I once saw a high school teacher lead a simple, powerful exercise to teach his class about privilege and social mobility. He started by giving each student a scrap piece of paper and asked them to crumple it up.  Then he moved the recycling bin to the front of the room.  He said, “The game is simple — you all represent the country’s population. And everyone in the country has a chance to become wealthy and move into the upper class.”   The students in the back of the room immediately piped up, “This is unfair!” They could see the rows of students in front of them had a much better chance.  Everyone took their shots, and — as expected — most of the students in the front made it (but not all) and only a few students in the back of the room made it.  He concluded by saying, “The closer you were to the recycling bin, the better your odds. This is what privilege looks like. Did you notice how the only ones who complained about fairness were in the back of the room?”  “By contrast, people in the front of the room were less likely to be aware of the privilege they were born into. All they can see is 10 feet between them and their goal.”  “Your job — as students who are receiving an education — is to be aware of your privilege. And use this particular privilege called “education” to do your best to achieve great things, all the while advocating for those in the rows behind you.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/nathanwpyle/this-teacher-taught-his-class-a-powerful-lesson-about-privil |
| So he had to teach an obvious lesson through the same way you teach 5 year olds with visual metaphors? |
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| Inb4 one of the kids in the back row becomes a school shooter. |
LoneWolf said: @Josh makes me sad to call myself Canadian. |
| Just move your chair to the front of the bin. |
JonyJC said: Just move your chair to the front of the bin. Sounds like a plan |
| I swear that classroom was fool of retards including the teacher if that is even a real story. |
| Wow. This is so stupid. Privileged? I'd be happy to be as wealthy as an average unprivileged American or Westerner... |
| your waifu is shit |
| This is what should have happened: (1) John stands up while holding his desk to himself, goes to the front of room, and dunks his paper in the bin. Everyone thinks that John's an asshole. But wait! (2) John now picks up the bin. What is he thinking? (3) John walks to the back of the room and holds out the bin for wheelchair Jenny. (4) Wheelchair Jenny gently places her paper in the bin. (5) Soccer moms across America fall to their knees and weep. |
LoneWolf said: @Josh makes me sad to call myself Canadian. |
| Seriously, what did you expect from MAL? Social privilege is a myth and people who are born in the slums of Baltimore have an equal chance for success as the people who are born in upper west side of Manhattan. |
ImmaMuggleYou said: JonyJC said: Just move your chair to the front of the bin. Except in the classroom you can't move up to the front all the time. Anyways this is a simplistic idea of what privilege looks like, and its message is quite clear. Only to the most basic of hipster, seems like a fake story to me. It reeks of someone having just watched dead poets society and wanting to make something up. Is he going to tell them to rip up their books next because the only true teacher is life! then he will dance around the room telling the students to go see a movie and write about how it made them feel in a poem. |
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ImmaMuggleYou said: SzJ said: Wow. This is so stupid. Privileged? I'd be happy to be as wealthy as an average unprivileged American or Westerner... What's so stupid about it? People in the ghettoes of the US have no right to complain since there are child soldiers in Africa. /s |
ImmaMuggleYou said: JonyJC said: Just move your chair to the front of the bin. Except in the classroom you can't move up to the front all the time. Anyways this is a simplistic idea of what privilege looks like, and its message is quite clear. Sit on top of the table and call it a seat, guess I have synapse privilege. Also Buzzfeed. |
| I bet throwing that class into a jungle to survive would've made them understand privilege much more. |
| I've been here way too long... |
ImmaMuggleYou said: Yes this could have been made up but does that matter? The point of the story is quite clear. In society people have better opportunities to succeed than others and its essential we realize this as a society if we want to give people more of an equal chance at life. Haha thats life, thats the universe there is no possible way to literally have every human having the exact same privilege and opportunity. Even your geographic location can affect your life opportunities, everything can. You would have to have every human live in a cubical right next to everyone else, doing nothing all day to have everyone equal. PC has gone mad. |
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| So what would the op do about it? |
| That's just platitudes, of course people don't have equal opportunities some are born without legs, so everyone has leg privilege. Equal education? We have the biggest library ever at our fingertips and everyone is still a dumbass, education doesn't matter. Let's assume you confiscated every single drop of wealth in the world and redistributed it equally and then gave a crash course to everyone on how to use money, in a day the bottom 50% would have 0 cash or be in debt. |
ImmaMuggleYou said: Not you saying education doesn't matter though, you would not be who you are today with an education. I would not be who I am today without an education. Our future as a society is pretty much determined on how we handle our education and our education system. My school was one of those in constant threat of been shut down. Students set fire to buildings and violent crime and theft was prevalent in its halls. No teachers actually taught and most didn't show up. Now by all standings I should be disadvantaged education wise but I taught myself, I studied in libraries and read a lot of books, taught myself maths and history. I left that school more educated than most and it had nothing to do with the education system. It was adversity that made me push myself further because I didn't want to be a product of my under achieving school. Adversity is what makes people excel you take away lack of privilege and nobody will excel at anything. No down on his luck athlete will train harder and win gold. No down town city kid will work his way up to the supreme court. We thrive or die on hardship. If we were all privileged nobody would care to aim higher. |
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| How encouraging. |
| "Let Justice Be Done!" My Theme Fight again, fight again for justice! |
ImmaMuggleYou said: Specifically I'm talking racial issues in the US. Oh of course this is about race, I'm out. |
RedRoseFring said: How encouraging. I don't care about encouragement. I'm merely pointing out a factual account on why under privilege is required to push people to excel more than their surroundings demand. |
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| Reminds me of this bullshit lesson Teachers come up with the dumbest shit sometimes in order to get their points across, I mean this was just basic. |
| I've been here way too long... |
ImmaMuggleYou said: It was adversity that made me push myself further because I didn't want to be a product of my under achieving school. Adversity is what makes people excel you take away lack of privilege and nobody will excel at anything. No down on his luck athlete will train harder and win gold. No down town city kid will work his way up to the supreme court. We thrive or die on hardship. If we were all privileged nobody would care to aim higher. I don't know if adversity is the final answer but it certainly helps, to contrast your story I was in probably in one of the top 100 schools in Europe and still learned zilch, apart from some cool map reading skills and language which I worked my ass of to reach and surpass the average level anyway, most of what I know is self thought, surrendering your education to other people is foolish. |
| There is no white privilege. There is a "parents aren't scumbags" privilege. There is a "born in late 1900s-early 2000s instead of 5,000 BC" privilege. Whites, blacks, women, men, Asians and Hispanics; all of them share in these privileges. |
| Let's go bowling. |
| Why are there so many Imma people on this board? |
| Why is this popular? Talking about the privilege wastebasket thing..seen a video, a couple threads about it on MAL and people talk about it like they never seen a visual demonstration. And all of them start with "I once saw ..." |
| "In the end the World really doesn't need a Superman. Just a Brave one" |
| This is some deep shit man! |
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| I know that just by seeing the op post you feel the urge to say something that oppose it or just claim it as bullshit, especially since the use of the word "privilege" is used and that one has been abused to hell by anti-white racist and feminist but the example is actually quite decent and real. If you are born in a rich family with connections of course you have better chances of having a better life than some child in an orphanage. It's ridiculous trying to refuse such a fact. |
MonadJan 28, 2015 5:39 AM
| I'm pretty sure its more the pretentiousness of it. Monad said: If you are born in a rich family with connections of course you have better chances of having a better life than some child in an orphanage. It's ridiculous trying to refuse such a fact. So? unless you're willing to reprogram humanity so money doesn't = power and influence I suggest that crying about it is going to be a waste of time that you could be spending trying to excel at something. No poor person is going to get power and position handed to them so they might as well stop crying about it and work hard to achieve their goal. Just because its harder doesn't make it impossible. Or put forward a way of making it so literally everyone is on equal ground, I would love to hear that titbit of genius social and economic engineering. |
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| He was trying to make it about race, and of course it is an American problem. |
| I would throw the papers at the teacher or the person in front of me and called it freedom of expression. They can throw papers back at me but they should never move from where they are, it is in my right that I can throw my papers at anyone or anything as the same goes with all the other people. We can spend all days throwing papers at each others, or we can all agree to throw it to the bin, this is how you describe mutual respect in society. See, I can even made up new things from the same scenario. |
| The most important things in life is the people that you care about |
| Frankly, I don't really care if it's true or not. Its purpose is to prove a point and teach people. It's circulating for that reason. Of course, it's only using basic reasoning and simple metaphor. If we want to have fun, and show where proper education makes a real difference, we will instead ask difficult critical thinking questions, such as: If people who have privilege tend not to recognize it, does that not mean that groups that say they're disadvantaged might actually have privilege and not know it? Is privilege absolute, or do different groups see privilege in different areas, possibly being privileged here and an underclass there? Does supposed privilege warrant discriminatory practices in the name of "leveling the playing field" even if this specifically disadvantages large groups of people due to arbitrary group definitions? Consider: most US women do not know that the current education system is stacked against men, yet many continue to claim to be an underclass, usually citing long-debunked statistics about a barely-existent (if at all) pay gap. Yet, there are clear situations where they are disadvantaged, and it's men that don't realize this. While African Americans suffer greatly from poor schools and the current criminal justice system, it can hardly be denied that they have a leg up against whites who are more qualified in getting hired, promoted, admitted to colleges, and receiving financial aid. All thanks to various affirmative action programs and ideas. And related to above, a white person from a low-income family and area does not get those benefits, yet also does not have many of the supposed benefits of being "white." As such, it's hard to argue that "minorities" are not privileged compared to such a person. Edit: Title is also potentially misleading. The teacher is the one teaching. Taught can mean the teacher is the one being schooled, and the common form would be "teaches" in part to avoid that confusion. |
ErwinJAJan 28, 2015 10:32 AM
| So I should steal the seats in front of me, and murder everyone in front of me...I see.. |
| I don't think people should be given equality in every aspect. Equal 'opportunity' within the nation is important. Whether you're black, white, gay, straight, male, female, transgender... you need equal access to schooling and equal consideration when it comes to work. But if that's established, and then someone still fails, it's insulting and dangerous to lift them up from the dirt. So... it's important to know when opportunity is too little... but also when it's just about right. It's easy to keep claiming that part of the system is broken just because you yourself can't beat it. I'm not even sure everyone should be allowed to vote. But if that's so, everyone should be born without suffrage, and everyone should get the chance to earn suffrage. |
 ~ join the MAL suicide pact! ~ ~ ★☭★ ~ ~ embrace nuclear annihilation! ~ |
| what's more important OP is that what the hell were you doing on buzzfeed in the first place |
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ErwinJA said: And that is the thing. When you compare whites and blacks in the same situations, you get the same statistical struggles. The problem here is that leftists take the average white person (middle-class, married parents) and compare him to the average black person (poor, unmarried parents) and then compare statistical struggles/benefits, see a disparity favoring the white, and then say that the privilege came from being white. But the privilege never came from the fact of his whiteness, the privilege came from having middle-class, married parents. Black kids with middle-class, married parents are on an equal footing with white kids with middle-class, married parents. So it's not white privilege. It's "middle-class, married parents" privilege. There is no privilege to being white, there is a privilege to being born in a stable family that is dedicated to their children's education and advancement, and teaches strong moral/social values and ethics. Leftists do not want this fact to be revealed, so they invented the "micro-agression". Micro-agressions is what lets a wealthy black claim that a white crack-baby has "white privilege". "I get followed around stores because I'm black." "Cops harass me because I'm black." "People assume I'm -X- because I'm black." None of these things are falsifiable. Is the store-owner following you around because you're black? Who knows? But as long as you can say he is and assume that he doesn't follow around the poor, white, crack-baby, then you can be the special little victim, even if you are better off than the white in every single tangible way. The fact is that the black population does suffer, statistically speaking, a disparity of outcomes. However, the factors that cause this are not racism and micro-agressions, but other social statuses: Are your parents married? Are they employed? Are they dedicated to your education and achievement? Are they sober? At the end of the day, it's all just bullshit race-baiting. The problem with blacks in America is not that they are black, it is that their parents do not get married and stay employed. |
| Let's go bowling. |
StopDropAndBowl said: Shhh. I'm just giving a more diplomatic presentation by issuing questions that cannot be addressed without thinking ;-)ErwinJA said: I know those who believe in this "white privilege" won't think about the holes in the theory or the failures of attacking the problem, or even the veracity of their own claims. It's much the same way someone who automatically calls someone who's the least bit skeptical about the theory of catastrophic AGW a "denier" doesn't realize they've automatically lost the debate. But, if you're diplomatic while asking the tough questions, a few will take the bait. If you just tell them outright, they'll just say "nuh-uh" and be done with it. |
| I really am glad i'm moderately wealthy, I've seen the ways some people in developing countries live and i just can't help but pity them. |
╮ (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.) ╭ |
| Thanks for the pictures. I'd never be able to follow the story without them. |
| Signature removed. Please follow the signature rules, as defined in the Site & Forum Guidelines. |
| I really don't get why people complain about privilege in first world countries Literraly nothing in this world is equal to another and no matter how much we try, we are never gonna achieve absolute equality. Instead of bitching about privileges in a normally funtioning society where differences are imperceptible, how about you take some action to fix matters that actually matter you little shits. |
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