privilege as a meme

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

fucking "likeability"

when was the last time you saw people debate whether a SWM celebrity was "likeable" or not smh

Multiple x-posts: You don't get to determine what experiences I have had without talking to me. And around and around we go again.

"passing" as something that's not just limited to your skin tone

yeah this passing is interesting to me because previously i'd considered the place in class i inhabit - (self)educated lower middle class child of upper working class parents - as a zone of exile, of not fitting in, but increasingly i come to see it as the possibility of existing within different spaces, and being able to pass between them, which is a privilege up to the point where i hit the gatekeepers i can't con

Ties in to something else I hate which is certain people of colour being described as 'articulate' by white ppl. Xps

"Passing" is such a complicated and fascinating concept and I'd really love to be able to discuss it in all its permutations - obviously the racial passing sense, which I first encountered it in, but also in the sexual orientation sense, and really in the trans*/gender identity sense, and whatever other senses there are (I feel like there's very likely to be a class passing sense, c.f. The Great Gatsby on out)

Identity is so complex, in ways we only started to touch on in the "Gender Identity" thread. That it's not just what *you* feel or know yourself to be, but it's also ways-in-which-you-are-treated-by-others, and these things interact with one another in subtle ways.

And I do think you're right; that "passing" in some areas counts in the "ways-in-which-you-are-treated-by-others" areas of identity way more than "being".

I don't know if ILX is the place to be trying to have the conversation, though, or if we should just invite DL along to another of our table-pounding sessions. (Can't promise not to call anyone cunts, though, once the single malt comes out.)

haha YES

related: this actual question in the bbc's interview with sampha this week - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25216843

You're from south-London, did you have a normal upbringing?

literally no fucking words

xp

x-posts and BOOM, NV brings up exactly the sense of class passing that I was wondering about. Glad you said that.

more xp I mean, when Branwell says this: "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 appreciate its clarity and honesty, and respect that, but I think the content is destructive bullshit. I become unknowable (because I am apparently totally known and understood by folks who don't need to talk to me), which, because I like to think of myself a a bunch of different things, many fluid, is going to put me in a fight or ignore you stance. Which lex don't care about, but maybe lex should. You'll never know!

And I do think you're right; that "passing" in some areas counts in the "ways-in-which-you-are-treated-by-others" areas of identity way more than "being".

which in turn unavoidably affects your own self-perception/self-definition - your own sense of being

i feel like in the UK your ability to "pass" in various areas counts for more than what you actually are

I think about this a lot wrt my privilege - I can pass for middle class because I went to public school and talk proper, so maybe it doesn't matter that if I called my dad he couldn't stop it all? Which is small beans in the scheme of things I know, I mean SWM probably makes up for any class deficiencies anyway.

xposts obv

x-post to Lex, you are shitting kidding me with that question!

Anyway, I am off to eat lunch and go shopping in my dreadfully un-normal SOUTH LONDON shops, hope that this discussion stays as interesting, DL, Lex and NV!

x-post I'll think about that feedback loop until I get back. Because being treated my whole life as "queer" whether I was identifying as heterosexual or not probably did affect my identity in ways I haven't done parsing yet.

please no more x-posts, I'm hungry

Just as a minor aside, literally nobody on this board has ever even hinted that the race thread should be "declared us-only" so can we stop making stuff up?

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.

yeah, this common tendency to shut down discussion the moment anyone gets 'angry' (which generally means showing any sentiment whatsoever) seems almost entirely the realm of people who can treat the topic as a kind of abstract parlor game, as opposed to something that has a bearing on the participants in the discussion and is WORTH being angry about.

NV, the descriptor you are looking for is LIMINALITY.

I also want in on the table-pounding and single malt, dammit!

you know in part i think i got the sense of isolation from Hardy and The French Lieutenant's Woman and other literary versions of the prole educated beyond their useful station but at some point you think "i can be a person who is taken seriously in my job and still be honest with my friends and accepted by them"

those of you from different walks of life wd be amazed how many times i still come across people who make snap judgements about my intelligence based on me failing to rein in my accent or tastes or opinions tho

can i say i recognize these issues are SMALL POTATOES and treat them as such in the big intersectional scheme of things, mainly noting them out of interest tho i get much more angry when i see fellow working class people running into the shifting barriers of "know thy place"

xp I think that's simplistic. I'm not aware of anyone who treats this stuff as an "abstract parlor game". Often "shutting down discussion" (which is apparently what we must call withdrawing from an argument, whatever the reason) is done because someone is angry, upset or confused and will continue to think about the issues but outside the context of a Twitter dust-up.

mm, sometimes people walk away from arguments because the argument is painful to have due to being too close to their experience. We have the freedom to walk away from internet arguments in a way we don't have the freedom to walk away from our own lives (even though it can be hugely difficult to exercise that freedom).

it is very hard for any of us to tell whether someone else is engaging in an "abstract parlour game", or to evaluate the various ways in which another person is privileged or marginalised as a prelude to working out how much benefit of the doubt to give them -- unfortunately it is also very difficult to exist on the internet constantly extending good faith to other people!

I wasn't really specifically talking about the internecine conflicts of left twitter there. More a wider kind of political discussion where you have the generally rather privileged person, who's probably identifying as a leftist, playing the role of the annoying philosophy undergrad, devil's advocating here and trying to pick holes in arguments there because they have no particular stake in the discussion, then feeling happy to be dismissive when their interlocutor, who does have stakes, gets annoyed or angry. A role perhaps which perhaps reaches its contemporary apotheosis in the rational atheist superbro. Left twitter stuff is obviously more complex than that but I think there are still elements of that kind of attitude around.

Ah, I see. I hate those people. No time for devil's advocates whatsoever. That wasn't who I had in mind.

it can take the form of a continuous sidetracking of what is at stake, attention to the insignificant or contingent in an argument, not dissimilar to grammar policing or the latter as a subset of this faux-academic pedantry maybe

Who did you have in mind, DL?

I was thinking of arguments about privilege where both parties were very much emotionally engaged and shaken up by it, which is why I was initially confused by Merdeyeux's generalisation.

Faux-academic pedantry is the bane of internet discourse and overwhelmingly popular with middle-class white men like this guy:

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/9

im totally not in league with the politeness police i think calling people out and getting mad is fine like sometimes its maybe not the most useful approach but maybe sometimes it is and were all humans who want to express ourselves so its cool

buut "check your privilege" is just such an inherently comical overheated phrase, i mean people are going to make fun of it, even people who agree with you

i think this is where the teen discourse of tumblr really comes in, along with shit like "youre not allowed to..." and "this isnt for you..."

like on some level theyre understandable sentiments but they really do not come off like at all like the people using them think they do, they just end up sounding like some canned comeback "talk to the hand" "get a life"

which is why i think understanding the concepts of privilege and intersectionality are really good and can help make the world a better place, but attachment to the words and forms of its own little micro culture is just futile

Screw that. Privilege talk without marxism (academic or inherent) behind it is just another way to say "you smell".

― Three Word Username, Friday, January 10, 2014 4:46 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean lol come on

also people getting weirdly psyched about intersectionality and playing it like its some sort of trump card or something

its worth remembering i guess that tumblr is teens and also college is teens

http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person-shesaid/

The reasoning & conclusion are pretty basic but it's interesting getting there.

People in their late 20s/early 30s being all dismissive about "teens" and how dumb and ignorant they are, when actually, in your 40s, you see how dumb and ignorant your 20s/30s were, and teens are wiser than a lot of people give them credit for; that is also a thing. x-post

For many, many people, choosing how and who to have arguments with is a form for self care.

Because if you are impassioned about something that affects you, you will be told you are "angry".

And if you are angry, even righteously and totally legitimately, you will be told you are "crazy".

There is nothing so angry-making as being told you are angry when you are not. There is nothing so crazy-making as being told you are crazy when you are not.

So walking away from those arguments that you can see from experience are likely to go down that route (and double if the person is already complaining about "rudeness" or how you sound "like a teengirl" as an actual dismissive insult) is a completely legitimate and sometimes necessary form of self care.

teens are cool they just have a lot of teen culture specific rhetorical ticks that tend to not play real well when adopted by non teens is all

not sure that it's that dismissive of children to suggest that adult discourse maybe shouldn't cop so much of the rhetoric of children idk maybe I'll feel different when I'm 40

xp obv

its like teen clothing, youve got to move on and argue like an adult at some point

It cuts both ways. That's a cartoonishly one-sided view. OK, so one participant mustn't be called angry or crazy, or even rude or teen-like, because it's hurtful. What about the person they're calling out? Fuck their feelings, presumably because they've been designated the Privilege Monster.

Sorry, that was an xp to BB