With ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ fresh in my mind, I started on ‘The Perils of Privilege’ by Phoebe Maltz Bovy, only to find… the book opening with a shaming of someone whose privilege has been called out.

But despite the close connection that the privilege call-out has with shaming, ‘The Perils of Privilege’ doesn’t have much to do with the idea of public shaming. The book is more concerned with looking at the usefulness of the privilege framework and even before you’re done with half the book, it’s easy to conclude that seeing the world through a privilege lens… isn’t the most helpful thing.

Something that struck me at the start was the argument that sometimes, we are mistaking privilege for rights. For example, it’s not a privilege to walk down a street at night and feel safe, it should be a right. So in some cases, things framed as “White Privilege” is misleading because what we’re lacking is rights for African Americans. The baseline needs to be higher.

One chapter on white feminism left me with the strong impression that despite the veneer of intersectionality (hopefully I’m using the word right!), the privilege call-out is sexist. They hold women to this impossible standard and seem to take pleasure in taking them down for any type of privilege possible – it reminds me of Men Rights Activists who are convinced that women are more privileged.

‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ mentions, in the last chapter, how during a public shaming, “everyone’s positions were hardening” and after reading ‘The Perils of Privilege’, I wonder if this played a part. One thing weaknesses of the Privilege Callout (apart from the fact that raising awareness =/= effecting change) is that it sets an impossible standard. Everything has to be perfect, every aspect of privilege has to be appropriately recognised and reflected on, and if you don’t meet anything, it’s time to be called out. It’s very much a type of thinking that favours immediate perfection over incremental progress, and it’s just my opinion but I find incremental progress over time to be the more effective way of building and maintaining change.

But again, we don’t really get a discussion of criticism vs shaming here, probably because the book doesn’t discuss how shame works in the privilege callout. It’s a pity because I think that pointing out blind spots (and by that, I don’t mean “cancel”) in shows, books, etc is a legitimate form of criticism, but where is the line? If, in a review, I say something like, “oh I thought this book was interesting but it was really Western-focused and I would have liked to see something more about Asia, though I recognise that would make it longer”, am I contributing to the problem of the Perfection Ideal or am I contributing to a discussion sparked by a book?

Maltz Bovy has repeatedly stated that she isn’t opposed to calling out injustice (which is the same stance as Jonson) but a more in-depth discussion of the line between callout and criticism/conversation might have helped. That said, I did like the concrete suggestions on what we can do, such as moving the idea of “wealth” back to money rather than cultural capital is a good suggestion (personally, I think that we overlook class as a divisor in a lot of discussions).

Personally, I think these two books are approaching the same problem from two angles. I think that across various communities, people are moving towards the extremes of opinions, making compromise harder (I can’t really say if this is global or just part of the American-dominated Internet I’m in, but America tends to export all its issues anyway). Jonson is looking at the issue through the lens of shaming – how we see it as a way to address perceived unfairness, regardless of the truth, while Maltz Bovy is looking at it through the lens of the Privilege Callout – how this emphasis on Privilege is solidifying extremes on both the American Left and Right.

I suppose we could take a step back and ask the question: do we even need a compromise? Can we not just argue until one side wins and implements their idea of utopia? Probably, but I don’t know if that’s possible and whether the trade-offs are worth it.

So, do you have any books that you think are related to these two? I think a third view might be interesting.