of Transnational Subjectivities as Insiders Outside

We take our own life stories as points of departure to look at some of the ways in which women were politicized in Argentina and West Germany (our respective countries of origin), focusing on similarities as well as differences in our politicization processes. We aim at putting present discussions about global political movements into a historical perspective. We want also to illuminate the centrality of political identities in the construction of specific (gendered) subjectivities. Our focus lies on theorizing the ways through which privileged (gendered) identities critically re-read their own position and transform their own understanding of themselves and the world through the field of the political. Methodologically, we want to contribute to ways of re-thinking Feminist methodologies by experimenting with a form of analysis in which we are alternately the subject and the object of our research process. The aim of this intervention is to transgress the binary oppositions between researcher/researched and challenge traditional understanding of social science where researchers provide analysis and informants have ‘experience’. One of our conclusions is that the 68 movement provided subject positions for living alternative normalities as an ‘insider-outside’, that is, for those who belonged to normalized groups in their respective societies, but for different reasons (of which we analyse some concerning our formation as ‘women’) could not identify with the dominant normalities offered to them. At the same time, the dominant male instrumentality of the movement estranged (some) women and allowed them (or forced them into) a kind of distanced engagement that, perhaps paradoxically, provided a basis for sustaining their political subjectivities through transformative experiences of defeat.

The Haunting of the South: American Geopolitical Identity and the Burden of Southern History

The evocative figure of a South haunted by its troubled past is a staple of representations of the region, and such representations not only create a problematic identity for the region but simultaneously produce a privileged national identity through the process of internal orientalism. This article connects internal orientalism with the notion of the double Janus to explain the similarities between America's attitude toward Southern history and its assertion that Japan and Germany bear historical burdens of their own. The inward-looking face of the double Janus is informed by the discourse of internal orientalism and gives Americans an opportunity to judge an internal spatial Other (the South), particularly with regard to the region's history (as a result American geopolitical identity is cleansed from the historical burdens that are construed as Southern). This practice as a righteous judge of the Other serves the US hegemon and its outward-looking face of the double Janus in that the rhetorical practices deployed to discuss Japanese and German history have been honed through the assessment of the burdens of Southern history.

Discourse appropriation, construction of identities, and the complex issue of plagiarism: ESL students writing in graduate school

Recent research on academic writing has established the intersection of writing and identity. However, it is not clear whether writers themselves are aware of this link. In this study, we investigated five ESL graduate students’ awareness of the identities that they constructed through the appropriation of others’ words and ideas in their texts. Moving beyond prevalent moral explanations, we further sought alternative reasons for students’ inappropriate textual borrowing practices, often categorized as plagiarism. Our findings suggest that, depending on their enculturation into disciplinary discourses, students exhibit different levels of awareness of the available and privileged identity options in the social contexts of writing. We argue that student textual plagiarism can best be viewed as an issue of authorial identity construction. The findings indicate that the roots of students’ production of institutionally unacceptable texts lie in their epistemological orientation as well as their authoritative view of source texts. We finally reflect on the implications of the findings for academic writing instruction. Drawing on the notion of students-as-ethnographers, we suggest that writing instruction can raise students’ awareness of the link between writing and self-representation as well as the epistemology underpinning academic authorship, as two important dimensions of successful writing.