The Problem of Privilege

And now to address the aspect of my reader's challenge that deals with race and class. Here's the well-articulated challenge to my position that we Americans are caught in a rhetoric that disorders our perception of possessions:


"I still agree with you that there is a national trend towards stuff that’s problematic, and that we are all to varying degrees complicit in a troubled system, but at the same time, to have a house full of extraneous stuff is a problem of privilege, one that many less-well-off people in America would be happy to have. I guess I’m wondering how it might feel to be poor, for instance, and then encounter rhetoric encouraging the viewpoint that having too much stuff is part of disordered thinking. Or how it might feel to be African American, with a family history of being legally forbidden from owning property, and then encounter rhetoric saying that our stuff “owns” us (such a loaded term in that scenario). And I'm wondering to what degree it is important to acknowledge and respect these differences, and to what degree it just keeps us isolated from each other. I recognize that, as a white, middle-class, educated woman myself, trying to put myself in the shoes of a lower-class or African American person runs the risk of sounding paternalistic and patronizing, but I am really struggling to think through how we can discover Truths that helpfully apply to all the world while still acknowledging the individuation that informs our respective circumstances."


Several decades of academic positioning according to race, gender, and class has prepared us to hold these distinctions between people in an artificial reverence. I think the root of our perverse attachment to houses full of useless objects is capitalism's rhetoric shaping our perceptions. And I would like to argue that it does the same thing to all classes and ethnicities. While I understand the reader's point that owning too much is certainly not a problem for the desperately poor, I don't have any qualms about asserting that consumption for the sake of it is wrong. Just as I know there are people without enough to eat, and yet that will not prevent me from counting my calories if I start putting on weight. It is, in a sense, a problem of privilege but that makes it no less of a problem. 


More importantly, however, I want to be clear that I'm not trying to do some Romantic grand gesture. I'm concerned about sustainability and our roles as American consumers in problems of global poverty. We have stores overloaded with cheap things that are neither useful nor beautiful and consequently we have homes that are overrun with the same. My argument that this is wrong is based on the actual economic circumstances under which these things clutter out lives. The manufacture is done in third world countries by the most disadvantaged of those people: women and children. The only reason people work in sweatshop conditions is because we Americans turn a blind eye to what it is we are actually buying and instead focus on the artificial pleasure of plenty. But it isn't plenty of good things--it's plenty of low-quality junk we value only because we have consumer mentalities. That consumer mentality isn't natural to us but resisting it takes a great deal of effort. Our accumulation of stuff is making the poor poorer. That's the real issue.


No doubt subsections of the US population have group-specific attitudes toward material objects. That's an interesting area of study for sociologists, I'm sure. However, the material reality of what is in our stores is the same for all of us. Every sweatshop item we buy advances human misery. That is the truth of our stores. I'd like to reason out a way to live authentically under these new economic conditions. Perhaps I would reason differently if I were black, hispanic, gay--I don't know. But the option to walk away from considering how to live under these conditions is not optional. I will either participate in a cruel system or I will have to figure out a way to resist that system.