Saturday, February 12, 2022

Wheel of Privilege

 No, not a game show.  From 2/10/22 Epoch Times:

A school in San Diego County claims it has removed a “Wheel of Privilege” graphic from its professional development training materials after the image was exposed on social media and parents objected.

The image was touted as part of professional development training by the Black Mountain Middle School in Poway Unified School District (PUSD), according to the Californians For Equal Rights Foundation (CFER), whose executive director posted the graphic on Twitter.

The “Wheel of Power/Privilege” teaching tool was designed to rank people by power and privilege based on skin color, body size, and gender identity, as well as citizenship, language, wealth, and other factors.

Of course, some of these characteristics are immutable such as skin color.  Others are characteristics that most individuals have the ability to change: formal education, wealth, housing, language.  Seeing individuals as fixed in place with no ability to change is a fixed size of the pie mentality, and one that sees people as victims.  As I have pointed out previously, there are black billionaires who started out in a society that was explicitly and openly racist, but chose to do better than their born level of "privilege."

What this fails to see is that some of these choices lead to power and privilege.  Choose to get to college, work hard, and learn English, and you will be in a much greater position of power.  Choose to drop out of school, spend your life intoxicated, and your status on the housing and mental health spokes will be far from power.

There are people who start with deficits that are hard to overcome but for most Americans this is not the case.

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