@sorghum I wasn’t saying that you believed that. You pointed out that life may be hard for the fictional butler, and I’m saying nobody here is in disagreement. This was just me trying to fix an ambiguity, not trying to (mis)characterize any of your views.
@roethlisburger …do you wanna provide anything to backup that assertion?
@suzyQ7 what does that mean?
I’m assuming since this poster posted right after the discussion of FA - he/she was referring to advantages/disadvantages of race in the college admission / FA process. But I may be wrong?
And that’s really puzzling as need-based FA only considered financial need by assessing family assets/income or the lack thereof.
Race didn’t enter into it when I was applying nor did it seem apparent when I was guiding some younger neighbors who applied to colleges recently.
Only exceptions I can think of are a few earmarked private scholarships…but there are others out there for specific White ethnic groups as well*.
And most only provided a few thousand dollars per year so it wouldn’t have made much of a dent if one was attending private colleges or some of the more expensive OOS publics even back in the mid-late '90s.
You and Postmodern had it right in I was mostly referring to college admissions. At colleges, which meet full need, getting admitted is the same as getting financial aid for those at the lower end of the income scale. Of course, the benefit of getting admitted to an elite college doesn’t end after four years. Whether you graduate from an elite college or not can be a significant factor in your career trajectory for the rest of your life.
I assure you that intersectionality has usefulness beyond academia. I see it operate in my personal life (I’m queer, black, and a woman). But more to the point in this thread, I use it at work. I work at a technology company. It’s a concept I introduced to some of my teams in the course of my work. The word itself was new to some people, but the concept was easily understandable to most, and I must say that it has definitely changed the way people think about the products we make and who they are for and how we make them. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve been asked to write primers and guides for it so teams can use it more effectively when doing our work. I’ve been asked to speak about it in various places to various corners of my company.
One of the reasons I love where I work.
hite straight men can be poor (#5, #15, #18, #27), or first-generation college students (#3), or bullied (#12, #23), or disabled (#20, #21, #22, #28), or stereotyped (#24), or from a single-parent household (#31), or have a history of substance abuse and mental illness, in their family (#30, #33). There are ones I left off, too. And some of the ones are not identity related at all - one simply asks if you are happy with how your identities are portrayed by the media. In my experience, almost no one steps up for that one. Almost everyone steps back for “If you ever tried to change your appearance, mannerisms, or behavior to fit in more, take one step back.”
I’ve done these exercises several times and everybody takes several steps forward and back. The whole point of them is to show that EVERYONE has privileges and disadvantages. I might be queer and black and a woman, but I’m also able-bodied, cisgender, was raised Christian, speak English as my first language, am upper-middle-class (now, at least), college-educated, etc. Intersectionality is simply the not-so-radical idea that people are complex beings with many identities, and that these identities are not discrete parts but integrated and tell a full story together. In fact, it is intersectionality that helps us understand that just because a person is a white straight man doesn’t automatically mean he’s privileged.
(A portion of US colleges so vanishingly small it becomes statistically insignificant).
Have you ever noticed that disabled people get exclusive use of convenient parking spaces? That proves that they have the advantage over non-disabled people…right?
Every disabled person, whether black or white, straight or gay, gets the same exclusive use of the parking spaces.
Disability transcends race! Disability can’t see color! Disability=The host of The Colbert Report?
People with “invisible disabilities” such as heart conditions get snarky notes left for them or nasty comments. they may have the right to the parking space but there is still push back by self appointed monitors.
tangent: Our local middle school has disabled parking spaces at least a football field’s distance from the front door. The distance plus our harsh winters make the spaces useless. What site designer thought that was a good idea?
Kind of like how every child has the right to an education…
My point in bringing up parking spaces for the disabled is that for white people to complain about the “advantages” of being black is like the able-bodied complaining about the “advantages” of being disabled. Yes, there are some “advantages” in some limited situations, but overall, not so much.