You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly.
The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game.
Imagine life here in the US - or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world - is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time.
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So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?īeing a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it:ĭudes. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is