Jon Stewart last night took a beat to mock the language of social justice. He just spewed out some of the words and phrases as gobbeldy-gook and then laughed:

What crime did this Occupy protester commit? I bet they served gluten at the gluten-free table, or shelved Chomsky before Zinn in the free library. Everybody knows that C comes after Z, because alphabetical order is a system of hetero-patriarch normativity. … Oh! I’m being told my mansplaining failed to check my privilege.

He ended with “check my privilege.”

It’s probably time to look at that phrase again.

First, it is not “check” as in “check your baggage.” It means, literally, check if you have privilege in this particular conversation, and check whether it is affecting your opinion, your worldview. Maybe take a moment to listen to the others, learn about what the unprivileged experience.

Privilege does not mean your life is awesome. It does not mean you’re somehow in control of others. It means, in the particular category being discussed, you are in the group that society considers “normal.” It means that the majority of society considers any deviation from this normalness a special case, and usually not worth considering when making choices, laws, media, etc.

If you are male, in this culture, you have privilege over non-males. If you are straight, you have privilege over non-straight people. If you are white, you have privilege over non-white people. If you are able-bodied, wealthy or middle class, or otherwise in the “normal” demographics, on that particular quality, you are the kind of person the society considers default, and – intentionally or not – favors you.

If you are a white, gay male, you get white and male privilege, but are unprivileged as a gay person. If you are a poor, black, straight woman, you only get straight privilege.

And part of privilege is having the choice – intentionally or not – to be unaware, to ignore the other, to ignore your own privilege. Those of us in the “other” category do not have that choice. We experience being different almost since birth in most cases. We are not on TV except as tokens, villains, victims or punchlines. Congress makes laws affecting us, despite having no or few members of our demographic in their numbers. We are mocked, assaulted, imprisoned, erased.

So is it too much to ask you to check and see if maybe you are in a place of privilege? And to listen to those who do not, in the particular category being discussed?

And wealthy, heterosexual, able-bodied white males should probably refrain from mocking the movement for society to open its eyes and stop oppressing those it tries to ignore.

As Douglas Adams wrote in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

~~S.