Privilege

[Qingdai]

Well that clears up a weird question I had.

[lisarea]

This is a really really great post, and the author is even patiently answering the angries in the comments. (It's similar to John Cheese's poverty stories on Cracked, but I like her better so far.)

Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, poverty thoughts

[Crumb]

[Demimonde]

I dug out a cd I hadn't listened to in forever over the weekend, Robert Earl Keen's Gravitational Forces. I forgot how much I love this song about privilege.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PseECvY5Km8

For those who don't know his music, Mariano and Wild Wind are also worth googling.

[lisarea]

So this is just another kind of run of the mill, laughably mistaken refutation of the concept of privilege, right?

Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege | The Princeton Tory

But for some reason, the right wing is treating it like it's significant.

Why is the New York Times even weighing in on the ill-formed emotional opinions of a teenaged boy who couldn't even be bothered to Google what he was talking about?

Way to bolster this kid's already inflated self esteem.

[BrotherMan]

Well, the Times is the white paper of record, you know.

[ZEZOZE]

i had to look up cisgender. wtf? lol.

anyhow, the best part of being privileged is being privy to the power that allows me to bestow the title of "privileged" upon myself and permits me the privileges that go along with being privileged, even if it makes me feel kinda bad, which is a kind of privilege in and of itself.

fuck that, i'm a king!

[Watser?]

That Princeton guy is also a Zionist who has said some appaling things about Palestinians (which I can't find anymore, grrrrrr), so he would like to be privileged in two countries...

I did find this: Conservative Money Front Is Behind Princeton's "White Privilege" Guy

ETA: oh here it is: https://twitter.com/RaniaKhalek/stat...770432/photo/1 Apparently he thinks Palestinians are 'living at Israel's mercy.

[Janet]

Here is a nice response to the Princeton article.

And this is a lesson in what happens when I don't have time to catch up with FF. I have to find out about White privilege articles from Facebook four days after Pea has posted them.

[lisarea]

That's an excellent point. It's really not him so much. He's just a sheltered teenager who thinks maybe a little too highly of himself.

Once, a long time ago, I was in a restaurant at a table near a family that was sort of doing that public-private conversation sort of thing, where they're talking really loudly and looking at the people at the other tables, like they're just kind of holding court, you know.

And the topic under discussion was a teenaged boy, probably 17ish or so I'd guess. And he had 'invented' (as in "thought of one day") a really groundbreaking idea that you should set the maximum speed a car to the maximum legal speed limit to solve speeding. That was it. No prototype or idea of how to go about it, and more importantly, no research or, obviously, even thinking it through. And his parents are sort of looking around at everyone for some kind of validation that their boy was a genius, and he's looking like he believes it, because hey, everyone is playing it up and all. Maybe he is! Or, more accurately, maybe everyone else in the world is really so stupid that nobody ever thought of that.

So, instead of, say, looking it up and learning that speed governors have been a thing practically since cars have been a thing, or even thinking through some of the possible problems with his idea, or doing any kind of research or developing any kind of critical thinking or even basic learning skills, this teenaged boy was getting the message that his dumbassed, off the cuff, unthought through idea was just pure genius.

Now, I don't know if his parents were so incurious and self-centered that they really believed it was some brilliant, unique idea, or if they were just encouraging their child, or what. But it's not completely unpredictable that a kid who gets unquestioning support like that for every little brain fart he has will grow up never learning to listen to anyone else and to just barge in with an uninformed opinion on things he doesn't understand. He's not used to shutting up and listening to other people long enough to actually absorb unfamiliar information. He's pretty sure that he's just intuitively right.

Like this kid. This kid heard a thing that hurt his feelings and went straight into defensive mode. He never even bothered to figure out what it means. And think about how disturbing it is that he was SO HURT by someone saying "Check your privilege" (in god only knows what context, because he never says, and I'll bet he doesn't even remember) that he sat down and wrote an angry but totally irrelevant little diatribe about what he assumes it means, based on what I can only assume is just his kneejerk impression. He got really angry the first time someone hurt his fee-fees and told him his opinion wasn't insightful, and that it was time for him to listen instead.

But this kid's in an Ivy League school now, and is very likely to be confronted with plenty of things that are likely to cause similar emotional reactions. Ideally, he'll learn how to incorporate unfamiliar ideas and perspectives a little better. He is very, very young and inexperienced, and he just needs a little of that cockiness knocked out of him so he can learn to actually seek out information he's unfamiliar with, instead of, well, this.

But the rest of the media? Seriously? They know what they're doing. They know he's completely misunderstood the concept, and they're just putting him out there because they know it gets page hits.

But they just reaffirmed for that kid that his uninformed, emotional reaction to a term he cannot even accurately define is important enough to merit national news coverage. What the fuck?

[Watser?]

Mondoweiss (founded by Philip Weiss, a self-proclaimed anti-zionist Jew, it's a blog about Israel/Palestine, BDS and occasionally Jewish stuff)
is using this as an occasion to point out that Jews in the US generally belong to the priviliged classes by now.

But Fortgang says his grandfather became an entrepreneur in the U.S. That’s code for, he made a lot of money. The family flourished, he says. He grew up in New Rochelle.

In other words, his ancestors were persecuted, but maybe Fortgang really is privileged?

Using Schwerner and Goodman and the Nazis to deny the Jewish moment (privilege)

[Janet]

It kind of amazes me how easy it is for even socially aware college kids to forget their own privilege. The niece I've mentioned before just graduated college last week. A week earlier we were talking, well mostly she was pontificating, about medical marijuana and legalization. She said that she doesn't even really want it legalized because she's got a good set up where she knows her grower and if the government piled the kind of sin taxes on it like they do cigarettes she probably couldn't afford to smoke anymore.

Which is when I cut in to say, "Yes, but you're a White girl. You are not one of the people who are being incarcerated for this." I'm pleased that she did listen, but for a girl who has ranted to me about the New Jim Crow to just casually forget that aspect took me back a bit.

[erimir]

How do you explain to straight white males what it's like to not have people of the same gender, race and sexual orientation portrayed in practically all media?

For example, in a discussion about Nintendo not including same-sex relationships in a new life simulator game:

maybe you don't understand what it's like to rarely see video game characters that represent you.

Originally Posted by dudebro

No I don't because I have NEVER felt a video game character represents me, ever. I am playing as those characters but they are fantasy characters. They do things I could never do and are completely different people so please do explain how in the hell they represent me?
Moreover, if I wanted them to represent me, their sexuality would be the last thing on my mind. Either way, I am not bothered that they do not represent me
[...]
Again, in what ways do you very fully play as you're self, you may get a character who is gay but he rips off monsters heads with his bare hands, which is something you can't do and doesn't represent you. Maybe it is just me, but character representation is not there for me.

Is it possible to get through to such people?

I feel that if you ask them to imagine a world in which 99% of characters are black, female, gay, etc. they just will say "It still wouldn't matter to me". Maybe because they honestly think they don't care. They don't get it because they've never been like "Hey that character is male/white/straight... like me!" because of course they are. It's so common that it's not noteworthy.

Hell, they don't even get why in a game where you play as an avatar of yourself why you would be bothered by not being able to have gay relationships.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by erimir

Is it possible to get through to such people?

I usually figure no. He's in defensive mode, so anything you say to the contrary is going to just inspire some new argument.

Besides, it's not like it's a hard thing to find information on. If he hasn't sought out other people's perspectives before he started arguing, he's not going to listen to them now. I'm pretty annoyed when I take the time to explain something to someone who can't listen, so I usually don't.

However, if you want to try, maybe for the benefit of someone else who might be listening, you could take the approach that it's pretty well established that straight white men consider themselves the default in our culture, so media* representations of non straight white men are usually identified as outliers and others. Cheesy novels about women are called chick lit, so why aren't cheesy novels about men called prose for bros? Because we are all so used to straight white male protagonists that any deviance from that becomes definitional. It becomes a black story or a gay story or a lady story instead of just a story.

I mean, if he doesn't acknowledge that phenomenon, yeah, there's no point trying to reason with him. He wants to stay stupid. His hypotheticals about what he would do and how he would perceive things are not just untestable, but also pretty much pointless. His ability to relate to something isn't a measure of that thing's legitimacy.

I once came down pretty hard on the crossbar of my bike, and it hurt but I didn't cry about it for a hundred years like dudes always do. I just said Ow and then I got back to it.

* I don't play vidyas, so I can't speak to that. I only do those little 'casual' games, and I don't even think any with real personas where I play as a character or anything. The closest I could think of was an Android flower fucking game, where you 'pollinate' flowers by diddling them to orgasm, and those flowers are obviously female. I honestly think I feel about as weird about those flowers being ladies as I do about the fact that I'm playing a flower fucking game in the first place.

[Janet]

Heck, I had a hard enough time getting through to my gender studies graduate niece and her friends about how much Divine meant to people who had no internet and no weirdos on TV and no real knowledge that they weren't the only weirdo in the world until this amazing giant drag queen showed up on their screens. And then when she showed up in mainstream movies that showed in the regular theaters, not the midnight showing at the art film house, it was such a validation that it completely blew you away. Yeah, I tried to explain that after we finished watching the documentary on Divine, but I don't think they really got it.

[Angakuk]

Originally Posted by Janet

It kind of amazes me how easy it is for even socially aware college kids to forget their own privilege. The niece I've mentioned before just graduated college last week. A week earlier we were talking, well mostly she was pontificating, about medical marijuana and legalization. She said that she doesn't even really want it legalized because she's got a good set up where she knows her grower and if the government piled the kind of sin taxes on it like they do cigarettes she probably couldn't afford to smoke anymore.

Which is when I cut in to say, "Yes, but you're a White girl. You are not one of the people who are being incarcerated for this." I'm pleased that she did listen, but for a girl who has ranted to me about the New Jim Crow to just casually forget that aspect took me back a bit.

Was she stoned at the time?

[Adam]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Cheesy novels about women are called chick lit, so why aren't cheesy novels about men called prose for bros? Because we are all so used to straight white male protagonists that any deviance from that becomes definitional. It becomes a black story or a gay story or a lady story instead of just a story.

I think there's a genre of cheesy novel that's roughly equivalent to chick lit. Or, at least, there used to be. Nobody calls it anything cute like "chick lit", but I think it's understood to be more or less dudes only. Hack prose, very little character development, wish fulfillment plots featuring the successful application of violence to problems and the gleeful fucking of any female character who happened to appear. The specific example I have in mind is the Executioner series. Think Ian Fleming without the writing chops. I had a couple friends who were really into that sort of novel in high school. Personally, I found them boring although, sadly, not because of their problematic content or lack of literary merit, but due to their deficiency of swords and dragons.

I get what you're saying, I think. I'm just being super nitpicky and saying that I think the problem isn't that there's a lack of a mens' book genre ghetto to match the womens' book genre ghetto, but that any book by or about a woman is sort of presumed to belong in the ghetto unless proven otherwise.

Also, tangentially, I think cheesy mens' books don't get as much attention because there's a stereotype that reading for enjoyment is something that women, not men, do. Dudes who read a lot are (or used to be, anyway) pigeonholed as nerdy bookworms. So, there's less money in promoting dude lit, while the idea of chick lit seems to be something that publishers ran with to drive sales of books to women.

[Megatron]

I've had white male privilege my whole life, because welp, that's the genetic accident I was born with. It just sorta happens when you have two white parents and you end up male.

Now here's the thing. I realize there is a huge, HUGE privilege for white males in this country and probably a lot of others. I'm not necessarily comfortable with that, but it has certainly been a benefit for me in several situations.

So, I am not sure what to say in a lot of situations, except nothing. Maybe that's the right answer? If asked I will answer with my own experience, but otherwise I just shut up these days. I am also not afraid to include how there are situations in my life where my privilege gave me an advantage (when asked), but I don't rub that in, I just acknowledge it. Because I feel that should be acknowledged, otherwise privileged people won't truly understand privilege.

Still, after all that, I still probably don't understand the reach and depth of it, and never will claim to. It's not like I can stop being a white male.

Is it bad that I just wish this would go away and everyone would be the same, for real, instead of just in the laws (lol, yeah like anyone gives a fuck about that, otherwise blacks and whites and mexicans and women would make the same wage for the same jobs, look how far we are from that) and one day we just don't think about any of that shit anymore? I really wish we were there, and I hate the fact that I was born in a time where we're NOT there yet.

I mean, look at the fucking media circus that erupted around Michael Sam being the first openly gay NFL player. You know what I want to see? The day where an openly gay player is drafted in the NFL and no one even gives a shit aside from how good he is at football. We went through this when Jackie Robinson went into the Majors. Nowadays no one gives a fuck if you're black, just that you can play ball. If only that spread around everywhere. If only that was the same with gays and trans and whoever the fuck else, and we didn't have to make a big goddamn deal out of it. That's when we've really put that silly shit behind us.

Can we just get there already? It's fucking 2014, people.

Growing up I thought I'd one day see a world where gender, color and sexuality don't matter anymore, and I'm sorely fucking disappointed that 35 years later this is still a big deal. I'm just so disappointed in this stupid ass planet. I mean, seriously.

[ZEZOZE]

you will consider that up until Vietnam it was mostly white males who were being killed in American wars. we were so privileged that we achieved enlightenment and eventually invited others to be as privileged as we were. now anybody can die fighting in a war.

the thing about white male privilege is that constantly pointing it out only puts you someplace else.

dude.

[Hermit]

Stacy Washington, an African American, wrote An Open Letter to White Privilege 2014 Attendees. Read it, and weep. My reaction (copypasted from another forum) is this:

Four generations of successful African Americans. Those are heart warming data points, and I'm sure that, as Stacey mentions, there are many more. Looking at the broad picture, though, one could only conclude either that on average African Americans don't strive as hard for success as white people do, or the tenor of the White Privilege Conference reflects reality: While the formal barriers of segregation have been just about completely dismantled in the USA by now, it does not follow that blacks do not have to deal with barriers that whites are not affected by. The difference between such indicators as average incomes or incarceration rates, for example, make it pretty much unavoidable to draw one of the above conclusions from undeniable, in your face facts. Denialism borne of anecdotal feelgood stories don't cut the mustard. Sorry, Stacey. Please be smug in the privacy of your cosy home. Your open letter is an insult to African Americans, Latinos and all other social strata that are demonstrably worse off because they are still treated differently on account of the colour of their skin.

[Watser?]

Eh, what kind of a site is that? 'Progressives Today'? Reading the comments everyone there seems to be lost. Conservatives Last Year would be a better name...

[erimir]

It's a site about "exposing" modern progressives, so yeah.

[Ymir's blood]

[chunksmediocrites]

Originally Posted by ZEZOZE

you will consider that up until Vietnam it was mostly white males who were being killed in American wars.

...If you don't count all the civilian casualties and the combatants on the other side of the conflict, sure. US troops fought numerous wars against native tribes inside the US, then also fought and killed Malay, Chinese, Turks, Spaniards, Mexicans; Fiji, Samoan, and Hawaiian islanders; Koreans, Filipinos, Haitians, Dominicans, and Puerto Rican soldiers and non-combatants- all before the Vietnam war- where US casualties were 50,000 and Vietnamese and Cambodian casualties were about 3 million.

So yeah, if you ignore everything else...

[ShottleBop]

Originally Posted by Megatron

. . . Nowadays no one gives a fuck if you're black, just that you can play ball. . . .

. . . and provided you don't show up in someone's Instagram feed.