privilege as a meme

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

you have a couple of choices

Except these aren't choices - doing one doesn't block you from the other.

xp zachlyon, that's the kind of fallacy that leads nowhere. If you decide that anyone who doesn't respond to hostility with humility is an intransigent dinghole then you're (1) ruling out any possibility of self-criticism in regard to your approach and (2) alienating people who would be broadly sympathetic to your views if approached in a different way. Of course it allows you to feel doubly righteous but it doesn't change anyone's mind - "I am right and they are beyond help" is both the easiest possible stance and the least productive.

if I am reading him correctly, zachlyon was talking about himself

I don't disagree with that per se--the reasonable anger felt by a lot of people over the relative intransigence of people who deny the reality of various kinds of privilege is part of the reason why I think people who benefit from a kind of privilege have a responsibility to take the lead in subverting it. For an honest and open conversation, sometimes a straight white guy is the best person to talk to another straight white guy about the how and why of straight white privilege.

xp

To me it's just basic psychology and basic politics: tailor your tone to your aims. If you straight up hate someone and just want to slam them then by all means give them both barrels but if, as these Twitter activists claim, you want to engage with potentially sympathetic left-wing commentators, you have to be more cunning about winning them round. I get why they're angry, they have every right to be angry - I'd just like to see them try avenues that have a better prospect of tackling the problems they're angry about.

And there are several writers who deal with privilege in a reasonable, persuasive way but in Britain, at least, this issue has caught fire on Twitter, where it's much easier to get heated and phrase a tweet in a way that sets the discussion spiralling down a more negative ad hominem path.

emotion does not necessarily imply hostility

and confrontation gets misread as hostility across racial lines all the time q.v. michelle "angry black FLOTUS" obama earlier this week

oh god don't get me started on that bullshit

Well there are so many different cases of course. Some are across racial lines, many aren't. Sometimes emotion gets misread as hostility, sometimes it's real, vicious hostility.

i don't know, man, for me suggesting that criticism needs to be moderate in tone to be effective seems like a bizarre way of coddling the very people who need to be shaken out of complacency

Yes.

And the reason a lot of (young, British) people reject the conciliatory approach is that they've seen what 13 years of friendly conciliatory left wing government ended up looking like.

sometimes hostility is warranted, and I say that as a massive proponent of the "shouting at people rarely makes them change their minds" school of thought

even nice, well-meaning people do things that warrant them getting yelled at from time to time, it's a part of life

I hear all of that but I've studied how this plays out in a lot of situations and I'd take a little tactical coddling over these go-nowhere shitstorms.

haha um I really hesitate to say this but perhaps you should, you know, check your privilege here

I do appreciate what you're saying DL, but I still switch round the 'tactical' and 'go-nowhere' in that equation.

Backing up Dan here. Nothing like politely objecting to someone's POV only to be told you're being ANGRY or your tone is all wrong.

Basically if you want to show me your privilege, and you want to convince me it looks exactly like a mandrill's arse on you, go ahead and prove it by asserting your inalienable right to determine what the tone of any argument should be, or that there's a place for me to be put in somehow, by you.

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!"

haha yes i get major schadenfreude vibes from white ppl's reaction to being really distinct in japan. I've never directly pulled a "do you see?" on anyone about it, but I have responded to "japanese people are sooo racist" sorts of stories with "you know, maybe you're just actually noticing it more, because, well?"

but as we've discussed elsewhere i have a bit of stockholm syndrome w/r/t feeling out of place, so.

xposts. i honestly don't like when people get too worked up over people being pigs and saying crummy things tho. not in the sense of that they're doing wrong, but that they're stressing themselves out, and that at least in the near term there will always be more of this stuff and being mad on the internet all day is not healthy (you have to pick and choose when you get mad), so like if you get worked up too often about too much, you're probably right, but maybe its not a good way to live, emotionally. what's wrong with immediately going HAM as opposed to a more distanced approach is really that the former takes too much work to keep up.

the issue is that a certain percentage of people are just bad people -- not only entitled but bitter, and uninterested in whether other people find their speech offensive or discriminatory. so when you focus on bad things said by individuals, sometimes you are going to antagonize these kinds of people and the discussion is not going to go anywhere productive, because these people don't care about being good people/citizens

Yeah but fuck those people.

Well, first of all, fuck those people, and second, I don't think they really exist in the numbers to make themselves the real problem. Unashamed racists, for instance, are not the only people perpetuating systematic inequality! Far-right religious nutjobs who complain on natl tv about women having JOBS and being allowed out of the kitchen are not the whole reason rape culture exists! If it was just the far-flung stuff, we could all laugh it off! That's the good news. The bad news is that the problem is actually everyone.

it's always a little weird to live in the activist bubble full time and then encounter someone actively antagonistic to ~anti-oppressive thinking~. it's like suddenly encountering marvin the martian, and then blinking and looking around and realizing that to varying degrees you're surrounded by marvin the martians

xposts those people are actually where going HAM makes the most sense. because maybe you'll never convince them to not be horrible, but you can basically convince them that their lives will be v. miserable if they don't stfu about certain things in certain places at least. (and obv for extreme trolls, moderation and banning).