I’d like to think that Dylan was more concerned with telling the story of Edgar Meevers and removing agency from his killer as a way to make the story not about people, but about power structures.
He’s saying that his killer didn’t want Edgar Meevers dead because of anything he did to “deserve it”, he’s saying his killer wanted to maintain his place in society, and needed to kill him to do it.
The killer was aware that this act of violence would ensure his white privilege continued to exist, not unlike the death of Michael Brown at the hands of power, ensures that white privilege is still around.
You are right, racist people have agency, they protect their place in society. Dylan is questioning whether that place is worth protecting.
But the concept remains the same, and its not an easy concept to accept, if it were, we might not be where we are right now, people complaining about the use of the word privilege and in doing so, avoid addressing the pressing concern of oppressed people.
My advice to anyone who wants to advance discussion of this issue would be jettison the word privilege.
Oh yes, the whole people were shitty to the Irish, therefore racism doesn’t exist… as someone who has Irish ancestry too (my family immigrated during the later/lesser famine), that’s just a load of BS. By the second half of the 19th century, the democratic party actively worked on behalf of the Irish community, in part through the political machines such as Tamany hall. The Irish were pretty white by the early 20th century in the US. The came here and demanded to be included, and given the deep racism of British colonialism they were leaving, you can’t blame them. But they succeeded. That doesn’t mean that no Irish person was never victim to anti-Irish/anti-Catholic sentiment, but that they did not face the same systemic racism that African Americans faced.
Someone posted this up thread, but it bears repeating:
That’s a fair point - it’s a hard line to walk, both acknowledging the structures that limit agency, and acknowledging agency. Either way, it’s an important song and a good one.
For crying out loud: acknowledging that an event happened in the past in now way implies anything at all about the continuation of similar events into the present and future. I am saying 1950 was in the past.
I am not saying there is no more systematic racism–because by my definition that would include things like the depiction of black people in the media, the behavior of the police, etc. etc.–which continue to be huge problems.
I can’t believe I am being called willfully ignorant by a person who seems to want me to abjure the past tense because if I use it I imply that that thing is no longer true. So, by your logic, if I said “I was alive in 1975,” I must, necessarily mean that I am presently dead. I don’t know if this is a matter of will, but please!
Correct – voting is necessary, but not sufficient, at the national level. But those bastards came from somewhere, which is why I had earlier suggested working at the grassroots level (and at a real grassroots, not that trompe l’oeil shit like the Tea Party movement).
No I did. It’s a very true thing, I’m not denying that your family worked their asses off. Mine did too. Good for us.
But at the same time your grandfather was fleeing the rebellion, thousands of African Americans were being lynched for the simple fact of pissing some white dude off, or by succeeding economically. At the same time your dad was scrimping and saving for a house, African Americans were being underpaid, and given no access to credit. At the same time you were being harassed by that one cop that one time, African Americans had to worry about a broken tail light meaning a trip to jail or the morgue.
We can talk all day about the struggles of all americans, but we absolutely need to come to terms with the racism and inequality. I don’t think you’re doing that. The whole world is not about you.
ETA: Also, you said this:
I had a driver in Sao Paulo named Carlos. Good guy. Once bought a rabbit off a street vendor for next to nothing and spent hundreds trying to keep it alive when it got sick. He had to work extra hours outside
of being a driver for an American family.
So, you lived in Sao Paulo, and had a driver while there, but your family couldn’t pay him enough to cover his expenses…
Because you are hung up in a word, and are using that that wave away the very real system racism that is connected to the past and still exists. You don’t care for the word, but you still think there is a problem? Why are you so bent out of shape over the use of privilege. I think you need to examine your own motivations here.
Not everyone in this discussion (nor in society at large) is as pig-headed as you’re being in your refusal to understand what the term means, and how that meaning is valuable, in this discussion.
I’m trying to understand what’s going on with the resistance to this, because there are people I respect, in this thread and elsewhere, who are staking out the opposing position pretty firmly.
Part of it, I think, is a profound insecurity in the US left, a worry that if you say anything critical about working class white men, they’re going to totally flip out and go hard to the right.
Also this isn’t a 1 and 0 situation. Just because some people haven’t experienced it (or are completely blind to it) doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
Well, it isn’t the Illuminati plot to control world history, but . . . .Originally my sense was that it was mainly academic sociologists and related folks who were attempting to change the vocabulary of the whole discussion around race so that they could control it, they could decide who was OK and who wasn’t, they could decide who would be ostracized from the company of the virtuous, who would be treated with contempt. The context of this was largely on campus for a while. Until maybe the late 1990s, when a lot of students who had come up through the ranks when this particular vocabulary was being pushed started pushing it in the culture more generally where it met with a more vigorous push-back, because the people pushing it didn’t really have the right sort of institutional power to succeed as easily as the academic people had (start using the vocabulary I give you, or you fail). But, my general notion is that it is an attempt to take the discussion around race and bring into within a certain kind of academic purview. To make it so that this is no longer a conversation that we have as more-or-equal members of a flawed republic, but a discussion that takes place more like a classroom discussion, where certain points of view can get sidelined by those in authority, certain points can be ignored or ridiculed because they push back against the agenda, where certain knowing people can put themselves up as the judges of other people lives, experiences and opinions, while they hold themselves to be part of some select group who have undergone the conversion that the unwashed have not . . . something like that. It is an attempt to put the discussion on a footing with which most people are unfamiliar and most likely to put the “outs” on the defensive.
I saw this approach–teaching about race with “white privilege” as a centerpiece-- brought into a major university, and that was very much the motive: the students felt qualified to talk about and argue about things like “racism.” They knew they were on uncertain ground and felt personally threatened when the discussion centered on “white privilege.” Some more clever kids saw through it immediately: just say what they want you to say and it won’t effect your life one bit. In fact, you could end up scoring yourself a pretty safe spot among all the racial tension at the university by just parroting the right things and talking earnestly about how you’d “owned” or “checked” your white privilege and of course attacking anyone who was uncompliant for any reason. But some of them, because they didn’t see that the change in terminology as inconsequential, or on point of principle, fought it. And here we are still fighting about it, only now the terminology really begins to get in the way of a discussion that needs to take place.
Yes, I think that’s part of it for some. Some seem to feel that (a la Fanon above), their lives are not unfairly advantaged in terms of race. Others just don’t seem to get the concept, and both what you cited and what I cited seem to be possible reasons for that. Among others. Common white feelings are complicated!
This comic is a great example of the concept of “privilege” being used well. There are experiential differences between the lives of people based on who they are, that are made invisible to them because they never get to experience life as anyone but themselves. Privilege is an important term and topic in race and gender discussions.
The reason some people get bothered by the term, though, is that it’s sometimes used as a slur. Like, when someone posts a picture of a group of upper middle class white frat guys wearing boat shoes, pastel shorts, and polos and says “Look at these privileged assholes.” It’s that use, as a catch-all insult, that really isn’t helping things.
People understand things through the prism of their own experience. This may be a fun argument to have with Rich suburban white men that think they have earned everything they have. I just don’t think its really an effective conversation for convincing people that racism is real and worthy of their attention.
