A sociologist might discuss factors in the home like household wealth, childhood exposure to crime or violence or disease, quality of education, parents' education level, and a whole bunch of other things and their effect on a child's future wealth and educational outcome and so on. (and yeah, something like IQ is a little more taboo, but you can always look at that) That's sociologists, but even among normal people that looks like a reasonable list of things that would constitute privileges, at least as a first approximation.
Oh yeah, I don't know where you live, but in a country like the one I live in, where money by design tends to trump just about everything in importance and effects the ability to obtain or maintain everything else, guess which factor tends to constitute the most important privilege?
None of this makes me want to wave my arms around and cry out "oh my, this privilege thing is so complicated we do not even have a vocabulary to talk about it!" but YMMV.
>in a country like the one I live in, where money by design tends to trump just about everything in importance
That 'just about' gets overlooked to an extreme degree. How much money makes up for being autistic? From having a learning a disability? From a history of abuse?
And even if the sociologist are looking at all the right factors, once we are a single level removed from them lots of those factors are dropped from the vocabulary and not picked back up. For example, sex is often brought up in regards to some issues, but completely dismissed from others. Other issues are considered to minor to be worth mentioning, and while that may be true for any single one, someone who suffers from multiple such small ones can end up being declared privileged despite the combined effect of multiple minor issues completely eliminating privilege granted by others.
How does a wage gap and expectations of putting children before career compare to having a law preventing genital mutilation? How much benefits stereotyped to men are to be canceled out by someone with a gender neutral name who sounds female over the phone? How does being white, tall, and handsome compare to auditory hallucinations?
The 'normal people' discussion of privilege is an abstraction of what privilege actually is, and it is a very leaky one. That some can choose to ignore those leaks and the impacts of those leaks on themselves does not validate the abstraction as a good one worth using.
Holy moly, we're not talking about an "abstraction." If you thought the definition of "privilege" was promising you a scorecard by which you could cleanly and easily judge where people fall on a line, that's about you and your expectations, not about reality.
A sociologist might discuss factors in the home like household wealth, childhood exposure to crime or violence or disease, quality of education, parents' education level, and a whole bunch of other things and their effect on a child's future wealth and educational outcome and so on. (and yeah, something like IQ is a little more taboo, but you can always look at that) That's sociologists, but even among normal people that looks like a reasonable list of things that would constitute privileges, at least as a first approximation.
Oh yeah, I don't know where you live, but in a country like the one I live in, where money by design tends to trump just about everything in importance and effects the ability to obtain or maintain everything else, guess which factor tends to constitute the most important privilege?
None of this makes me want to wave my arms around and cry out "oh my, this privilege thing is so complicated we do not even have a vocabulary to talk about it!" but YMMV.