I feel like on these boards whenever “<insert minority group> gets treated badly” comes up there is always the counter “We should treat everyone better.” As if marginalization weren’t a thing. As if we could all just agree tomorrow that white people and black people were equal and that it’s just a coincidence that the white people will still live in the wealthier areas with better public services and the black people will still live in the poorer areas with crumbling infrastructure. That’s just an accident of history, what can we do about it now?
I’ve lived most of my life as an extremely privileged individual on a lot of possible privilege dimensions. And when I first started hearing about the concept of privilege it irked me because I’ve also lived my life from a very non-privileged position on other dimension. But when I felt the sting of having white privilege pointed out, I thought, “Jesus, is this a tiny peek into the way that black people are made to feel every fucking day?” and I adjusted my attitude.
I was trying to explain why the ability to commit sexual violence against women in GTA games (a well known feature of the games) was a sexist element of the game, in:
And it was just a wall. The fact that you can kill anyone and the in-game sex workers are just treated like other people is apparently an absolute logical counter to that (despite the fact that you can kill anyone in real fucking life and we have sexual violence in real life). At one point someone expressed how depressing it was to see people “warping facts” while arguing that it’s not possible for players to be encouraged to do easter eggs in games because easter eggs are hidden by definition. Like there aren’t multiple wikis telling me where all of them are, or there aren’t youtube videos with millions of hits showing them off. Like real live children aren’t encouraged to find literal easter eggs on actual easter. THEY’RE HIDDEN.
Every single time people try to go back to their logic. If judging someone based on their skin colour is bad, how could judging me based on my white skin be good? People like logic because in logic you lock in your premises at the beginning and you never have to question them. Do you know how often in logic class someone says, “Well, if that’s the conclusion then I guess one of the premises must be mistaken.” Unless the conclusion is a literal contradiction, it never happens. I don’t even want to talk anymore.
