privilege as a meme

she cited this 1989 article of her own in the footnotes of mapping the margins http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/tbettch/Crenshaw%20Demarginalizing%20Intersection%20Race%20Sex.pdf

xp

on that, suey park is unstoppable

fyi that last article is a lot more boring and talking about cases. i was just wondering when the word was first used. kind of like when jaymc tried to find the first use of 'gaydar'. i'm sleepy and i had wine.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/15979/hood_feminist/

Everyone wants to be an “expert.” And it’s much easier to get paid for being an “expert” on people who can’t speak for themselves. But Twitter makes it impossible to ignore the voices of the people you’re talking about. You can’t be an expert on those people when those people are at the table with you.

...the some voices of the people you’re talking about.

Just a reminder, but while these voices being cited presumably speak from a much more direct and intimate experiences than the pseudo-"expert" being derided here, but it is always dicey to elevate any one voice or any subset of voices as the voices of "the people". Twitter does not yet represent the "voice" of everyone, but only those who tweet.

Twitter's breadth of participation may mark an improvement on the status-quo ante, but it is hardly universal, yet, and if it were, it would be so diverse and cacophonous as to be nearly impossible to encompass or to summarize.

/captain obvious

There's a hugely bitter debate within UK feminist Twitter / blog circles about the use of the term intersectionality at the moment. One side, which is primarily made up of white middle-class established journalists rejects the term as divisive and too academic. The other sees that as an attempt to police / remove one of the tools created by women of colour to address their own oppression.

Yes I stumbled on that and it took me a while to untangle the beginnings of it.

I thought this bit was helpful? Red Light Politics captured and explained some tweets that seem to have been pivotal.

http://www.redlightpolitics.info/post/71842333716/i-cant-think-of-any-high-profile-white-uk-feminist

A-ha! I read that the other day and couldn't find it again. Thanks!

It all kicked off again after that post was written, i think, following a radio debate between Caroline Criado-Perez and Reni Eddo-Lodge:

http://i.imgur.com/9DZsmhN.png

Criado-Perez responded to a statement about high-profile white feminists struggling at times to deal with their own privilege by focusing on the idea that intersectionality was being used as a tool to abuse her and her friends.

It has been going on for ages. The UK doesn't really have a plurality of mainstream outlets for feminist discourse in the way the US has kind of developed so there's a lot of focus on a relatively small group of like-minded people who write (or have written) for The Guardian or New Statesman and have a high social media profile. They tend to be journalists rather than people with an academic or campaigning background. Over the last year there's been a number of occasions when quite a few of them (Caitlin Moran, Suzanne Moore, etc) have responded very badly to being called out on questionable assumptions relating to race / trans issues and have hit back by accusing people of using intersectionality as a stick to beat other women with.

from a uk perspective i follow @renireni and @judeinlondon and a few more. there are plenty more i wish i could follow but the volume would get overwhelming. i should probably just create a list or something.

not sure which has been less edifying, white liberal journalists being snide about the "intersectionalists" all year or telling black women they're not doing it right (and still conflating it with internet abuse, ugh). the bigger picture is so much more heartening though, it's pretty obviously ~the future, ideas that in 10 years will be completely mainstream. i've found intersectional twitter extremely inspiring and interesting of late.

My take-away was that white feminists were objecting to other, less prominent white feminists using intersectionality to punch upward at them? Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of intersectionality, I think. People like that have to realise that there is always a context where they will be the privileged person in an interaction, no matter how much abuse they personally have suffered or how little money they might have in the bank. OTOH someone else Lex and I both follow, a v. v. smart woman of colour with little formal education, was basically shat upon by a black female academic for wanting to talk intersectionality issues because she hadn't read essay X or book Y. Wanted to throttle the academic, really, for doing exactly the thing she purports to be schooling against.

it's not all sort of happy-slappy

xp yeah academic privilege is often a...blind spot here. i don't mean the basic stuff like grasping the concept of intersectionality and i certainly don't give anyone smart enough to have a career in mainstream journalism a pass on constantly whinging it's too hard to understand, but just repeating how you came from nothing but made it to university can def come across like bootstraps rhetoric at times. especially when many people on whose behalf you purport to speak don't have the access to or even interest in that kind of education.

Man, it's such a drag to have people speaking for "feminism" who say things like that, because then I have to look at every social media feed being full of scathing (and deserved) denouncements of what "white feminists" do for like a week afterward. More seriously because this shit is part of what makes smart, political, motivated women of color decide they can't be "feminists" because the official face of the movement excludes them and LASHES OUT AT THEM?? so duh, they are taking their toys and playing in the other sandbox, which at this point is kind of the only sandbox for me.

For most of my life I haven't had the vocabulary to talk about justice issues and didn't know that there even was such a thing, but I do remember my mom asking me why I cared so much about gay rights (in college, natch) and trying to explain to her that their oppression was not separable from women's struggle for equal rights and opportunities. It would be 15 years before I learned the word "patriarchy."

Well, this is the thing - lacking the *words* for a concept is a very different thing from lacking the concept itself.

Having the experience of the kinds of things the word/concept discusses makes it much, much easier to encounter the word for the first time and go "Yes! That!" and not see it as an overly academic concern, but finally having the right word for an experience one has encountered one's entire life.

The problem is, as that Flavia Dzodan piece makes clear, the people most often saying "the concept is fine, but the word is ~terrible~" are the people coming at it from an academic rather than an experience point of view, so what they're objecting to, really, is not the word. It's the concept.

Haha. Yes.

"It's not me. It's you."

all of this stuff reads kind of like extreme mental subterfuge/mind games to me

also this is otm
i have had to remind a lot of feminist friends that making fun of people because their academic practices (handing in a rough draft to a professor) are different from theirs is nagl

xp yeah academic privilege is often a...blind spot here. i don't mean the basic stuff like grasping the concept of intersectionality and i certainly don't give anyone smart enough to have a career in mainstream journalism a pass on constantly whinging it's too hard to understand, but just repeating how you came from nothing but made it to university can def come across like bootstraps rhetoric at times. especially when many people on whose behalf you purport to speak don't have the access to or even interest in that kind of education.

― lex pretend, Friday, January 3, 2014 7:58 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

just realized i used to get most of my priv news from twitter but now theres a lot of it on facebook

wonder if that has to do with fb tweaking their flow to surface more substantial #content or the topic is becoming more mainstream or im just imagining it or what

it does seem to me like its become more mainstream? i didn't see it nearly so often 3+ years ago.

yeah id have to agree w that, not sure i even knew about it as like a thing three years ago, well three years ago prob, but five years ago idk

i've had some familiarity with it from gender studies courses i took in college, and it had currency among activists i knew in occupy days, but that was where i started to realize for the first time that like 'tumblr discourse' or what have you was a thing

and that seems to have been its base of operations for spreading

tumblr by teens

™

™blr

"privilege as a meme"

i am playing a beta for a thing and can't log in, the exact lingo used in silly video-game-speak starts with "Error xx.xx...: You are not entitled to..." so i googled it and landed on a gamefaqs thread where no less than five thousand people (maybe just 2) joked "have you tried checking your privilege"

have to wonder how soon it is before the word and the discourse around it starts to really infiltrate everywhere and every standup comic in the world does a bit about it like what happened with the term "political correctness" in the 90s. and it becomes a big thing that people far away from the internet have strong half-informed opinions about, and then the word is completely lost forever because it develops such a connotation with badness, nothing but a joke, etc. has fox news spent a day on it yet? it sucks that a few years ago so many people would be so excited to see how far it's all come but lol come on this was bound to happen it will always happen

yup

it's like when "A spectre is haunting Europe" became a lol meme and then communism caved in

memes ruin everything

Next jargon pls

did people actually identify as politically correct in the 90's? i thought that was the reactionary designation hoisted on them. makes it sound like something it's cool and dangerous to be against. ppl tend to self-identify as "anti-oppressive" now ime

conservatives got it from the left iirc

no one identified as politically correct iirc, it was something liberals said to make fun of themselves or their more strident brethren but then it really picked up steam when conservatives/normies got ahold of it

yeah i knew that wasn't a good parallel, also i was born in 88 so i have no idea how it all started, but i think the trajectory of that term once it really took off is possibly very similar to what will happen with "privilege"

obvs meanings/cultures are always mutating which is what inspired me to bravely start this thread, but i wouldnt be surprised if privilege has some legs, it really kinda speaks to our times

I was thinking recently that a lot of the things that I now would describe in terms of white privilege, ten years ago I would have described I'm terms of "Eurocentricity", but that particular mode of discourse has fallen out of favor.

I dunno about "fallen out of favor" exactly, but intersectionality addresses one of the key weaknesses in post-post-colonial identity politics, which is precisely that identity is not singular and power flows in multiple directions.

Which is only to say, I guess, that it seems less that one discourse has been replaced by another than that the discourse has been field-tested and refined.

The old Marxist in me wonders what that does to old coalitions, what new ones it supports, and who benefits, but that's probably a different thread.

what is the story with the use of "folks"?

probably got it from obama

to me the mainstream discovering the privilege discourse, which it will anytime now, is just a necessary step in the process. there will be embarrassing david brooks columns or whatever but introducing the ideas to more people will only shift the overton window. short term pain for long term gain

who doesn't say "folks"?

snoots

i probably lean towards pessimism w/r/t the future of "privilege" in the public discourse. the mainstream RW press have barely touched it yet but i'm seeing a lot of disdain from mainstream liberal journalists sneering at phrases like "check your privilege" and "intersectionality".

more disturbingly it's being conflated with social media trolling - like, literally in the same debate about misogynists sending rape or death threats on twitter, some idiot liberal will chime in with "and those mean intersectional feminists having the temerity to disagree with me in a rude tone".

i genuinely have no conception of the time when the word "privilege" began to be A Thing because it always seemed like duh, the most natural word to use for a social phenomenon that was entirely obvious to me. it's not like it's a relatively new word like intersectionality. people have surely been referring to "privileged backgrounds", "privileged kids" for decades?

also, when i say white liberal journalists sneering, i don't just mean the occasional clueless-but-measured articles they write about it - i mean the behind-the-scenes stuff on facebook, twitter. just pure contempt and disdain for the very idea that those words could mean anything. a loooooot of people have plummeted in my estimation over the past few months.

Lex, you've grown up somewhere that's outrageously frank about class compared to the US. But you're right about the behind-the-scenes stuff - it's as if some people in the commentariat resent not being out ahead of what are (to me) simple, important terms.

People on the left used to go batshit insane when GWB referred to 'folks'.

Late '80s 'political correctness' was used by lefties/students in a non-ironic way but by the time I graduated from college it was just 'PC'. Ironic use by right-wingers took about a decade to get going.

The phrase "check yr privilege" was used as a punchline in the IT crowd recently

ARGH think about who wrote that, and how annoying he finds the inconvenience of people who are more left-wing than him calling him out on Twitter.

i had an 18 year old student use it in class during a debate about ethics of genetic testing he started laughing as he realised what he was saying, and all the other students laughed too