Question
What privileges provide unspoken advantages in American culture, and what kinds of advantages are associated with each privilege?
Answer
I'll ignore the well-known ones based on race/gender etc. Some less-known ones:
- Extrovert privilege: being an extrovert is much more useful in America than in other cultures, since sociable self-promotion is necessary here to some extent. This is changing to introvert privilege these days for various reasons.
- Language skills privilege: America rewards skill with words more than most countries, due to the dominance of language-skills-heavy elements in the economy (marketing and law in particular)
- Immigrant privilege: people from other countries are so used to certain things being pointlessly hard in their home countries that having those things be easy turns into an advantage. By contrast, native-born Americans pay a sort of entitlement tax. This is a big part of the explanation of the success of various (especially Asian) minorities in America.
- Non-family teaming privilege: Americans form teams, and know how to work in teams almost from the cradle. Tocqueville first observed that the idea of American individualism is something of a myth. What really defines Americans is the ease with which they form teams, associations and every conceivable kind of group structure. The surprising fact is the extent to which this is not along kinship/family lines. This unconscious and native operating system function has to be paid for and loaded as an unfamiliar module for people from other countries, who generally suck at such teaming behaviors outside of family/kinship structures. Partly this is due to things like higher generalized trust in strangers etc., but mainly it is due to the heavy emphasis on getting along productively with random people in America.