privilege as a meme

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.

xp i agree DJP, my education about my own privilege came exclusively through my personal experiences, the people i've met, talked to, worked with, etc. and it came by thinking about myself and other people and life and all that self-reflective jazz. nobody spurred me onto thinking about it, no website taught it to me. it just sorta happened, so maybe that's part of why I doubt this whole thing.

i have been called out on privilege before and it did change my thinking so *shrugs*

test again

i think people would be less defensive on being "called out" for privilege if they realized that being privileged, in itself, is not a negative thing. in an ideal society, everyone wouldn't start out from the bottom and claw there way to the level comfort and security they "deserve" -- as in the capitalist fantasy -- but would be able to take comfort and security for granted, and focus their lives on more fulfilling things than escaping poverty, oppression, and marginalization. so to call someone privileged for being educated and materially comfortable is not saying that they don't deserve to have those things, just that other people deserve them too.

One of my best friends from college, a very liberal white private school dude, told me a story early on in our friendship about how he got into trouble at his boarding school for a map of the lunchroom he and his friends made where they called the table where all of the black kids sat "Africa", using as a defense that they had called their own table "Nerdville". I was pretty appalled and told him so and he didn't really get it.

Later, we were on tour in Japan together and he was getting a LOT of attention for having blonde hair and blue eyes; stares, head turns, murmuring when we walked by etc, to the point where his frustrations boiled over and he blurted "God, I can't stand it here! I feel like everywhere I go, everyone is noticing me and staring at me!" I looked at him and said, "Really? This is no different than life in the US for me." I could literally see the dawning realization on his face of an inkling of what it must be like to actually be an ethnic minority, combined with the realization that we were eventually going home and he wasn't going to be drawing this attention for the rest of his life. I don't think I ever heard him complain about the high school lunchroom incident again; after that point, I think he really Got It.

The problem is that we were on a ridiculously expensive trip that we only were able to go on thanks to our association with an elite university; this particularly effective lesson in privilege recognition was impossible without both of us already existing in a state of pretty high privilege. Furthermore, no matter how many discussions we had about it, he didn't understand what the big deal was until he was placed into a situation where his innate ability to be the baseline against which all else is measured was removed, and this is someone who was very receptive to and sympathetic towards equality issues. This is a pattern I've experienced time and time again because, thanks to a quirk of location and upbringing, most of my friends are white; most of them did not feel that they really Got the perniciousness of racial issues until something happened that involved them, usually in contrast to me. This is where my skepticism of conversation comes in; I think it's good and needs to happen but I also believe people need to experience things before they understand them (this IMO explains the conservative empathy gap).

Every time I read this thread I get earwormed by "Holiday in Cambodia."

hi, i'm a person who used to be a complete nightmare about *privilege* things, and then i got called out on it on the internet, and now i try to make sure i'm not like that anymore

and they weren't nice either. seriously if you can find truth in someone's point but choose to ignore it because they let emotion be a part in their argument you're an intransigent dinghole and you don't deserve kindness