This is a kind of No True Scotsman fallacy. Anyone that is successful was 'advantaged' because her family was rich, or she had two parents, or she had a parent, or she was born in America, or she was born with the right number of chromosomes... The whole conversation strikes me as just snarky and reductive. I don't see the point. Why not try to promote a conversation to lift people up and empower them rather than writing off the hard work and perseverance of others?
> Why not try to promote a conversation to lift people up and empower them rather than writing off the hard work and perseverance of others?
I think these two can live together - if you succeed, there was something that allowed that. Whether it was privilege, whether it was luck, or timing, or the right application of hard work and a blend of them all.
It's important to recognise what advantages are best leveraged for success, and then we can optimise to ensure most people have access to it.
In the argument in question, what advantage did Airbnb's founders have that allowed them to take that risk? How did they get the flat they were struggling to pay for in the first place for example? Why did they not skip rent and have to work 3 part time retail shifts to cover it like large swathes of workers in a similar boat.
Identifying privilege is an important piece of the puzzle - noone succeeds solely by hard work alone (otherwise all coal miners would be millionaires, and 996ers would be everywhere), so if we can spot the factors that successful people leverage, we can support others to get there (whether that's better education, cheaper housing, familial support etc...).
Well, yes, that's the conversation of intersectionality. It's important to recognize that the 'lone genius' narrative is largely false in order to have the discussion that empowerment is necessary in the first place. Otherwise the overarching narrative may be that people who suceed do so purely under their own power and therefore there is no systematic mistreatment to address (which perpetuates systematic mistreatment).
It's true that a wide variety of things contribute to someone's success, and many of them are outside of their power. Being able to acknowledge this can be taken to the extreme, but all of your statements are entirely valid assessments to make that have real effects on how realistically difficult a task may have been- or if the task was possible at all.
I mean if the person is living in Scotland and has a Scottish accent and is wearing a kilt they might be Scottish.
Or, more relevant, if someone is in the dominant social and ethnic group in the richest country in the world and raised in a dual-income white collar family with a degree from an absolutely top-flight internationally recognized college where they met their co-founder, they probably don't fit any reasonable definition of poor.
I think it's an important conversation to have. What if the story of success is a complex sum of contributing factors but it turns out, certain factors have significantly higher weights than the others. If you don't explore all of the cases, you may perpetuate a narrative that does many a disservice by promoting factors that don't empower but ultimately suppress.
Many may think their chosen set of contributing factors will make them successful and it turns out, those factors might not be all that useful. By ignoring that information and falsely giving equal weight to all factors, you might empower them down a path far more likely of failure than of success. That path could be a good portion of their lives so I think stepping on a few toes in conversation is well worth trying to resolve those problems instead of only speaking in the positive.
