support and solidarity for the educated, privileged people at Houston

One of the ways that capitalism works is that it convinces poor people that they're middle class and middle class people that they're upper class, or at least, that they will ascend to the next rung of our caste system in short order. That's part of what keeps the peace. Arguments about false consciousness are unpopular among many progressives, as they are perceived as rude, but rude and true can comfortably overlap in a Venn diagram.

This aspirational tendency intersects with liberal privilege hunting in an unhealthy way. Because the understanding of privilege is often crude, and frequently held by those who are interested in it as a defensive posture rather than a critical analytic tool, the tendency is to simply sort people into broad categories of "privileged" and "unprivileged," which misunderstands the scalar quality of human suffering, denies compassion to those who deserve it, and excludes those people from the solidarity that is necessary to provoke political change. I see it happen all the time: the crude way in which privilege is discussed insists on people denying the ways in which they are systematically oppressed, which dulls their support for structural change and contributes to their false consciousness.

So take these University of Houston writing fellows who are agitating for better pay. They are, certainly, people with social capital, and many or most of them are significantly privileged. That's important! Social capital is real. Privilege is real. But they are also people who have not gotten a pay raise in years and are, by any rational measure, poorly paid. That's also real. Social capital can ensure that you eventually live a life of material security where another person of similar ability does not. But it can't pay the garage when your car breaks down. I have written thousands and thousands of words on both the reality of social capital and its limitations. Unfortunately, many academics don't want to recognize those limitations at all, but rather articulate an entirely nuance-free vision of privilege that excludes anyone who has any from either political solidarity or human sympathy. And that's a profound mistake, if only for the way it makes structural political change less likely. I also think that this is the way savvy, educated types accept their own false consciousness. They are simply voicing a more sophisticated version of the delusion that one is not poor, but rather a temporarily illiquid entrepreneur.

You might say that it's easy to navigate these tensions, to both recognize the power of privilege and the persistence of social capital while maintaining both personal sympathy and political solidarity for those who enjoy it. In my experience, though, many people succumb to the temptation to cast everything into the broadest classes possible, to see the world as made up of the subaltern and those whose complaints are inherently white people problems. Not me. I have understood suffering enough to sort one thing from the other, and I will keep my own counsel on who is worthy of human compassion. So: here's to organization, resistance, and victory for the University of Houston's teaching fellows.