I'm frustrated at the way we're talking

My greatest fear, when I was a kid of 12 or 13, was mufti day. I didn't really have clothes other than my school uniform - or at least, not ones for wearing outside the house. I had a pair of blue track pants that weren't quite long enough for my lanky teenage legs, a pair of wildly unfashionable jeans, and two sweatshirts. I was ashamed of them all.

I began this piece with this particular story deliberately, and I will soon tell you why, but I also began it with some trepidation. Let's start with the trepidation.

It's a little bit about the clothes, perhaps more about the feelings of inadequacy that attached to them. It's hard to talk about some things: they still hurt, decades after they logically should. I admire the confidence of people for whom clothes and self-belief were things that were always just there. I feel frustration with the ones who can't imagine anything else.

Privilege is tough to write about. And it is true that those who are writing are usually privileged: that is how privilege works. Those with the least privilege have more pressing things to do than write about privilege. If you write a blog like mine, you have a certain level of cultural capital, however acquired. If you read a blog like this, then there's good odds you're similar.

I started this post with the story of my clothes to establish credibility with you. I couldn't have done otherwise. That's the tenor of so many conversations about privilege conducted in progressive circles. Part of the reason privilege is tough to talk about is the tsunami of judgement that waits when you do. There is an army of commentators just itching to tell you that you did it wrong.

I want to share with you my frustration at the way we are talking. Again and again, I see the concept of privilege weaponised against people, often cruelly, and in situations that amount to little more than online bullying. People relishing the opportunity to call one another out - and often from a vantage point of equal privilege, only they're more aware of it, so they feel more qualified to speak.

I've seen, and I'm saddened by it, people dealing with trauma they live with every day belittled for social mobility, and their priviliged voices now dismissed - by those who were comfortably middle class all along, and read about bad things that happen to poor people in an undergraduate textbook.

For some folks reading this, my clothes story will resonate - for others, it will not. And for others still, a lacklustre teenage wardrobe will seem like the most trivial of worries. Whichever group you're in, I welcome you. If you want to talk and listen, genuinely and without judgement, about anything that I've written above, if you care enough to bother, then you are my ally.

None of us has the right to deny solidarity to anyone else who would be an ally. It is ungenerous. More importantly, it is stupid. No one ever won anything by isolating themselves in the ever-decreasing circle of a righteous online echo chamber.

To do that, I would suggest, is the definition of privilege.