People Now Whining that Extroverts Have ‘Social Privilege’

By Katherine Timpf

Monday, April 20, 2015

Social Justice Warriors have found a new thing to be upset about: the institutional oppression that introverts endure because “this culture has been built for extroverts” and that gives them “social privilege.”

No. I’m not kidding. It’s a thing, and apparently such a big thing that an Everyday Feminism contributor named James St. James felt the need to write a whopping 1,700-word piece about it, titled “6 Examples of How Extroverts Benefit From Their Social Privilege.”

In plain language, those six “privileges” are:

1. Not having to “forsake your basic needs” like food and going to the bathroom because your roommate has company over and “when [your] daily person quota has been filled, hunger is the lesser of two evils.”

2. Not having to leave a store empty-handed because you can’t find what you need after looking for several hours and are too afraid to ask an employee.

3. Not “risking bodily harm” because you walk so fast in order to get away from the crowd and close your eyes every time you turn a corner and so are “pretty much guaranteed to smack into somebody.”

4. Being able to find a job more easily, and if you think it’s just because you’re a “great worker, and all that,” St. James clarifies that that’s just because “extroverts don’t seem to understand the amount of privilege actually helping them,” like being able to socialize.

5. Being able to make friends more easily because you talk to people.

6. Not having to be as tired as introverts are all the time because having to be around other people (something that St. James refers to as “daily socialization demands”  and “human chores”) leaves you “ready to collapse.”

“For the longest time – like, at least 25 years of my life – I thought something was wrong with me,” St. James explains. “Turns out I’m just an introvert.”

I don’t mean to extrovertsplain, but I kind of feel like if you’re regularly starving yourself and running around on the street with your eyes closed then that might actually be a situation where something is wrong, regardless of personality type.

But what do I know? After all, it’s not just this blog post from St. James making these kinds of claims. The author also cites a passage from a bestselling (bestselling!) book titled Quiet: The Power of Introverts claiming that introverts are “second-class citizens” in our society today, comparing their relationship to extroverts to that of women in the 1950s:

“Our schools, workplaces, and religious institutions are designed for extroverts,” states the quoted passage from the book, which was written by Susan Cain. “Introverts are to extroverts what American women were to men in the 1950s — second-class citizens with gigantic amounts of untapped talent.”

Sounds pretty bad, huh? Believe it or not, St. James still somehow manages to stay strong:

“Oh well,” he writes. “You learn to live a little easier with disappointment and failure, at least.”

Way to go! Always inspiring to see someone keeping it positive despite having to face some very serious adversity.

(St. James gave no actual solutions for how to solve the problems of institutional privilege faced by introverts — other than telling extroverts that they should “let us sit in the corner every so often and not take offense.”)