privilege as a meme

600 words, sure--10 of them would have done the job.

Having just read Penny's piece, I think this is the most objectionable part:

The conservative commentariat does not want to be asked to check its privilege – but it's time to take a lesson from the internet and listen for a change.

This does not at all jibe with my experience of the Internet in any form, going back through Usenet to the Prodigy message boards. In fact, I'd argue that the Internet is the LAST place to go to if you want people to listen to you unless you can find the enclave that already agrees with you.

(Obviously this says more about the Internet communities I have participated in than anything else. I would normally not make this addendum but it feels super wrong not to on the "privilege as a meme" thread.)

xp It is possible that Laurie may not consider the internet as white as you do.

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, June 5, 2013 3:33 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

unless she's unearthing some long-lost angela davis e-zines from the 60s she'd still be entirely inaccurate

Guy with 6 slices loses his voice with nary a word of protest from ilx, check yr privilege everyone

does every thread have to be about pizza

The idea that the great left wing project is being derailed by a handful of shouty twitter 'activists' seems pretty stupid tbh.

― oppet, Wednesday, June 5, 2013 2:54 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is no great left-wing project, 'online activism' is just a series of individual interactions

basically DJP otm, idk about this thing with laurie penny but given the enormous history of mainstream 'face of feminism' feminists whitewashing women of color out of the history she deserves to be called out for whitewashng the history. it's possible to call a lefty activist out and still "contribute to the project" or w/e, but honestly if you're a woman of color fighting a battle of intersectionality, why is the action of calling out an influential and popular writer of whitewashing not allowed to be part of the "project"

― ty based gay dead computer god (zachlyon), Wednesday, 5 June 2013 20:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol yeah I am in agreement with you. Laurie Penny is an absolutely hopeless journalist. I'm rmde at the people on her side of the argument who get in a massive froth about 'Twitter Anarchists' etc who have the temerity not to respect the left-liberal commentariat boooooo hiss.

by and large the ~left-liberal commentariat~ is not particularly worthy of respect, or at least it is certainly worthy of eye-rolling, but also "don't be a dick" remains #1 internet rule, & there's a point at which the whole "why should [twitter anarchists] respect [the commentariat]" question becomes so over-done that you wonder why either side pay so much attention to the other if they're so a priori awful.

idk about this thing with laurie penny

IDK. IDK. IDK.

the erasure of context from tumblr activism (a logical conclusion to tumblr's erasure of context from aesthetics, the reduction of cultures to a pretty screenshots) is SO FUCKING AWFUL and bad for thinking, activism, progressive solutions, everything. YOU DON'T KNOW THE CONTEXT. so why go off on that ranty paragraph?

'tumblr activism'

http://lucidstrike.tumblr.com/post/52272076345/bakuninja-maoismfightsback-teachers-are

we, as a species, deserve better from our tumblrs

is maoismfightsback the maoism version of my favorite tumblr hiphopfightsback

guys it's yahoo! activism

For me it's not about taking sides so much as recognising when things aren't working. There's a tendency for some activists to think that because they feel they are morally right they don't have to question whether their methods are productive or to think about the best way to get someone to consider their POV. It is easy to say that people under fire should separate out the reasonable critiques from the personal attacks but I'm sure that when you're the one looking at a Twitter @ column full of criticism it's a different matter and it's tempting to feel "fuck this". Often the call-out crew want an apology rather than a debate anyway, which is another thing guaranteed to make people pull up the drawbridge instead of engaging.

But because they are always right, any conflict must be the fault of the person (usually a prominent left-wing commentator) they are attacking and couldn't possibly be down to anything they've done. Sometimes, as with Suzanne Moore, they are justified in feeling that the commentator is too stubborn to listen, but I've seen them be just as vitriolic towards more conciliatory and sympathetic writers like LP or Owen Jones so no, in orbit, being attacked does not automatically mean that YOU'RE THE PROBLEM. Another thing I've noticed is that activists accuse the commentariat of closing ranks and backing each other come what may (sometimes true, often not) while behaving in a very similar way. Activism can be a self-reinforcing bubble too.

I actually think that Laurie, as well as being a much better writer and thinker than she was two years ago, is one of the most punishingly self-critical, ready-to-listen members of the "commentariat", if that's what you want to call it, and not someone who uses the behaviour of more hostile activists as an excuse to brush aside the issues.

Proper post

Yoga flame

for all time

for great social justice

i feel like this whole privilege conversation is just victim behavior. nobody gives a fuck that they're privileged, and if they're open to being educated about it then chances are they're the type of people who don't need to be educated about it in the first place. go out and fight for your equal rights, cuz these "privileged" people aren't making the decisions that affect your life, and they don't give a shit, either. it's a hell of a lot easier to find people to vent your anger on, but it's going to accomplish nothing.

sincerely, privileged fuck.

He's right in a way, the only way to accomplish anything is to organize and gain political power (whether through official or unofficial channels). Ultimately privilege awareness is a good thing but it doesn't get you far to prevail upon the privileged to check their privilege. Few people really want to voluntarily give up what they have.

But this isn't check like your coat - checking your privilege doesn't lose you shit (except the opportunity to run one's mouth)

Neither does stopping to listen to the moonies but yknow fuck that an all

xp so what's the goal there, universal respect? i'm a straight white dude and I don't even have that. seems like a pointless attempt to rewrite human fault. there were people who tried that already ... Jesus, Buddha, and a whole assortment of crazy characters. and the dude firing a shotgun at an Obama effigy probably isn't going to listen anyway.

i feel like this whole privilege conversation is just victim behavior.

inflammatory, stupid

'victim behavior'

why not? you have a couple of choices. 1) get off your ass and do something to right your wrongs. 2) bitch and moan to random people that their perspective is wrong. If victorious, you've enlightened someone who has absolutely zero bearing on your life or the lives of the people you're fighting for. Congratulations!

imo a v simple way to think about it is that if one of the major points of leftist politics is to make the voices of the least fortunate and most oppressed heard then you're not doing very well at leftist politics if you're operating in a way that will still result in those voices going unheard.

If victorious, you've enlightened someone who has absolutely zero bearing on your life or the lives of the people you're fighting for.

This is a really strange view of society/the world. How do you think public opinion actually works, exactly?

I'm coming from the perspective of having some experience in politics.

what's the goal there, universal respect? i'm a straight white dude and I don't even have that

go fuck yourself, dangerfield

if you're trying to open peoples' hearts and minds, see comment about Jesus and Buddha and all those dudes. there are plenty of people who came before who tried that shit. thousands of years of philosophy behind loving your fellow man. how's that worked out? i'm just trying to look at reality here.

xxp That's, um, nice for you?

Has this thread taken that turn again where it substitutes "overly aggressive activists silencing other activists" for the entirety of the discussion of privilege? Which observation was just considered a "booming post" yesterday?

those people hijack the argument so that it's about whether some people are aggressive on the internet when it should be about privilege itself - not whether it exists but how it affects us, the multiplicity of its manifestations, how to combat it and call it out etc

Oh, I do love it when someone more conservative and less clever than me comes onto a thread to bang on about 'reality'. That's always fun. xp

spectrum, i suggest you go inform some activist women of color that their attempts to reframe how we think of structural inequality are actually 'victim behavior.' i'm sure they'll appreciate your perspective.

buddha, jesus, dl, failed prophets all

xxp cripes, i'm pretty damn far to the left. my vision for society is a place everyone is accepted for who they are and everyone has equal standing and rights regardless of race, gender orientation, etc. etc. i just think this whole privilege thing is a vehicle for venting out of a sense of powerlessness and frustration.

"reframe how we think of structural inequality" = legislation that guarantees equal pay??? or is the guy hanging Obama from a noose in his backyard going to be convinced by these academic arguments?

i'm just curious what any of this actually accomplishes for people, because it seems to only give a sense of false power through intellectualization, and it affects a class of people who are already sold on the arguments and who are in no position to change anything anyway.

It would be far, far, far more helpful to not argue about motives and instead argue about tactics/actions, particularly if the end goal is to affect both the baseline culture of society and the laws that govern it.

Are the shotgun guy and the noose guy pals

I mean, for a lot of people the motivation behind this stuff lies in wanting to live up to the values that they ascribe to, so regardless of the wide-ranging culture-shattering effects of people talking about and examining privilege, if it results in some people being nicer/better I consider that to be a win in and of itself; I don't think every positive action needs to shake the world.

spectrum, do you actually think structural inequality can be solved by legislation? i guess you are liberal

i'm just trying to think of practicable, on-the-ground solutions that could help people right now. i imagine there's a small number of people who are open minded enough to really take to this kind-of stuff. i mean, most people probably just care about themselves, their families, and maybe a couple of friends, and that's it. maybe I'm just being cynical, I've encountered a lot of ignorant and hateful people in all walks of life, not to mention what you see on the news everyday.

anyway, xp that is a valuable goal.

I'm not set in stone about any of this, just throwing out some ideas that popped into my head and seeing what other people think.

go out and fight for your equal rights, cuz these "privileged" people aren't making the decisions that affect your life

um

Spectrum, did you give that opinion to Woman's Own magazine in 1987? Because it's like you're saying 'there's no such thing as society.'

anyway, my own personal "thing" in this is we only have one life on this earth, and i think it sucks that people's lives can be limited, minimized, demeaned, damaged, or destroyed just because of who they are. and if I sound like a clown here I'd rather just be out with my opinions and get feedback on it, otherwise I'm just going to continue along blissfully unaware.

...

HOOS, can you think of a scenario where educating people about privilege through the current channels (internet websites, academic journals, left-wing magazines) can positively impact somebody's life?

you've implied that the discussion of privilege is exclusively aimed towards those who have it, and that there is no practical value for a marginalized population to be aware of privilege and how it works.

i don't understand how you reached that conclusion

I think the factor that is being lost in this specific discussion is that the segment of the marginalized population participating in these academic conversations is almost by definition made up of people who are privileged over the strawman conception of "the marginalized population"; this* is conversation happening among college-eduacted middle-class to upper-middle-class to upper-class people. There is an expectation that this information will be passed on to less educated, less wealthy people by those who share axes of marginalization with them that may not be happening as well in practice as one would assume.

* there are obvious assumptions I'm making here that I don't think are unwarranted; no one drops cites like someone with a bachelor's degree

(the flipside of this is that practical life teaches you about the concept of privilege that no amount of lecturing can get across if you end up on the short end of the stick, so this is just as likely to be a topic that requires an echo chamber to be an effective conversation)

test

xxxp I don't know, it seems to me like more is happening than people might think, but I'm maybe newly enchanted with my local options for activism.