privilege as a meme

i know, 'twas ever thus, it's disspiriting tho. i think the onus is on the non-egomaniacs to work right around anybody who's in it for the sectarianism tbh - you're either a broad coalition or you're fucked

xp-to-self (also the whole "japanese people are soooo racist" story is, as a story, usually pretty racist)

hah csm, i was trying to make the same point in the race/racism thread

See i retead treeship's post of 20:40 local time (sorry no c&p on phone lol) and imo it could as easily apply to ppl itt on either side of the debate, so if the outcome is 'fuck those ppl' fine, but fuck em all

i took lessons in tone at a prestigious public school, i don't think you guys have what it takes to shake me out of my complacency. this evening a friend&i were reflecting on our privilege, he said "i feel invincible" and i just nodded.

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.

but he was being self-deprecating, because white people are smart!

amazing

It struck me last night after I left the thread that I was getting too caught up in the context of Twitter arguments and that I feel much more relaxed and optimistic if I take a longer term view. 25 years ago something similar happened around political correctness: important progressive work (with a minority of zealots) which required a period of tension, especially across generational lines, before settling into a new norm for younger people. Many concepts and linguistic terms that were then considered, by some, alienating or academic are now firmly established in mainstream discourse. So I guess the point is not whether some middle-aged commentators are persuaded to change but what younger people, who may be observing these angry exchanges without joining in, or just absorbing these ideas by osmosis, integrate into their everyday thinking. One thing that really bugs me is when older writers I respect talk of privilege and intersectionality as if they're difficult or pedantic concepts when in fact they're very simple to take on board. So the current tension, even though it's become the big media narrative around CYP, will hopefully feel irrelevant 10 or 20 years from now. It's in my personality to get dismayed by bitter infighting on the left so maybe it's a better idea to just step back and accept it as a necessary part of the process.

aaaanyway for me "checking your privilege" is at its core a process of recognising that all individuals' positions/experiences/expectations are affected by their social and economic backgrounds

DING DING DING.

w/r/t the story of DJP's friend in japan, i think one of the reasons i intuitively "got" the concept of privilege (i can't even remember where i first read it, it just seemed an obvious word and idea for things i already knew) is because i felt both obviously privileged in some ways (gender, class) and obviously non-privileged in others (sexuality, race) so the fact that privilege isn't a blunt black-or-white thing, that it's a complex set of privileges that in any given situation can cut a number of ways, seemed self-evident and not offensive.

i think what frustrates me more than seeing middle class str8 white men not getting it is seeing feminists argue about it. when i see white feminists resistant to privilege talk i'm like...but you KNOW what privilege is, you may not use that word but you know how male privilege works structurally, so why is it so hard to extend that to class and race?

middle class str8 white men actually most underprivileged group in modern western society imo

SIKE

lol i just assumed that was a darraghmac post

Check yr middle class privilege

Also fyi uk ppl thumbing their noses at occupied nationalities nagl imo but you're one of five ppl on ilx who gets to define privilege or else spittlerage tantrum so i mean pinch of salt, pinch of salt

Occupy darraghmac now in it's 15th month, media awareness still at an all-time low, with occasional spikes.

The problem with being a living example of liminality (I feel that way about myself and I see it in most people I know) is that 'the intersection' seems so fucking obvious, and people who don't/won't see it just seem completely oblivious, and proud of themselves for that.

One thing that really bugs me is when older writers I respect talk of privilege and intersectionality as if they're difficult or pedantic concepts when in fact they're very simple to take on board.

OTM

i think what frustrates me more than seeing middle class str8 white men not getting it is seeing feminists argue about it. when i see white feminists resistant to privilege talk i'm like...but you KNOW what privilege is, you may not use that word but you know how male privilege works structurally, so why is it so hard to extend that to class and race?

Also OTM, but there's a long history of this sort of protectionist shit, sadly.

if people recognized and acknowleged their own privilege so easily, well, this thread wd be a lot shorter, yes?

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/5148/ii94.jpg

okay lol

technologist privilege

lool

hahahah

ftr nothing hugo schwyzer says ever matters

But this is fun. Oh is it EVER fun.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/07/male-feminist-hugo-schwyzers-early-retirement.html

doesn't even mention that he's a rapist who blamed his victim

Someone's back! SORT of.

man this is getting uncomfortable

Honestly unsure if it's really him or someone's just hacked in.

for a hack it seems strangely self-consistent

i buy it - it's dark and specific enough that i really doubt it's the hairpin equivalent of the SYRIAN ELECTRONIC ARMY or whatever (though i'm sure the "i was hacked!" excuse is just around the corner/whenever the seroquel kicks in)

We have a winner

Hugo Schwyzer = Gaius Baltar

lol

haha

wasn't hacked, this is the most obvious Next Step for any manipulative asshole who's ever lived, isn't it?

self-hating/self-serving twitter confessionals during a manic break? I dunno if that's generally applicable.

how familiar r u with hugo

he knows most of the world is going to default pity him for it, i'm not going to join in

he's a rapist and an attempted murderer and every horrible thing he's saying about himself is true, the only direction he can go is up, this is the way to get there, he doesn't deserve an ounce of pity

Wow, I don't follow him bc I have never felt he had anything to say that I wanted/needed to hear but yikes -- that's quite a spiel. What's it doing hidden in here?

http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/

Political projects of transformation necessarily involve a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves as well. However, for this process to work, individual transformation must occur concurrently with social and political transformation. That is, the undoing of privilege occurs not by individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position, but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the systems that enable these privileges. The activist genealogies that produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a problem of individual prejudice. Rather, the purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of oppression. However, the response to structural racism became an individual one – individual confession at the expense of collective action.

damn

i get kind of lost once shit get deep but the thesis is on point imo

a friend of mine who's been loudly skeptical of white privilege before posted this with endorsement so i had been not looking forward to reading it, but this looks great so far

Native peoples are not positioned as those who can engage in self-reflection; they can only judge the worth of the confession. Consequently, the presenters of these narratives often present very nervously. Did they speak to all their privileges? Did they properly confess? Or will someone in the audience notice a mistake and question whether they have in fact become a fully-developed anti-racist subject? In that case, the subject would have to then engage in further acts of self-reflection that require new confessions in the future.

To quote one of my activist mentors, Judy Vaughn, “You don’t think your way into a different way of acting; you act your way into a different way of thinking.” Essentially, the current social structure conditions us to exercise what privileges we may have. If we want to undermine those privileges, we must change the structures within which we live so that we become different peoples in the process.

this really rings true for me, the projects i try to spend time on are big on "building anti-oppressive culture" and this clicks with that

Hiram Perez similarly analyzes how the white subject positions itself intellectually as a cosmopolitan subject capable of abstract theorizing through the use of the “raw material” provided by fixed, brown bodies. The white subject is capable of being “anti-“ or “post-identity,” but understands their post-identity only in relationship to brown subjects which are hopelessly fixed within identity. Brown peoples provide the “raw material” that enables the intellectual production of the white subject.

this is the good kind of skepticism imo

your friend prob didn't read it

kind of a bummer conclusion tho

Based on this analysis then, our project becomes less of one based on self-improvement or even collective self-improvement, and more about the creation of new worlds and futurities for which we currently have no language.

oh great sign me up i guess...

hah. well.

the point she actually goes on to make is cool tho