Please, just stop

Sometimes you apologize. That’s great, but it’d be even better if you could stop doing it altogether. I don’t want an apology, I want you to stop doing it.

More often, you make excuses. “Oh, I call everyone ‘man’. I use it gender-neutrally.” But even ignoring the sexism that entails, it’s disingenuous; you don’t call everyone ‘man’. When you talk to other women, (that is, women who are not me) you just say “What’s up?”, never “What’s up, man?”

Yes, I pay attention to that sort of thing. It’s relevant to the way I have to navigate social interactions.

So, please, stop lying to yourself. Stop clinging to your privilege and couching it as an unavoidable personality quirk. Stop insinuating that I’m not really a woman. Because that’s what you’re doing, every single time you say “Thanks, man!” or use the wrong pronoun. It’s painful, it’s annoying, and frankly, I’m tired of it.

Look. I know. It’s awkward. You’re still “getting used to it”. Sure. Except it’s been almost three months now, and you’ve been seeing me and interacting with me five days a week during that time. At some point “getting used to it” becomes “obstinately refusing to get used to it”.

Like I said, I’m tired of it. I’d call you out on it, but, well, it’s not like I have security against being fired if someone complains to HR. So, could you just stop? Is it really that fucking important to you that you not have to make a tiny alteration to your worldview?

Because I can’t handle this shit any more.

Stop bitching. Start a revolution.: A bitter rant and last hurrah →

iamwhoiamandidontgiveadamn:

I am an introvert. I love to watch the interactions between people and I stay out of them as much as possible because I dont fully understand how I’m supposed to act. So I watch, listen, and I think. And honestly….

I’ve bloody fucking had it with the “radical” internet “community”.

There are two…

No flames from this quarter; you make some good points in here. The central arguments you seem to be getting at are “Oppression Olympics are bad” and “being a radical doesn’t give a pass on pulling oppressive shit”. Which are fine, fine themes, and really should be explored as part of the meta-narrative of the Social Justice community.

(by meta-narrative, a term I kinda just invented for the purpose, I just mean “talking about how we, as a community, approach / deal with / talk about things”)

Your concern, of course, is that the community is unaware of how all of this (Oppression Olympics, etc) affects it. This is, sadly, true far too often. However, I know some people have tackled these topics specifically (Kinsey, for one), so there is hope. We aren’t all completely in the dark about how petty and counter-productive a lot of this shit is.

I did want to elaborate on a few things from your post:

Some would argue that rich, white, cis gendered, straight, able bodied, straight men of sound mind have ALL the advantages, but that would presume that that person has suffered NO disadvantage or trauma EVER in their life.

It is important to remember here that disadvantage and trauma are not equivalent to oppression, they are only part of it. Oppression, by definition, requires that the disadvantages and traumas are caused by the systems of power put in place to elevate some people while lowering others. The rich, white, cis, straight, abled man very well may face effectively zero oppression.

Of course, he is a vanishingly small minority of the population. And usually, he is, in fact, the eponymous Man.

On the flip side, I suspect that the number of people who possess zero privileges is also vanishingly small, but I do not know for sure, in part because I am limited by my US-centric world view.

Some people argued that because it causes erasure of some groups, NO ONE should feel empowered by the phrase.

I missed the brunt of that discussion, but it seems to me that empowering yourself while dis-empowering or harming someone else is counter-productive. You’re dismantling one part of the Kyriarchy while holding another part up. A phrase that doesn’t dis-empower anyone would be more effective and less harmful.

This is actually strongly related to a post I recently made about reclaiming slurs. It’s not exactly the same scenario, but the same underlying problem exists - and it is murky ground, and I don’t have a good answer there.

But those disadvantages dont matter because I have X number of privileges

Anyone who claims that is playing the Oppression Olympics. “Oh, you’re not oppressed enough”. It’s bullshit, and it should be called out for the bullshit it is. Simple as that.

Now, there is some validity to the claim “you lack perspective on issue X because you are on the privileged side of the axis”. There are aspects of being trans that cisgender folks simply can’t comprehend. But that’s not the same as completely invalidating someone’s thoughts just because they aren’t “oppressed enough”.

What it does mean is that you should probably double-check what you’re saying before you comment on the experiences of a group you don’t belong to. Hell, even if you do belong to a group, think carefully before making generalized statements about the group.

Case in point: I was having a conversation with someone the other day about homelessness. He asserted that “all homeless people choose to be homeless”. He backed up this (blatantly false, as I can easily think of several counter-examples) claim by pointing out that he was homeless by choice at one point. He further asserted that “the dozens of other homeless people” he met during that time also all chose to be where they were.

There was so much fail I didn’t even know where to start. He generalized his experience as being universal, and supported it by claiming knowledge of the motivations of every other homeless person he met. I highly doubt he asked them individually why they were homeless, after all.

I saw things that I dont like. Things that have made me bitter about radical politics.

When you something you don’t like about a community or group, to my mind you have three choices:

1. Live with it.

2. Walk away from the group in question.

3. Work to change it.

1 and 2 are completely valid options; see the meme “You don’t have to be an activist”. 3, however, is the foundation of the entire Social Justice movement, and activism in general.

And truth, I see NO end in sight at all in this system. Especially if there are members who think that their shit never hits anyone else.

Keep telling them. Call them out every time you see it, and maybe they’ll eventually get the memo. That’s been my approach, anyway.

Once I get flamed I will more than likely back down from every statement I have made here, recant all of my opinions, concede that you are right and I am wrong

My recommendation: don’t let people bully you into backing down. If you get critical responses, read them, consider them, and only concede that you are wrong if the argument is actually sound and compelling.

Privilege 101: Why privilege is bad (Part 2)

This post is part of my Privilege 101 series. You may want to read it from the beginning. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.

When I wrote the original post on Why privilege is bad, I was not terribly satisfied with it. It felt like I had relied on descriptive, US-centric ethics without really stabbing at the heart of the issue. So, I am going to give it another go as a way of rebooting the Privilege 101 series. This time, I’m going to attack the problem with pure logic as much as possible.

We start with the premise that society, that is to say societies in general, are good. To support this I offer the following observations:

• Societies increase our chance of survival through the pooling of resources.
• Thanks to the division of labor possible when people band together, societies allow specialization, which leads to technological innovation.
• Societies can also improve our quality of life, both through the above-mentioned technological innovations and through the emotional ties that we create with family and friends.

If we accept that society is good, then it follows that it is in our best interests to ensure our society is as functional and healthy as possible. My next premise is that eliminating privilege/oppression dynamics are in the best interests of society. I offer the following Proof by Demonstration, by way of thought experiment.

So, let’s imagine one iteration of the social activist utopia: Unearned Privilege does not exist. No group is afforded opportunities and benefits at the expense of another group. My prediction is that this would lead to an overall increase in quality of life. More people would have the opportunity to become better educated, which would lead to more capable people in various specializations.

It would also lead to a decrease in crime, both by making crimes of desperation less necessary and by removing the underpinnings that allow violence against oppressed groups to be considered acceptable.

Society as a whole would benefit. And when we benefit society, we benefit ourselves - because what is society if not the sum of its parts?

It is actually pretty simple

A lot of people seem to be getting confused about what to call us transgender folk, or what a transgender individual means when they say, for example, “I am a trans woman”.

Apparently, this is confusing because it is not clear whether the trans individual is referring to their “biological sex / birth sex” or the “gender they think they are / want to be”.

Please note well the quotes. They are important here, because they are being used to denote derision of these phrases.

This confusion is rooted in cissexist thought. And it is very easily cured. Just apply these simple rules:

1. Gender is an identity, not a set of physiological traits. When I say “Mary identifies as genderqueer”, it is functionally equivalent to “Mary is genderqueer”. Now try it with a woman, to make sure you get the idea: “Anna identifies as a woman” is equivalent “Anna is a woman”. The important thing to take away from this is that gender is an identity for everyone, including cisgender folks. “Anna identifies as a woman” does not tell you whether Anna is transgender or cisgender. (she is transgender, in case you have not been paying attention to this blog)

2. When you see the phrase ‘trans man’ or ‘trans woman’, you can use basic grammar to deduce the meaning. ‘Trans’ is an adjective, and is short for either transgender or transsexual, depending on context. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are nouns, and they are the operative word in the description. This means a trans man is a man, and a trans woman is a woman. See rule 1 if you get confused about the implications.

So, if you have grokked these two rules, you should be good to go. In case you are still having trouble, I will rephrase (and expound):

The words man and woman apply to all men and all women, respectively, regardless of whether they are cisgender or transgender. You do not need extra language to include trans men and trans women when you say “men and women”. In fact, including extra language is cissexist, as it implies there is a need to point out the difference. You DO, however, need extra language to include non-binary folks.

“But Anna,” asks the Strangely Deferential Mob, “What if I want to make sure transgender people know they are explicitly welcomed and included? After all, trans people often face a lot of erasure.”

Well, mob, I’ve got good news: this problem can be solved! Just like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ both describe gender identities, ‘cisgender’ and ‘transgender’ describe whether your gender identity matches your birth-assigned gender. So, as an example, if you want to make this phrase trans-inclusive without causing harm:

We welcome everyone, whether you are male, female or transgender.

might be:

We welcome everyone, whether you are a man, women, or non-binary, and whether you are cisgender or transgender.

This really isn’t rocket surgery, folks.

Robot Heart: Sex, Religion, and Politics: Privilege 101 →

The way white men look at the world is natural and normal. The society we live in has no widespread racism or sexism or any other -ism problems, because this state of Not Unequal is also natural and normal.

Privileged people view those who question or challenge what is accepted by them as natural…

Privilege 101: Why privilege is bad

This post is part of my Privilege 101 series. You may want to read it from the beginning. To see all of the posts in the series, click here.

In my last post, I tried to explain clearly what privilege is, and to provide examples to demonstrate that it is a real thing that does exist. Now, let’s talk about why exactly it is bad.

This is something that anyone working to fight oppression assumes: Oppression, privilege, and kyriarchy are bad, and it is worth the time, energy, and risk to fight against them. Just like the assumption in the last post, this may seem obvious to a lot of people already working to fight oppression; however, the purpose of this series is to explain the reasoning behind the assumptions we make, for those who jump into the whole mess without realizing the foundation it is built on.

To talk about whether or not something is bad, we have to look at the problem of morality and ethics. Philosophically, this is a landmine, best articulated by the is-ought problem. I won’t go into detail here; for a comprehensive breakdown of the problem with ethics and morals, See this trilogy of articles. Basically, though, the problem is that there has never been an argument justifying any code of behavior other than “because we think it is a good idea”.

However, I’m going to skip that problem by sticking with descriptive ethics. The United States, at least, is founded on the principle of Equality. To wit, in one of the first public documents of our government, the Declaration of Independence, the founders of the nation said:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Every American schoolchild knows these words, but I often think that many Americans, child or adult, have failed to spend very much time thinking about them. There are several relevant points I want to draw out:

First, all men are created equal. The sexist language is a sign of the age of the document, and it is worth noting that these words were not intended, as written, to apply to all humanity; after these words, the US went on to perpetuate slavery (and later institutionalized racism), misogyny, and an abundance of other legalized, institutionalized injustices. However, as a nation we have embraced, slowly, the realization that all people are people, not just white men. And so we stand by the idea that all people are fundamentally equal.

Also, the unalienable rights listed are not meant to be exhaustive. …among these are… is a key phrase, and the government has (again, slowly over time) recognized certain additional fundamental human rights, such as the right to marry (Loving v Virginia, Zablocki v Redhail, Turner v Safley, and of course the ongoing Perry v Schwarzenegger. The right to an education is also considered a fundamental right, and was the purpose of the founding of the public school system in the US.

Finally, that second sentence, not quoted as often. The purpose of government is to ensure these fundamental rights. So, clearly, our society considers equality to be key; it is the reason for governments to exist, after all. It is, then, necessarily noble and just to fight for equality wherever inequality exists.

Privilege is inequality defined. Privilege necessitates oppression; you cannot gain an unearned advantage without imposing an undeserved disadvantage on someone else. So, if you accept the idea that equality is a worthy goal (again, an idea on which the US was founded, and an idea that pervades European political philosophy as well), then privilege is necessarily bad, and should be challenged.

If you don’t believe that equality is good, then there may be nothing I can do to convince you (see above on the unproveability of morals and ethics).

I'm fucking done apologizing: ::hangs head and surrenders:: →

So, I’ll be honest. I don’t know how to read this post. You seem to oscillate wildly between passive-aggressive tactics and admission that there is something wrong with the attitude you are evincing. I think a lot of this is actually addressed in the other post I just made to you, so I will respond to a few things that stood out.

An apology for how I was brought up?

If you think an apology is what people want, you’re missing the point. I do not apologize for being white, or middle-class. I recognize that these things have shaped me in ways that are negative and that harm other people, and I work to reshape myself so that I am no longer participating in the damaged parts of our culture.

If it means I have to change my name so the irony doesnt kill you, fine.

I’d much rather you own it. It’s a powerful, affirming username. Live up to it. Take it up as a banner, a reminder to always work toward becoming a more effective agent of activism and positive change. Because we need as many as we can get.

Here is what I do to try and be a better person, with regards to privilege:

When someone calls me out for something I say or do, I stifle my initial response - whatever that response is. I stop, and I think about what they are saying. I think about what I said/did. I analyze the situation and look at it from as many perspectives as I can think of, especially from the perspective of the person calling me out. Then, if it still feels like I’m being called out unfairly, I do some research - dig up some blogs from people who are oppressed along the axis in question. If I still feel like I’m being called out unfairly, I ask, politely, for further explanation about how my actions were harmful/offensive. I usually say it something like this: “I apologize for $offensive_action, but I’m still having trouble seeing how what I did was offensive. If you have time to explain further, please do. I’d really like to root out the privilege that’s blinding me here.”

At any rate, own your actions, apologize for them, resolve to do better, and move on. That’s the healthiest course of action.

If it means I have to apologize for how I was born, fine.

genderbitch already said this better than me: “I’m not attacking what you are, but what you are doing.”

You aren’t in control of which areas you have privilege in. It isn’t your fault that you are white. However, you are responsible for what you do from that privileged space. The difference is crucial.

But really, this reblogging me so you can flog me shit hurts. And if youre doing it to make some point about how if feels to be marginalized and hurt then consider your point proven.

Just a note: this is still laced with playing-the-victim, a common derailment tactic that people with unacknowledged privilege engage in. As a reminder, this is not an attack on you, but is just an attempt to point out how our damaged culture is still shaping your thoughts, even though you don’t realize it.

Im doing my best to relinquish my privilege in this situation and Im going to get my ass educated on being a better person.

This is a good start, but there’s a flaw in your thinking, and it is this: You can’t relinquish privilege. If you’re in a privileged group, you probably can’t change that. You can’t become asian. You can’t choose to be gay, or trans (despite what all the fundies say). You can voluntarily become poor, I suppose, but I don’t think anyone would ask you to, because amongst other things, it wouldn’t achieve anything here.

What you can do, though, is acknowledge your privilege. That’s the first step. Say it with me: “I am white, and this gives me advantages that people of color do not possess.” Repeat that in your head. Say it until you know it is true, deep down. Then, repeat for every other axis of kyriarchy on which you are privileged. This, by the way, is the reason I wrote this page.

Once you recognize, both intellectually and emotionally, that you have an unfair advantage reinforced by society, start to think about how you can minimize the impact that your privilege, personally, has on the people it oppresses. This includes avoiding broken language and striving to treat people as fundamentally equal at all times.

Oh, and here’s a big one: do not expect acknowledgement and praise for Working On Your Shit™. You have to make this a personal goal, done because you want to be a decent, caring human being. Never expect someone on the other end of the oppression axis to praise you for all the ‘hard work you have done for them’. That implicitly oppresses them more, because the mentality hiding underneath it is “look at everything I have done for you lesser people”. This is the trap in the word “ally”, which is, incidentally, what started this whole discourse.

But I want this shit to end. I started it and I will make the first move (the only move I can think of) to end it.

Tell me what needs to be done on my part.

Er, see above. It boils down to: Work On Your Shit™. I’m actually planning on writing a blog post on that very topic, although I’ve said much of the relevant parts here. In fact, I will probably crib a lot of this post when I write that one.

Also, I notice that you’ve already written a follow-up to the post I’m replying to. It would seem I don’t formulate my thoughts quite as quickly as you do.

Here's what white privilege sounds like... →

adailyriot:

[Note:
     This article appeared in the Baltimore Sun newspaper and was written by a Caucasian professor of journalism at the U of Texas. A followup piece can be found here. ]

Here’s what white privilege sounds like: I’m sitting in my University of Texas office, talking to a very bright and very conservative white student about affirmative action in college admissions, which he opposes and I support. The student says he wants a level playing field with no unearned advantages for anyone. I ask him whether he thinks that being white has advantages in the United States. Have either of us, I ask, ever benefited from being white in a world run mostly by white people? Yes, he concedes, there is something real and tangible we could call white privilege.

So, if we live in a world of white privilege – unearned white privilege - how does that affect your notion of a level playing field? I asked. He paused for a moment and said, “That really doesn’t matter.” That statement, I suggested to him, reveals the ultimate white privilege: The privilege to acknowledge that you have unearned privilege but to ignore what it means. That exchange led me to rethink the way I talk about race and racism with students. It drove home the importance of confronting the dirty secret that we white people carry around with us every day: in a world of white privilege, some of what we have is unearned. I think much of both the fear and anger that comes up around discussions of affirmative action has its roots in that secret. So these days, my goal is to talk open and honestly about white supremacy and white privilege.

White privilege, like any social phenomenon, is complex. In a white supremacist culture, all white people have privilege, whether or not they are overtly racist themselves. There are general patterns, but such privilege plays out differently depending on context and other aspects of one’s identity (in my case, being male gives me other kinds of privilege). Rather than try to tell others how white privilege has played out in their lives, I talk about how it has affected me.

I am as white as white gets in this country. I am of northern European heritage and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn’t live near a reservation, I didn’t even have exposure to the state’s only numerically significant nonwhite population, American Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I “fix” myself, one thing never changes - I walk through the world with white privilege.

What does that mean? Perhaps most importantly, when I seek admission to a university, apply for a job, or hunt for an apartment, I don’t look threatening. Almost all of the people evaluating me look like me they are white. They see in me a reflection of themselves - and in a racist world, that is an advantage. I smile. I am white. I am one of them. I am not dangerous. Even when I voice critical opinions, I am cut some slack. After all, I’m white.

My flaws also are more easily forgiven because I am white. Some complain that affirmative action has meant the university is saddled with mediocre minority professors. I have no doubt there are minority faculty who are mediocre, though I don’t know very many. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. once pointed out, if affirmative action policies were in place for the next hundred years, it’s possible that at the end of that time the university could have as many mediocre minority professors as it has mediocre white professors. That isn’t meant as an insult to anyone, but it’s a simple observation that white privilege has meant that scores of second-rate white professors have slid through the system because their flaws were overlooked out of solidarity based on race, as well as on gender, class and ideology.

Some people resist the assertions that the United States is still a bitterly racist society and that the racism has real effects on real people. But white folks have long cut other white folks a break. I know, because I am one of them. I am not a genius - as I like to say, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have been teaching full time for six years and I’ve published a reasonable amount of scholarship. Some of it is the unexceptional stuff one churns out to get tenure, and some of it, I would argue, is worth reading. I worked hard, and I like to think that I’m a fairly decent teacher. Every once in a while, I leave my office at the end of the day feeling like I really accomplished something. When I cash my pay check, I don’t feel guilty. But, all that said, I know I did not get where I am by merit alone. I benefited from among other things, white privilege. That doesn’t mean that I don’t deserve my job, or that if I weren’t white I would never have gotten the job. It means simply that all through my life, I have soaked up benefits for being white.

All my life I have been hired for jobs by white people. I was accepted for graduate school by white people. And I was hired for a teaching position by the predominantly white University of Texas, headed by a white president, in a college headed by a white dean and in a department with a white chairman that at the time had one nonwhite tenured professor. I have worked hard to get where I am, and I work hard to stay there. But to feel good about myself, and my work, I do not have to believe that “merit” as defined by white people in a white country, alone got me here. I can acknowledge that in addition to all that hard work, I got a significant boost from white privilege. At one time in my life, I would not have been able to say that, because I needed to believe that my success in life was due solely to my individual talent and effort. I saw myself as the heroic American, the rugged individualist. I was so deeply seduced by the culture’s mythology that I couldn’t see the fear that was binding me to those myths.

Like all white Americans, I was living with the fear that maybe I didn’t really deserve my success, that maybe luck and privilege had more to do with it than brains and hard work. I was afraid I wasn’t heroic or rugged, that I wasn’t special. I let go of some of that fear when I realized that, indeed, I wasn’t special, but that I was still me. What I do well, I still can take pride in, even when I know that the rules under which I work in are stacked to my benefit. Until we let go of the fiction that people have complete control over their fate - that we can will ourselves to be anything we choose - then we will live with that fear.

White privilege is not something I get to decide whether I want to keep. Every time I walk into a store at the same time as a black man and the security guard follows him and leaves me alone to shop, I am benefiting from white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out in our daily lives, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.

Emphasis added by me :)