Let’s Talk About Privilege

If you told me any person’s top-five forms of life admin, I could identify the person pretty precisely. Or at least I could tell you a lot about the person.

Our admin differs. In many ways.

Some people’s admin is far worse than others.’ For instance, some people’s admin may be painful because it’s connected to a painful life event, like a death or a divorce.

And some people’s admin is awful because it’s the result of poverty or lack of social capital. Let’s talk about what makes that kind of admin especially rough.

Source: Shutterstock / id 517863967

For starters, people of means typically do admin that involves private entities, choices, and influence over others. People without means typically do admin that involves public entities, obligations, and submission to authorities. These are very different experiences in several ways: in the tone of the interaction, the likely wait times before resolution, the stakes of the outcome, and the possibility of recourse if things go awry. These admin experiences are very different indeed.

As Esther Duflo has said, speaking about how wealthy people see things:

“We tend to be patronizing about the poor in a very specific sense, which is that we tend to think, ‘Why don’t they take more responsibility for their lives?’ And what we are forgetting is that the richer you are the less responsibility you need to take for your own life because everything is taken care of for you. And the poorer you are the more you have to be responsible for everything about your life. . . . If [people with money] do nothing, we are on the right track. For most of the poor, if they do nothing, they are on the wrong track.”

People of means get lots of second chances. People without means get one—or maybe none. Which means that the admin carries much higher stakes.

On top of that, doing the office work of life is surely that much harder if you don’t have an actual office—with printer, scanner, computers, and the like—or office-work skills to draw on.

And the admin of poverty sometimes seems not just incidentally painful, but intentionally so. Humiliation admin, we might even call it.

Kaitlyn Greenidge writes eloquently of her memories of falling into poverty as a child, after her parents’ divorce. She remembers her first trip to the grocery store, her mother presenting food stamps at their regular checkout counter, and the cashier telling them no, she couldn’t help them; food stamp users had to use a different line. “If you have ever had to deal with the bureaucracy of poverty, of having to prove over and over again to those in charge how fundamentally unworthy you are,” she writes, “you understand.”

Painful admin confronts people, regardless of means, when they seek resources a government or company is rationing by hassle. Those seeking asylum from an unwelcoming government know this too well, to mention one striking example. People without means or status often face admin so complex that even lawyers find it perplexing. (This is one reason that the lawyers and non-lawyers volunteering to provide free assistance to asylum seekers and others in need right now deserve so much gratitude and support—as do the organizations that do this work.)

The ways our identities and life experiences intersect with admin’s challenges will be topics for future columns. For now, I’ll offer one further point.

One of my aims in writing about life admin is to recognize the divide of privilege—to talk about vastly different kinds of admin in different lives—with the hope of illuminating an aspect of the quandary of poverty and disenfranchisement. When I started my research, I did not appreciate how hard conversations like this would be.

The difficulty became apparent in a brainstorming session I conducted with advocates at a legal-services clinic. I first asked these dedicated law students about their impoverished clients’ admin, and then I asked them about their own admin. I was struck by the way these well-intentioned law students found it nearly impossible to talk about their own frustrations with scheduling the cable-TV person, for instance, after talking about their clients’ struggles to keep their low-income housing or custody of their children. “It does make me feel selfish,” one clinic student said, “when we’re comparing our admin problems to real problems.”

Although it can be hard to do, I try to talk about admin across the divide of privilege. I am not saying all forms of admin suffering are equivalent. They are not.

But I am also not saying that because some people’s admin is surely worse than yours, that your admin challenges shouldn’t matter. In my years of conversations about admin, I have seen possibilities for admin compassion.

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I hope that, by risking talking about the privilege divides around admin and telling stories from all sides, we can see each other a little bit more clearly.