Conversant

This post is a continuation of a conversation between myself andsebastian over in the comments ofcereta’s post about men and rape. I was saying that it seemed sort of inevitable that sebastian and I would end up disagreeing on certain things.  Like a Marxist discussing with a Freemarketer, we just frame things differently. And I was going to try to say a bit more about the perspective I am coming from, and what the implications of that are.

I probably first really became aware of the conceptual framework around privilege about two or three years ago. I think I’d had hints the argument was out there, but this time when I heard it, I was receptive, I got it.  And since then I have found it a very useful way to conceptualise issues around the power structures in society. In the context of this framework, I do not have male privilege, but I do have e.g. white privilege and straight privilege.

Things to know about privilege:

1)      If I have it, I have it, whether I want it, or acknowledge it, or not. It is something that comes with e.g. being white, or being male. So, for example, imagine June (a white racist) Freddy (a white antiracist ally) and Tony (a man of colour) all trying to get a taxi in New York. June and Freddy are more likely to get picked up. Freddy may hate that this is the situation, but he will still benefit from it.  June may be unaware that it is the case but will still benefit from it.

 

2)      The benefits of privilege are often quite practical. It may be that my privileged soul is shrivelling on the vine, but it is not right for me to expect people of colour to put up with their shitty end of the daily stick, on the basis that it will make them better and more spiritual people. 

 

3)      If I am privileged, that fact may often be very invisible to me and glaringly, embarrassingly visible to anyone who’s on the reverse of that particular coin. 

 

4)      Privilege operates at a group level (as in the group Men or Whites). Therefore there will be lots of individuals whose personal experience does not match the picture for the group. That doesn’t invalidate the model as a whole.

 

5)      If I (a woman) have white privilege and he (a person of colour) has male privilege, they don’t cancel each other out. They are different. Each of us will be privileged over the other more or less in different scenarios or even in different ways at the same time.

 

6)      Having privilege does not make me a bad person. It does mean the balance is weighted in my favour and I may need to put some work in to redress it, if I’m someone who’s in favour of fairness and equality. When I think of this work as ‘extra work’ I need to remember that the reason the balance is in my favour is because the unprivileged group has to do a bunch of work on this all, the time, every day, which I may well be largely unaware of.

 

7)      When I am told that I have privilege, my first reaction is likely to think of all the hardships I face in my daily life, or have faced in my personal history, and to feel hurt or angry that someone is labelling me as privileged. I therefore don’t stop to listen and think before jumping on all the really obvious flaws in their argument. Sadly I am not as original as I might like to think which is why people have written guides to avoiding the same false arguments which everyone else made before me.

And I have found that this perspective is really helpful. Before I found it, I would probably have said that everyone should try their best to be a decent human etc. and that would have been my plan for ending racism. But this framework kicks my arse and shows me why that isn’t enough. It reminds me how when I talk about treating people equally, I’m actually overlooking the burden which people of colour are already carrying, and so my ‘equally’ is actually intrinsically unequal.  It also reminds me that when I wait for someone to ask me to make a choice between homophobia and the better thing, I may be waiting many days because I am privileged to address the issue when it takes my interest and pretty much disregard it at other times, rather than having to confront it all the time, every day.

Before I found this framework I would always, always have avoided a confrontation, and if someone got angry with me, I would have pretty much thought they were an arse. By having a conversation with people who are all speaking with this perspective in mind, suddenly I can see why those people were so angry. I always knew in theory that anger can be healthy, but I could never see how that could ever work in practice – it seemed as though it was always destructive. Suddenly now I can see the way in which the expression of anger can be healthy and positive, and in particular, I am starting to understand when my own anger is legitimate to a particular argument, and when I’m defending my own hurt feelings.

The only downside so far? That if some people are speaking from within this framework and others aren’t? Pretty much a recipe for disagreement, although there will also be some people who are (like I was) ready and will get it right there and then.