Khan, Shamus - Privilege PDF

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In-depth summary, with copious quotation, of Shamus Khan's "Privilege" read in his course, Introduction to the Social World. ...

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Privilege is an ethnographic study of the students at St. Paul’s boarding school in New Hampshire by Professor Shamus Khan. In Privilege, Khan tries to make sense of contemporary inequality through an analysis of the elite culture embodied in “students’ disposition, interactions, and ways of being in the world;” he uses the term “ease” to refer to the naturalization of their privilege and devotes a lot of analysis to comparing the learned ease of the rich to the dispositions of lower class and non-white students (16). His analysis heavily draws upon the elite’s imaginings of a true American meritocratic system in which hard work and talent do pay off. He ultimately claims that this imagining of equality of opportunity obscures the reality of durable inequalities. In contrast to the students’ claims, they do not populate the school because they have worked harder or are otherwise better able to succeed; their acceptance was heavily influenced by their parents’ position and other measures of character that value the traits of the elite. In spite of the belief in meritocracy, those who succeed in the eyes of peers are not those who work the hardest, for one is ostracized if one does not manage one’s workload with ease. The persistent belief in merit obscures the durable inequalities that affect the poor, female, and non-white members of this community. In this essay, I will be following various obfuscations of social structure by the rise of individualism throughout Khan’s work. After the collectivist politics of the twentieth century and the rise of the meritocracy, socially ascribed characteristics have been increasingly credited to individuals. Khan’s analysis of the socialization into “ease” is a concrete example of the individualization of social constructions. Ease, like the tendency for Asians to study and for girls like Carla to be faking a role, is treated as something innate. Dinners in formal dress and multi-faceted relationships with superiors are not seen as influencing the easy dispositions of elite students because this ease is already seen as an innate characteristic. Khan claims that “[b]odily tastes, dispositions, and tendencies” are produced and practiced to “look more and more like just who we naturally are” (136). Attributing these characteristics to the individual obscures the influence of society. In addition to an easy disposition, the cultural and academic privilege of the rich is taken out of social context and is credited to the hard work of individuals; they embrace meritocracy yet embody the marks of privilege, and thus the elite “have obscured the persistence of social closure in our society” (17). We see this clearly in Khan’s distinction between the ways in which the staff of St. Paul’s frame their work and the ways in which the “Paulies” frame theirs. Whereas Stan, a student, understands his upward mobility as a result of his hard work, staff members who arguably works harder than Stan, see no upward mobility and instead derive pride from the work itself. Because these inequalities cannot be explained with the meritocratic framework. students “simply ignore the staff,” only acknowledging those whose social stagnation can be explained through disorders (Khan 57). The student’s attribution of their success to hard work and their separation of lower class workers from this progressional structure obscures the influence of class, race, and gender on the politics of mobility. Khan acknowledges that the black students, often on scholarship, in this institution experience the opportunities afforded to them in ways that are wholly different from the white elite students who take their experiences for granted. The same is true of the female students for whom gender prevents their hard work from being acknowledged as often that of male peers:

“[boys dominated the realm of the extraordinary, even though the girls were doing better” (187). In spite of the foundation of these inequalities in race and gender and class, they are not appreciated as coming from such roots because differences have been individualized. It is no longer socially appropriate to attribute differences to such generalizations. Yet, these boundaries do exist. Professor Shamus Khan’s ethnography offers insight into the disguised boundaries of the new elite and the ways in which their disguise has come as a result of collective politics bringing about the rise of the individual. He claims that “the ‘new’ inequality is the democratization of inequality . . . [d]ifferences in outcomes are explained by the capacities of people; the elite have embraced differences among their roles while accepting and even consecrating the hierarchy between them and others” (196). This reading of inequality makes addressing durable inequality more difficult to address and brings into question the effects of so many academics who strove to dispose of the idea of innate difference....