11:26pm August 6, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: analyzing privilege misses the point sometimes

because I think the important thing is that people should be treated like people.

And there’s all kinds of common ways women get treated horribly.

And all kinds of ways trans people of various genders get treated horribly.

And things that are specific to trans women. And things that are…

Yeah the idea of privilege is useful sometimes. It’s important to know who generally has power over others.

But people take a tool, and turn it into The Way to analyze every situation. It gets turned into a mathematical equation.

Real life isn’t like that.

Even in situations where privilege comes into play, this’ll be true:

1. Each oppressed person is oppressed differently.

2. Each person within the same oppressions will find different ones affect them differently. Disability affects me more in most situations than gender. Another disabled nongendered bio female may be the exact opposite.

3. One person will find different forms of oppression affect them different amounts depending on the situation.

4. Nobody entirely lacks every form of privilege. Even if they fall under every major form of oppression.

5. There are more forms of oppression than will ever have words.

6. In each category of oppression, there are practically infinite grades and types of oppression.

Racism will be different for a black Anglo woman, a black Latina, a Tsalagi woman, a Hohe woman, a woman who is half Sri Lankan and half Iraqi, etc

I often feel weird about the brief “disabled”. I understand why it exists. Both for political reasons and to unify us. Having one body, I don’t experience all my disabilities as separate.

But when I think of my experience of disability oppression, I always feel weird describing it as one oppression.
I’m physically disabled, cognitively disabled, chronically ill, former mental patient, developmentally disabled, neurologically disabled (central and peripheral), chronic pain, sensory impaired, visibly and invisibly disabled, severely disabled by most standards. Hereditary, acquired, stable, fluctuating, and progressive. Housebound, bedbound.

I use (part time and full time, rarely to constantly) a power chair, Hoyer lift, aug comm, hospital bed, bedside commode, feeding tube, Interstim implant, bidet, prism lenses, medications, screen readers, apps, a Kindle, crutches, incontinence briefs. All as assistive technology, none are just luxuries. Go to the ER and hospital many times a year. Qualify for admission to nursing home or ICF/ME, live on my own. Get help in almost every area of life, from helping me initiate to doing it all for me. I have DD services for two day shifts, and a night service where someone can come if I hit a button. LNA comes in the day to do personal care.

And all that detail and more. Every single part of it. Factors into exactly how I experience disability oppression. Each general type of disabled person experiences ableism slightly differently. Sometimes very differently. The technology we use, the services we get, the time in our lives we became disabled, all of these things cause variation in how we experience disability oppression. So in my mind I always think of my experience of disability oppression as multiple related oppressions, not a single overarching oppression. I understand why it’s important to tie these things together, to avoid fragmenting into tinier and tinier pieces, etc. But my felt experience of disability oppression isn’t so unified. At least, I find myself listing off cognitive, physical, etc. when asked to list oppressions I experience.

7. Oppression is not the only thing that can cause groups of people to face prejudice and hatred. The fact these things are not oppression changes the way the hatred happens, but it does not make them trivial. (And FFS, saying this does not mean I’m trying to be sneaky and say oppression without saying it. And discussing this doesn’t mean I’m trying to discount the hate oppressed people face.)

8. Oppression is not always stable. A person can be more oppressed in one situation than another. A person can even be oppressed in one situation and privileged in another in the exact same area.

9. There are people who are right on the edges of oppression and privilege. People who are almost always on the oppressed side, except when they have privilege in that same area. There are people who are almost always privileged, except when they experience oppression in that area.

This can be both confusing and controversial. But it’s also real. Because categories are always ideas. Categories are not the real world. And that means that there will always be some people whose existence proves exactly WHY the categories aren’t real.

10. Oppression is different in different cultures.

Who counts as white is different in different cultures. What races exist and who belongs to them, even what (and whether) race IS, is different in different cultures. How racism is carried out is different in different cultures.

There are kinds of oppression that exist in some cultures but are unheard of in others.

Different cultures have different kinds of genders, different numbers if genders, and different rules about who belongs to which. And so of course sexism is going to look totally different by culture.

Different cultures have different ideas about who is disabled, and why, and what ableism functions like.

11. All oppression is not alike nor equal. In quality or quantity.

Sexism is not a different form of racism. In some ways, oppression is oppression is oppression. But in other ways, they’re very different.

Not all kinds of oppression are as bad as each other too. But many people make dangerous assumptions when they figure this out. Generally they take the worst kind of oppression they experience and say that that’s the worst, then take the area they are the most privileged in or the most clueless about and say that’s the most trivial form of oppression.

Often ableism ends up described as trivial or nonexistent. Mostly because people don’t understand it, and because many online discussions of ableism reduce it to not using certain words.

In reality, disabled people are “disappeared” from society into institutions where most people forget we exist and we often die young as a result, which everyone assumes is just what happens to disabled people. People murder us and people not only rush to the sympathy of our murderers, but claim it’s for our own food because our suffering is over. Our murderers usually get off without even bring convicted of murder. Serial killers get work in institutions because it’s the easiest place to get away with serial killing. People work to find ways to make it so we won’t even exist in the future, and people think this is for the good of humanity. We are scapegoated in hard economic times as drains on our societies, and killed both directly and indirectly for this. People who think of themselves as kind and loving believe we are actually better off dead. We are treated as expendable. Our inclusion in our own cultures is rarely seen as a human right. It is seen as inevitable for us to be forced to live, go to school, and work completely separated from everyone else. Our rates of abuse are sky high. People are thought of as saints merely for putting up with our continued existence near them. Caregivers are also considered saints, and when they abuse or even kill us it’s thought to be an inevitable result of how hard it is to be around us. Parents who have committed cold blooded, meticulously planned murders have received no sentence at all because, the judge said, living with someone like us for fifteen years is prison sentence enough. Some mainstream scientists and ethicists debate to this day whether we ought to count as persons or human beings. Some say animals should have more rights than we would. People think of us as empty shells that happen to be shaped like human brings. People see us as halfway dead already, so it surprises them little when we die of neglect, even when our disability doesn’t lower lifespan. What’s more, every single kind of oppression that exists, depends HEAVILY upon ableism to function at all, but instead of challenging the ableism, other groups simply uphold ableism while distancing their own group from disabled people. And that’s just the beginning. And people think of all of this as normal, even the way things should be.

(No, I don’t believe in prisons, but the inequality involved in the way sentences are handed out still says something horrible about oppression.)

So wherever ableism falls in terms of which oppression is worst, I can’t imagine it to be the most trivial of all oppressions. And anyone who thinks it doesn’t exist is simply ignorant.

So while any person can say “this oppression is worst for me”, and while some oppression probably truly is worse than others in some objective sense… I think people are too unaware of our own biases to make sweeping statements that this or that one is always the worst. Because usually the one we see as the worst is based on the experiences we are the most thoroughly aware of. We tend to trivialize the ones we are least familiar with. So I don’t think anyone is objective enough to know what’s the worst overall. Even though there probably is a worst.

12. It’s not oppression PLUS oppression, it’s oppression TIMES oppression.

13. You can’t put everyone on a chart showing exactly their location in terms of oppression and privilege. It’s too complicated.

Poor.

Poor, raised middle class.

Permanently poor. Raised with middle class money but not middle class culture or financial security. Went to school with rich kids. Parents worked for bosses, jobs more like upper-upper working class than true middle class until my dad promoted to engineer after I had already left home. Parents and previous generations raised poor and working class since forever. Parents now permanently poor.

That’s just ONE.

Notes: