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Expanding the Definition of Privilege: The Concept of Social Privilege
Abstract
Examinations of privilege have historically focused on gender and race. By placing privilege within the context of oppression, the authors offer an expanded view of the domains of privilege that include sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, differing degrees of ableness, and religious affiliation.
Los exámenes del privilegio se han enfocado históricamente en el género y la raza. Colocando el privilegio dentro del contexto de la opresión, los autores ofrecen una vista ensanchada de los dominios del privilegio que incluye la orientación sexual, la posición socioeconómica, la edad, difiriendo los grados de habilidad, y de la afiliación religiosa.
... The cultural capital consists of skills, knowledge, education and skill that give its holder a high status [4]. This concept resonates intensely with current notions of privilege, where access to education and networks of acquaintances can enable a higher social status through better business and employment opportunities [5]. In Visual AI, this privilege is translated on to specific imagetic representations of the taste of the small groups that guide its training. ...
This paper delves into the concept of taste as a classifier and its role in perpetuating cultural capital. Pierre Bourdieu's study on class and taste highlights how those with higher cultural capital dictate societal notions of good taste, influencing dominated classes. In the era of machine learning visual generative methods, the perpetuation of cultural capital ownership occurs through statistical processes. The evaluation of visual neural networks' aesthetic quality involves two crucial steps: filtering out low-quality images and creating test synthetic images for evaluation during training. However, these evaluations are biased, reflecting the preferences of a select group of individuals. Aesthetic evaluation data is obtained through public rating systems, but most of their users belong to a specific demographic, leading to further homogeneity in taste. Consequently, current rating systems reinforce a limited cultural capital rooted in access to technology and computational creativity. To foster diversity in neural generative systems, the paper proposes the development of new scorer systems, incorporating ratings from individuals in the Global South, those unfamiliar with generative systems or computers, and marginalized cultures. This endeavor aims to build a more inclusive aesthetic guidance and address the dominance of specific cultural capital in the field of visual culture. Finally, we also describe Edouard Glissant's concept of opacity as a valid resistance strategy for cultures which do not want to be mapped within generative artificial intelligence models. 1 Introduction Since the release of OpenAI's Dall·E and Stability.AI's StableDiffusion in 2022, the use of neural networks to generate images from text inputs has become a common task. As we'll see, these models are trained from both a combination of text-image pairs, used by the Clip models, and a massive collection of images retrieved from the Internet for training variational autoencoders. The goal of this article is to show how the choices in the selection of images that make up the training dataset, as well as the methods, leads to aesthetic biases in the generated images. 2 Societal Biases As with any system which relies on the mass extraction of information from public data, these models incorporate much of society's problems, like gender inequalities or racism. These effects are well known and have been investigated and documented elsewhere [1]. In fact, some of the corporations running large commercial services are aware of these issues and are actively fixing them [2]. These efforts consist generally of applying another bias on top of the existing ones so it won't reflect the existing distribution of data in society. A common example of this effect is the generation of a given profession. For instance, since most representations of CEOs in the underlying data are composed of white males, a model is most likely to produce white males when asked to create a picture of such executives. To avoid this effect, which hinders the representation of women in leading positions, an artificial bias is applied. The effect is not different from the use of affirmative action, materialized as, for instance, quotas for underrepresented groups in universities or employment opportunities. To be relevant and useful in society, artificial intelligent systems must aim for a fair representation of it-even if it won't reflect reality. But societal biases, notwithstanding the importance of the issue, are not the subject of this investigation. The goal here is to draw attention to the matters of taste guidance in the development of the visual generative AI models. Aesthetic issues related to taste are often overlooked in society. In the book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu dedicated an extensive research to demonstrate how dominating classes may impose their own taste on the culture of their times, in detriment to the aesthetic preferences of lower classes [3]. According to his study, classes with greater cultural capital determine what consists of good taste in society. The cultural capital consists of skills, knowledge, education and skill that
... Reflexivity about divers' intersectional roles (even professional roles like scientist, conservationist, economic agent) can increase potential restoration stakeholders' sense of agency through an "aesthetic of resilience" that builds hope in the Anthropocene (Meyers 2017). As the field moves toward mainstreaming restoration stakeholders' recognition of diversity and intersectional roles (both limited and privileged, the latter in Black and Stone 2005), the visual record must be interrogated for the degree to which it is exclusionary. It is important to document who is producing the visual record that will inspire and drive the future pipeline of divers, funders, and advocates-how and to what end? ...
Environmental non-profits use visual imagery, specifically photography, to communicate and educate the public efficiently. Harnessing the informative power and global reach of social media, images attempt to show the complex ecological issues surrounding restoration and what is at stake for our oceans and marine life, which depend on coral ecologies for survival. These images provide visibility to scientific interventions, while also shaping coral restoration as a visual concept. Coral restoration images have distinct visual communication techniques depicting coral as a site in itself and as a site of human and scientific intervention. These images attempt to reconcile scientific objectivity with affective advocacy both reproducing and challenging visual dimensions of restoration. Yet, they are not visual facts, rather they have a deep history and corresponding literature demonstrating how cultural values and visual tropes actively—if not intentionally—shape the public gaze at the illuminated sanctuaries of the reefs below.
... For instance, young people with lower SES are more likely to revise their expectations of applying to university downwards (Anders, 2017). On the contrary, the benefits of SES allow higher SES groups to have faith that they have "earned" a place in the social order (Black & Stone, 2005), which molds their belief that they deserve more. In fact, several empirical studies have found that higher SES is associated with narcissism, selfishness, and exploitative behaviors (Dubois et al., 2015;Harvey et al., 2014;Leckelt et al., 2018), all of which are manifestations of psychological entitlement. ...
Psychological entitlement is the belief that one deserves more. As an environmental factor that is systematically related to individuals’ beliefs about themselves and subsequent social behaviors, socioeconomic status is also closely related to psychological entitlement. However, previous research on this relationship remains insufficient. In the present three studies, we aimed to explore the relationship between socioeconomic status and psychological entitlement and its potential internal mechanisms. We recruited senior high school and college school students in Northwest China as participants. In the first study, we found that subjective socioeconomic status had a stronger explanatory power of psychological entitlement than objective socioeconomic status. In the following studies, we found that explicit self-focused attention (Study 2a) and implicit self-focused attention (Study 2b) mediated the positive relationship between socioeconomic status and psychological entitlement, respectively. Moreover, the results show that self-compassion only moderated the relationship between explicit self-focused attention (not implicit self-focused attention) and psychological entitlement. For lower self-compassion individuals, explicit self-focused attention was positively related to psychological entitlement. While for higher self-compassion individuals, there was no significant correlation between explicit self-focused attention and psychological entitlement. These findings expand the social cognitive theory of social class and have implications for understanding beliefs behind different socioeconomic statuses and taking corresponding measures.
... We use the term privilege to refer to a social group's unearned special advantage, which benefits that group at the expense of other social groups(Black & Stone, 2005). In this example, we use the term privileged identity to refer to white collegiate athletes' privilege when it comes to race. ...
... Privilege. Privilege refers to the unearned advantages that are conferred to an individual based on their social identities and the social context in which they are embedded (Black and Stone, 2005). We found that a subset of students who identified with non-UEM identities mentioned privileges they held in their undergraduate field biology courses related to these identities ( Figure 4A). ...
Field biology courses can be formative learning experiences that develop students’ science identities. Yet, they can also pose challenges to students that may disaffirm their science identities—especially to those who identify with underrepresented, excluded, and minoritized groups. It is largely unknown how students’ social (e.g., gender) and personal (e.g., where they grew up) identities intersect with their science identities in field biology courses. Therefore, we used the Expanded Model of Science Identity to determine: 1) the factors that influence students’ science, social, and personal identities; and 2) whether and how these identities intersect in field biology courses. Using a card sorting task during semistructured interviews, we found variation in science identities with which students identified, mediated by social factors (e.g., social comparison). These social factors influenced how students’ social and personal identities intersected with their science identities. Intersections between students’ social and science identities were also facilitated by structural factors (e.g., privilege, lack of representation) that perpetuate inequities in field biology. Based on our findings, we offer suggestions to support welcoming, equitable, and inclusive field biology education that nurtures the science identities of all students.
... We position this essay in line with Black and Stone's (2005) broad conceptualization of privilege, placing it within the context of oppression, and offering an expanded view of key factors beyond just race and gender to include sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, age, differing degrees of ableness, and religious affiliation. Black and Stone further note the difference between "privilege" and "preferred status." ...
Embedded within the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and building on the broader concepts of privilege and oppression, information privilege (IP) might be a useful lens for centering library and information science (LIS) curricula on information-related aspects of social power. IP suggests that individuals' access to and utilization of information is connected to demographic factors like socioeconomic status, place of birth, and gender. Despite the relevance of this concept to LIS scholarship and teaching, LIS scholarly discussions on information privilege are limited. The limited existing literature mainly extends Booth’s foundational essay exploring IP through the lens of institutional affiliation, stopping short of fuller sociocultural considerations. This essay considers IP as an information-focused organizing perspective within LIS teaching and curriculum development. The authors conclude with suggestions for building discussions of IP into LIS curriculum and teaching.
... Dans la littérature scientifique, cinq éléments font consensus pour définir les limites du concept. Le privilège est ainsi : 1) un avantage particulier, 2) accordé, donné et non pas gagné, 3) lié à un statut ou rang supérieur, 4) bénéfique à son bénéficiaire et 5) souvent un impensé pour celui qui en bénéficie (Black et Stone, 2005). Suivant les contextes, les privilèges peuvent être liés à la « race » ou à l'ethnicité, au genre, à l'orientation sexuelle, à la religion, ou encore à la classe socioéconomique. ...
À partir du milieu des années 1990, le contexte géopolitique et économique des territoires palestiniens occupés a permis l’arrivée de jeunes actifs, venus d’Europe et d’Amérique du Nord, pour travailler et résider quelques années dans les principales villes palestiniennes. Grâce à leurs passeports étrangers, ils bénéficient d’une liberté de mouvement sur l’ensemble du territoire israélo-palestinien. Cette mobilité, à forte charge symbolique pour les Palestiniens, leur offre accès à des lieux de détente, des activités de loisirs et une mobilité internationale facilitée. En s’appuyant sur une enquête menée pendant vingt-trois mois entre 2010 et 2015 — entretiens (N=90) et observation participante —, l’auteur analyse la forme que prend le privilège de mobilité au quotidien dans le contexte palestinien et les différents positionnements et usages face à cette situation inégalitaire. Ces usages différenciés viennent révéler des désaccords et des tensions entre « internationaux » et avec les Palestiniens.
Since the mid-1990s, the geopolitical and economic dynamics of the Occupied Palestinian Territories have facilitated the influx of highly qualified young workers from Europe and North America, who come to reside, work, or study in major Palestinian cities for a limited duration. Benefiting from their respective passports, they enjoy unrestricted movement across the Israeli-Palestinian territory. This mobility holds significant symbolic value for Palestinians, as it grants access to recreational spaces, leisure activities, and enhanced international mobility. Drawing on a survey conducted over twenty-three months between 2010 and 2015 — comprising interviews (N=90) and participant observation in the West Bank —, this study examines the daily manifestations of mobility privilege in the Palestinian context and the varied stances adopted by the surveyed population. These different uses expose divisions and tensions between “internationals” and Palestinians.
We surveyed multicultural counseling training practices in graduate level counseling programs in the United States in 2009 and 2020. The initial 2009 investigation focused on masters’ level programs and the characteristics of the respondents’ institutions, counseling programs, and multicultural counseling class (es). Another slightly shorter survey was fielded in 2020 and solicited participation from both masters and doctoral level instructors. Both surveys included questions about the nature of the multicultural counseling curriculum and the instructors’ experiences related to multicultural counseling preparation and teaching. We found while few instructors indicated the presence of more than one multicultural counseling course, broad categories of multicultural issues have been covered in these courses. Skills training, when present, in the form of counseling role-play, appears to be rare and short for most instructors. European American males were in the statistical minority of multicultural counseling instructors, despite representing a large percentage of the counseling population.
Facial Recognition Technologies (FRT) have the potential to be prevalent in society. Being constantly exposed to such technology could have an impact on the individual and collective behaviour of individuals and society as a whole. In this paper, we try to explore the terrain of the history of surveillance and its modern form in places like China to set the context and introduce current technologies. Later, we explore the possible ways the society could change if they were under constant observation by the FRT and what dangers can arise over time.
So-called multiculturalists have been recently targeted by journalists and scholars arguing that such apologists are the cause of contemporary cultural fragmentation, racism, neo-segregation, lowered standards, and a radicalism that ignores the wishes of mainstream America. This book is an introduction to some of the ideas underlying the claims multiculturalists make for diversity, inclusion, and complexity, and is one of the first rejoinders minorities have presented to combat the onslaught. Spanning the philosophical spectrum from difference to competent intercultural communication, each essay represents the precipitate produced from the writer's engagement with students, scholars, the public-at-large, and marginalized peoples. The reader will not find in these pages a call for chaos, civil war, or racism. None of what is here espoused can responsibly be characterized as unpatriotic or misanthropic. Radical? Yes. Subversive? Yes. But also expansive, sympathetic, challenging, and galvanizing. This book is not for the faint of heart. Readers looking for a demanding analysis that will provide guidance on adjudicating the claims of multiculturalists and monoculturalists will find it in this book.
Dismantling White Privilege critically interrogates whiteness across contexts, from the experiential level to the different ways in which whiteness is deployed in contemporary cultural politics. The editors and contributors contend that "marking" whiteness is an important step in dismantling white privilege within the context of concerns for equity and social justice. Significant to this anthology is linking analyses of whiteness to the discourse of critical pedagogy, especially around constructing "pedagogies of whiteness." Investigating whiteness in its many manifestations, Dismantling White Privilege closely interrogates the intersection among race, culture, and pedagogy.
Our survival as African American women in a large, predominantly White research university has depended on us creating a time and space for sharing our daily experiences. In understanding the role of the process in our lives as African American women, we have drawn on the history of African American women and Blackfeminist thought. The sharing of our experiences helped us to appreciate as never before the everydayness of our lives, which raised our consciousness to also appreciate the uniqueness of our experiences. Understanding the process has moved us beyond centering our world on Whiteness to recentering our lives on our individual and collective responsibility to social justice.
Outlines and challenges some prevalent myths and misunderstandings that have made it difficult to develop appropriate curricula and relevant counseling/therapy competencies for the different cultures in the US. Cross-cultural counseling/therapy is defined, and the adoption by the American Psychological Association of specific cross-cultural counseling and therapy competencies is recommended as a guideline for accreditation criteria. (43 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
