privilege as a meme

oh it's this tired false binary between sitting behind our computer screens and typing outrage or mockery vs ACTUAL ACTIVE ACTIONS as if one person couldn't possibly do both and as if both can't have value

boring

A lack of reading comprehension can also be boring.

...because I'm saying you are passive if you are typing loud and doing nothing, which assumes the possibility of typing and doing stuff, which I endorse.

don't give a fuck what you endorse m8

THERE we go!

i think if people are calling out power i don't really care if they've got a fully-formed political programme behind it or not. the recognition of injustice comes way before a theory of justice imo

then the road to changing yrself begins with recognising that yr sense of yrself is open to challenge and that maybe that challenge is v necessary and important

I just tell everyone I'm nouveau pauvre, that pretty much covers the situation I'm in.

The problem with just calling out power -- ending the process there -- is that power usually doesn't give a fuck. At which point it begins to look like an exercise in blowing off steam or in name-calling. I don't think either of those is going to get privileged folks to engage in earnest self-examination.

there's a core of privileged folks who are unreachable and unworth the effort imo

the rest of us shd probly not throw a hissy every time somebody questions our privilege

"Check your privilege", to me, is a phrase which both asks others to examine the power structures they are involved in, but also acknowledges power structures as pertaining to the self.

I think it's a well-intentioned and potentially powerful phrase. But I think a lot of people who find it directed at themselves completely misread an intent on the part of the person saying it, because of guilt, or fear, or projection or whatever. The phrase is saying "power exists, notice which ways it flows" with the hopes that it will lead to at least an acknowledgement, and perhaps maybe an attack on unequal power flow in itself. But then hearers choose to hear it only as an attack on them, personally, rather than as being directed at a power structure. And that misreading makes me really, really sad, because "privilege" is a way of saying "this is NOT ABOUT YOU, this is about a power structure way way bigger than either of us" but there's still this... arrogance? guilt? something? which makes a person hearing it think it's all about them.

But then, I guess one of those symptoms of that "protective shield" of privilege is the automatic assumption that any given thing is, always "all about you" and not about the power structure one is part of.

Nice post earlier, Branwell. I think that's why the word has had a rocky ride recently - people who feel that they lack class privilege have a hard time accepting that they do have privilege in other areas. It doesn't require a huge intellectual leap but I wonder if a different word without the old connotations of wealth would have been more effective. Minor point though, and I wouldn't want to dwell on semantics.

Another factor, but not excuse, re: responses to "check your privilege". The calling out often takes place on Twitter where it's inevitably reduced to buzzwords so it appears simplistic and a personal attack whereas, say, a Ta-Nehisi Coates post making essentially the same point does not.

Well, it's rude! Sometimes necessary, sometimes an appropriate response, but always rude -- and the use of the 2d person makes it not so utterly unusual that a person being spoken to would think they were being spoken to and about. If you aren't talking to me about me and my privilege, why not try different words? "Because you cannot tell a member of a group you are not a part of how to..." and so on ad infinitum.

If it is a phrase that means "shut up and here's why", it's well phrased; otherwise, it's maybe better-used talking ABOUT than TO people with. "Speaking truth ABOUT power" doesn't quite have the same ring, though.

Human nature being what it is, I think you can either (a) feel morally justified in being angry and aggressive towards Irritant X on Twitter or (b) expect Irritant X to engage in a debate with you and perhaps concede your point, but I don't think you can do both.

I know Irritant X sounds like a Nation of Islam follower who signed to Profile in 1989.

People get pissed off and calm down, but I've utterly lost track of who "you" and "Irritant X" is. I mean, there's personhood on both sides, generally.

released an album called Chekk Yo Privil-EDGE iirc

I think that Tone Policing has been a practice used to discredit and silence marginalised people since, well, forever, so criticisms of arguments based on how "rude" they sound to a privileged person are really another exercise of Privilege.

(Which makes it even more super-ironic, when privileged persons complain that "check your privilege' is falsely equated in their minds with "STFU white man" because we all know who uses silencing techniques the most, and who, exactly, usually gets silenced by them.)

whilst i am pro-civility i've said a thousand times that the birth and practice of Good Manners is inextricably rooted in exclusion

I find you completely impossible to talk to, Branwell. I would like to, but I cannot, and the words you use are all that is standing in the way (because this is the Internet, and I know you no other way). If I say that to I you, is it tone policing? Certainly not within the four walls of my head, apparently within the four walls of your head. I suspect that we my agree on more things than would at first be apparent, but I cannot avoid the feeling that our discussions are on a "I ---> it" level, rather than a "I <---> thou" level. Is it tone policing if I point that out?

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument

here's some goddamn tone policing - TWU your tone is incredibly supercilious and patronising and as such i find YOU impossible to talk to. my rudeness is indicative of my lack of interest in conversing with you. for you to tone police one of the people actually putting effort into this thread is unbelievable.

I find i police my own tone a lot in situations where i think there's a genuine chance of educating someone as to why their position is racist, sexist, etc. There are also plenty of situations where people just need to be angrily shamed into not doing something.

whilst i am pro-civility i've said a thousand times that the birth and practice of Good Manners is inextricably rooted in exclusion

indeed.

another thing i've noticed is where a Prominent Media Figure will get criticised for something they've done, and those criticisms will come in a variety of tones and degrees of rudeness, and if there's anything overtly rude, they'll seize on that as a means to discredit the entire criticism. it's just reflective of an unwillingness to engage.

Also, to be completely clear: I am not saying "don't be rude", as that would be the height of hypocrisy. I am saying that it's good to have some idea of the effects of what and how you say something have on the other party to the conversation -- unless the other party is just the Other, in which case fuck 'em but don't be surprised when they grumble.

X-post: I am familiar with the phrase. You have misunderstood my question. Shall I rephrase it?

X-x-post: Sorry you feel that way, lex.

Sort of like how I said the word "rude" and that got seized on?

people who feel that they lack class privilege have a hard time accepting that they do have privilege in other areas

I don't normally contribute to these threads (although I do read them all) for various reasons (e.g. I am pretty clueless in this area compared to you guys, there are too many SWM voices on here already etc etc etc) but just wanted to say that one of the things I find strangest about ostensibly feminist/progressive journalists on twitter/tumblr dismissing intersectionality is that reading about the concept of intersectionality seemed to make a lot of the arguments about privilege make sense to me finally, like I was a bit defensive about "white privilege" because of class issues but I feel like I "get it" a bit more now. I'm not saying I am totes enlightened now, I'm still basically an idiot, so I'll bow out again now.

I have no doubt that tone policing is a problem but the complaint is sometimes used dishonestly to give a free pass to abuse as long as it's punching up. To take one example, a while back a WOC called a white woman on Twitter a cunt. Is it tone policing to find that abusive?

only if the word "punt" doesn't follow

Independent Tone Police Complaints Commission

God, C-Poo, no, that's great! Whatever makes a lightbulb moment happen!

Discovering Intersectionality was a similar kind of experience for me, except I'd been spending 2011 in "feminist meetings" sitting drawing diagrammes of mathematical set theory on the back of napkins going "why don't I have a word for this thing that is going on here that I am trying to get my head around" in trying and failing to articulate and understand discussions of race, and why our "feminist group" was all white, and that being a bad thing.

And it was reading Flavia Dzodan's angry and rude and ferocious - but also impassioned and intelligent and informed and completely OTM - posts on Tiger Beatdown, all through 2011, and culminating in that amazing "My Feminism Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit" post that suddenly gave me a WORD for this thing, for this feeling I couldn't articulate but could only draw using set theory on the back of napkins. It was like a key that turned a lock and connected a group of concepts that had been floating around just out of reach to me. I am, too, still an idiot, but at least now I had a map and the name of the street I had to get to, and it was the start of an ongoing process to try to get better at this stuff. Dzodan collectively told all of white feminism to collectively check their privilege, and that experience of being shown what privilege was and how I had it in some situations, but not in others, and gave me a fucking WORD with which to address this stuff - that was the best thing that ever happened to my understanding of political life. Like, without going all "I had my privilege checked, and it was great!" I just want to say what a useful tool it can be.

But, at the same time, recognising that the way power works, and the way power corrupts, is that some people who have lacked power for much of their experience, they are unwilling to relinquish what little power they accrue, even if it comes at the expense of people with less power than them. This is not just applicable to "white feminists" though; this is applicable on every axis of power that exists.

a while back a WOC called a white woman on Twitter a cunt. Is it tone policing to find that abusive?

I am way, way less interested in whether *this* act was abusive, than query the abusiveness of whatever act (or actions) it was that would provoke said WoC to insults.

That link up there that I posted about "tone arguments" - it covered this kind of thing.

I was using the word kyriarchy before intersectionality entered the picture. Does anyone else think they're similar enough to be basically the same?

xp This is what I mean by a free pass. It can't be that she did something wrong - it must have been justified in some way. I find that dishonest.

^^yeah exactly. it doesn't invalidate her argument, and just because the trigger may have been a professionally worded article or politely worded nonsense doesn't mean that using profanity makes her response worse. it's just a bit childish, all a bit "mummy s/he said a Bad Word!!!!"

fwiw i thiiiiink i know what DL is referring to - i only noticed it tangentially but it's not like the WOC was calling anyone a cunt out of nowhere; those two have regular, er, interactions on twitter.

xps re: BB

Screw that. If someone calls me a c*** I'm going to stop listening. I'm not enough of a masochist to spend ages finding out why they think I'm a c***. And if I called anyone else a c*** I'd expect them to feel the same way. (Asterisking because I feel weird typing that word on this thread)

I don't think that anything I said implied that anyone got a free pass.

But I think that it is a system as a whole which bears examining, rather than slapping a label on one woman as "abusive" when she reacts a certain way.

Most sane people do not just burst out calling people cunts for no reason. I think it's better to look for reasons, and reasons on a holistic level.

(And I put the "sane" in only as a caveat and a recognition that living under a system of oppression, especially a system where that oppression is routinely denied and whitewashed and gaslighted away, is really really bad for a person's mental health. If a WoC *does* call a white woman a cunt for no reason it is probably not due to "insanity" but due to the fact that it *is* infuriating and stress-inducing to live as as a Black person in a racist world. This is clumsily parsed, and probably ripe for misinterpretation, but I'm not going to delete it now.)

well, my point is that i think these two particular people had stopped listening to each other long ago, so the use of that word was less "obstacle to reasonable debate" and more "manifestation of barely concealed mutual dislike"

xp

I've said this again and again, but the freedom to discuss oppression ~impassionately~ and *not* get angry, and the ability to walk away from an argument - that is often, in itself, an exercise of privilege.

xp Ha, good point.

While saying lots that I agree with, Branwell sums up the problems I have with the arsenal of debate jargon here. All online debate gets clotted with jargon - Straw man! Ad hominem! Fallacy! - and this strand is no different. I've read so many blog posts and Twitter exchanges which contain nothing but set phrases. It's like there's no behaviour that can't be defended with "Tone argument!" or "Gaslighting!" Do those words describe real phenomena? Absolutely. Are they sometimes used cheaply to simplify a disagreement into goodies and baddies? I think so, yes.

I am willing to give more marginalised people the benefit of the doubt way more than I am willing to give more privileged people the benefit of the doubt that their experiences are, indeed, what they say they are.

I know that is the opposite of how society generally works, but it's a choice I've made, and I'm going to try to stick to it.

I mean, the whole of Intersectionality, as a thing, is a way to try to get BEYOND "Goodies" and "Baddies" and say that systems of power and oppression are WAY more complicated than good/bad binaries.

In theory, yes

i find a lot of academic language impenetrable but i don't have an issue with a lot of those words - the impenetrability is more about a style of writing than terms like "gaslighting". do i think a big problem is that academics can't fucking write to save their lives? yup. but as long as it's comprehensible, you sort of have to separate the argument from the way it's phrased.

at core it's the argument that's important, not whether an individual uses a profanity or whether an academic talks in jargonese - neither of which are reasons for people to start mocking "check your privilege" or "the intersectionals"

and iirc we talked about this elsewhere recently but academic privilege is totally a thing and a lot of people seem v blind to the fact that they have it (just like every other sort of privilege i guess)

I don't think it's impenetrable, I just think that phrases that spring out of original thought turn into cliches that get in the way of original thought. It bothers me more in arguments than it does in texts because arguments always lead people to grab whatever weapons they have to hand, however blunt.

another thing to remember is that there's often a history of certain patterns of behaviour that those exhibiting them might not see. it wasn't til i read up via tumblr/twitter etc that i realised "White Feminism" was a thing, and that black feminists' irritation at certain latter-day figures wasn't because they were easily irritated by something problematic but not malicious; it was because they'd seen it all before again and again and again, and had little reason to believe it would be different this time

Sometimes one person's "argument that gets in the way of 'original thought'" (whatever 'original thought' is supposed to mean here?) is another person's "shorthand that describes a shit-ton of experience you have never had, but are sick of spelling it out the same way, over and again."

x-post again, Lex absolutely completely OTM and I really admire your stamina here.

a lot of it prob comes down to what we were talking about the other day BB - intersectionality makes intuitive sense to us b/c we live it - we both have lives that are unarguably privileged in some ways and unarguably non-privileged in others. when i first read about it, it kind of felt...freeing from false binaries of being either Oppressed or The Oppressor, or wondering why the game seemed to be stacked against me in some ways but in others i felt like i intuitively knew the rules

all of this feeds into a lot of thoughts i have about "passing" which prob belong on the race thread if it's not been declared a US-only zone by now - "passing" as something that's not just limited to your skin tone. sometimes i feel like in the UK your ability to "pass" in various areas counts for more than what you actually are - this country is quick to give people passes if they're the right sort of black person, the right sort of gay person, but step outside that box and ohhhh boy that's not the case any more