I often get pissed off that I wasn’t born a hundred or a thousand years in the future. Imagine how backwards and stupid today will seem … look at how bad things were for women and people of color in the 1970s and that was “only” 45 years ago. Heck, look how far gay marriage and acceptance of being gay has come in the last twenty years. Amazing progress.
The ultimate luck is to be born as far in the future as possible. The past sucked and has always sucked. The only constant is progress, for everyone… largely because the old bigoted socially backwards people die off. Like Chris Rock said
Grown people, people over 30, they’re not changing
I remember being lectured in school, by teachers, in the 90s to support the Oregon Citizens Alliance. Because LGBT were “gross” and “their” books didn’t deserve to be in libraries. We have come far, and the last twenty has been exceptional, but we aren’t even a generation away from serious bigotry.
'In 1992 the OCA returned to the issue of homosexuality, when it proposed Measure 9. This initiative would have amended the Oregon Constitution to prevent what the OCA called “special rights” for homosexuals and bisexuals, by adding a provision that the state “recognizes homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism as abnormal, wrong, unnatural, and perverse.” ’
While more than twenty years ago, it is still burned into my brain.
I believe the rate of social change is speeding up, due to radio, newspapers, TV, satellite TV, and now the Internet. We are all so increasingly connected, and all the good and bad things happening are visible to everyone.
The only downside is that people think the bad stuff is more common than it is due to “it bleeds, it leads”
… but the big upside is that ugliness cannot hide and exposure to light – the more the better – always kills ugliness.
It is speeding up. But seeing my family, friends, and community change like it has simply convinced me of the tenuousness of that kind of change. It is fragile and needs to be nurtured.
I personally am no agent of change. I’m a dumb, goofy dude. But I did watch my father and brother become a little more open minded, which gives me faith. (Yeah, they were both OCA admirer’s, and it was likely NPR that flipped them).
Steven Brust’s post contains the answer to your question. It’s right there. My earlier post does too. But you won’t see it if you reframe what we are saying to fit it inside the privilege paradigm, because that model cannot accommodate what we’re trying to express. If you can put what you think we’re saying in that model, you haven’t caught what we are saying yet. Try to see the mental models we’re using, that literally have no categories that correspond to yours. You will still be able to agree or disagree afterwards. I don’t agree with Brust about everything, so maybe it will help to show the common thread if you can spot the differences in our emphasis. But hold that critical question firmly in your mind, it’s the key to understanding - and re-read what we’ve already said. The answer is right there.
The mindset that stereotypes the pale-skinned as privileged, puts blinders on the people that use its lens to perceive their environment. This mental model can readily support courses of action that will perpetuate and expand racism.
The mindset that stereotypes men as privileged, puts blinders on the people who use its lens to perceive their environment. This mental model easily supports courses of action that will perpetuate and expand sexism.
Refusing to equate a negative (lack of an oppression) with a positive (granting of a privilege) helps remove those blinders.
Once the blinders are off, you’ll see that when you conceptually break humanity into inaccurately described groups and assign roles to those groups based on these inaccurate models, you are driven towards avoidable mistakes, such as estranging those who would be best made into allies. Tell all the people Southerners call “poor white trash” that they will get the same tax-funded educational and economic opportunities as the poverty-stricken descendants of slaves, and the majority will be right on board with you, and they will send their children to the same beautiful new schools that their dark-skinned neighbor’s kids attend to get those tax-funded lunches. It’ll be halfway to MLK’s famous dream. But let the same poverty-stricken white southerners hear you say they are privileged and you just recruited a new chapter of the Ku Klux Klan and doubled attendance at the Christian Identity church. Is that a reasonable price to pay in order to preserve a fashionable system of thought and a trendy rhetoric? We need to categorize people by whether their rights are being denied or not, rather than spinning all our conversations around who does or doesn’t physically resemble a group with a higher statistical chance of receiving justice. I have dozens of Southern relatives who would happily trade a lifetime of their “privileges” for one year of the amount of structural oppression that Natasha Obama suffers. Should I tell them to suck it up, and grow a helmet? If I tell them not being beaten up by cops is reward enough to compensate for the lack of the educational opportunities wealthy Northerners of all races enjoy, will that work as a way to move forward, or will I just lose all my credibility with them?
Language matters. How the argument is framed in your mind matters. My southern Baptist relatives (including people in their 70s, 80s, and even 90s, @codinghorror) were nearly all convinced to support marriage equality by the “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign because it let them be on the side of the good guys despite their heterosexuality and religion. That campaign accepted them and their shortcomings, it did not drive them away. We need to let white men stand with the good guys despite their structural advantages or everyone else will lose. You can’t convince southern whites in the numbers we need by using the language of privilege. It’s too divisive and alienating, and quite frankly it’s an inferior way of seeing the world.
So I gather the “privilege paradigm” for you is the belief that in current U.S. society, certain groups have privilege? And you reject that “paradigm”? If so, Oh the Irony that you would say I’m the one wearing blinders!
But white men in current U.S. society DO enjoy privileges that women and POC don’t.
Brust is saying that focusing on race and class oppression and privilege keeps “us” from focusing on class.
I’m saying that he’s the one wearing blinders to the significance of the first two, and that many, many activists in all three areas are able to work simultaneously in all three of them. I see no reason to dump the first two for the last one, except when introducing people who are unfamiliar with those concepts to them.
Oh sure it does. No one is saying an activist should walk right up to your poor white male Southern relatives and tell them about white male privilege; yes, that word “privilege” can be initially inflammatory, and that in some ways, men have it better than women and whites have it better that POC.
Believe me, I do know that there are better ways of getting the unitiated to see that while classism is a problem for them, black people and/or women have it even worse, thanks to the extra burdens of racism and sexism (which typically make their problems in terms of classism worse too – most people can be gradually encouraged to think intersectionally).
If white men don’t understand or refuse to see that being categorized as white and male means certain things for them, and tends to cause them to think, feel and act in certain predictable ways (such as, you know, denying the differing and often worse experiences of others?), they often do more harm then good as aspiring allies.
Okay, so now you admit that categorical structural advantages exist? But keeping that in mind is an “inferior way of seeing the world”?
You know, social class is just one category. It may be the overarching one, but denying the relevance of others while focusing on that one is the real form of wearing “blinders.”
I do agree, though, that a lot of people don’t handle being told that they have privilege well. That doesn’t mean they don’t have it, and it also doesn’t mean that they can never be brought to an understanding that they do have it, and that being categorized in dominant categories has a lot to do with who they are and what they do.
I thought this was already answered pretty well. In a racist, sexist, or classist society, getting all the rights everyone should have is treated as a privilege only some enjoy. That’s a problem, and it’s a problem that’s easier to acknowledge if you can discuss that present treatment as well as what should be happening.
So, from what I can tell you’re arguing that poor white southerners have a level of influence we need, and if we don’t change our language for their sake they’ll go out and make life hell for other racial groups without such influence.
That…doesn’t really make it sound like their racial privilege is really a stereotype at all, just that you think they’re so dangerously prone to racism that we should be afraid to bring it up.
And whether that is true or not is kind of immaterial considering the way race is constructed in the west - that white Europeans (especially Anglo-Saxons, but others, too) are the norm, and everyone else is evolving to that.
Your contention that Brust understands and disagrees doesn’t mesh well with what Brust writes. Here he is from the linked piece:
It seems as if there is some sort of magical transformation happening here: “Almost everyone who has actual power is white and male, therefore, if you are white and male, you have a share of that power.” Is that actually the thinking?
No, that is not the actual thinking, it’s an absurd caricature. That he would ask if that was the actual thinking tells me he doesn’t understand at all. If that is what he thinks is the basic idea behind the idea of “male privilege” or “white privilege” then he definitely, 100% does not understand it at all.
In essence, you are telling me that I should work to make those who are more oppressed than me as oppressed as I am.
Again, totally absurd. The point of recognizing our privilege is so that we can better understand each other and get along, and so that we can take advantage of our diversity (which is a source of strength, not of weakness).
And then there’s a purely tactical point: If you actually manage to convince someone that he benefits from racism, is that a very strong argument that he ought to devote himself to fighting it? It seems to me that part of the fight against racism involves pointing out the ways in which it hurts everyone.
Nonsense - and this is the point where he put me off the most. Unless your target audience is Machiavellian psychopaths, people don’t want to benefit from racism. They want to succeed without it having been unfair. Poll 10,000 people with the question, “Would you agree with racist policies if they benefited people of your race?” how many do you think will say yes. He is treating the following two things as equivalent:
people will genuinely and knowingly support a system that is unfair
people will use rationalizations to say that a system that benefits them is a fair system
And since it is the latter rather than the former that is true, pointing out to people how unfair the system is is an effective way to get them on board. If they get past their rationalizations and see that it is unfair they will stop supporting it. Which is precisely what pointing out privilege is intended to do. Yes it puts a lot of people off, but no successful social movement hasn’t started by putting a lot of people off. Suggesting that putting people off means it won’t or can’t work is… I don’t know… what sense does that make?
Again, this isn’t just a quibble, it shows a complete lack of understanding on his part. The “privilege paradigm” only makes sense if we believe that people are fair minded. It only makes sense if we believe that people have compassion for one another. When FOX News lies to people’s faces about what is going on in the world, they are acting on a paradigm where people are cattle who need to be herded around by an elite few. When a feminist points out privilege to someone who disagrees, they are acting on a paradigm where that person is capable of hearing what they are saying, is capable of examining their own life, and is capable of changing their behaviour. The point is that if someone only realized that he was, in fact, talking down to other people then he’d want to stop doing so. The #1 message that the privilege paradigm delivers to white men is that they should listen to people with different experiences than them.
Brust is saying “Race issues affect you, and sex issues affect you, but class issues affect me, so let’s all work on class issues.” If that is not what he means to be saying then he is still saying it anyway. You can’t come in here and talk about how the “privilege paradigm” is talking about things the wrong way without addressing how the language Brust is using comes across to the people he is addressing himself to. That is the point of telling white men to listen to themselves when they talk, because they say stuff like that all the time. Asking everyone else to sort out which self-important white men are making cogent arguments and which are merely being self-important comes across a lot like the endless hand-wringing about respecting the right to presumed innocence of those cops that kill black kids.
When Brust talks about the working class banding together, I just think “Under whose leadership? Yours, I presume?” I don’t believe that we will solve the world’s problems by having a billion footsoldiers fall in line with an idea, no matter how great that idea is.
Look, I hate the word “privilege” and I think it is ill chosen because I think how “checking your privilege” works isn’t so much by identifying the advantages you were born with as but instead by identifying the barriers you have erected that stop you from seeing things from another person’s point of view (which are, in many important cases, related to the advantages you were born with but are not necessarily the same thing). But in another way, I like it because it makes people uncomfortable and because it gets people’s hackles up. Things will change because of generational churn, not because people argue philosophy-class-style. Aggression towards old ways of thinking and offensiveness to people who disagree may be features rather than bugs anyway.
This is why I think “thankfulness” (gratitude?) is a better word. We should be thankful for everything we have, everything we are, for even being alive as a dust mote in an unimaginably large universe. And we should appreciate all the things we have to be thankful for every day rather than taking it all for granted. The list is very, very long and can be longer for some and shorter for others. We forget, we all forget, just how miraculous all of this shit is.
If someone gets pissed off for being reminded to be thankful for everything they were born with, or born into, or that they were born at all… that person is probably beyond anyone’s reach.
West of what? Europeans are normal in Europe - even if their laws seem to all reflect eastern religions instead of their indigenous ones. As for the Americas, the status quo has been “red” for a good ten thousand years or more. When I think of the US, I don’t think of Europeans, but rather some Euro colonials who were subsumed into the existing culture.
Yeah… he wants a way in which racism hurts everyone? Apparently, judging by this stance (that even if you believe you benefit from racism you won’t work to fight it), it hurts everybody by turning white people into douchebags.
I don’t want to be a douchebag, and I’m pretty sure the people around me don’t want me to be one, so, there, hurts everyone.
(The argument is very meta as it works not just for racism in general, but also for the particular attitude of “what we should really be working on is the stuff that hurts everybody.”)
But this widespread discrimination is not necessarily a sign of widespread conscious prejudice.
[ … ]
Even if, in our slow thinking, we work to avoid discrimination, it can easily creep into our fast thinking. Our snap judgments rely on all the associations we have — from fictional television shows to news reports. They use stereotypes, both the accurate and the inaccurate, both those we would want to use and ones we find repulsive.
