as small as a world and as large as alone

3:15am July 7, 2014

amorpha-system:

madeofpatterns:

youneedacat:

annekewrites:

madeofpatterns:

You can’t tell who the most powerful person in the room is by consulting a privilege checklist.

You can’t tell who the most dangerous person in the room is by consulting a privilege checklist.

True this.  But also it doesn’t mean that there aren’t overall trends.

Oh, yes, definitely.

I think the danger here lies in applying overall trends to particular instances, without thinking out whether or not the trend applies to that instance.

I was just thinking about this as a problem earlier today, but I can’t remember the context.  Which is aggravating because it would’ve made a perfect illustration of this situation.

Unfortunately, I can’t even remember a scrap of information about it.  :-/

But I do know it’s extremely dangerous to assume that a particular situation will follow an overall trend, without really looking into the situation and checking it over and being careful about it.

And I’ve seen a lot of situations where a person manages to skillfully manipulate a situation by using people’s assumptions against them:  By wielding power, and being dangerous, but not seeming to have a lot of privilege, and swearing up and down that someone else is more dangerous and powerful simply because they have more privilege.  And I’ve seen that do a lot of damage, especially damage to vulnerable people without a lot of privilege, when done purposefully for manipulative reasons.  And I’ve seen people brag about pulling this sort of thing off.

Yes. And like, the people in those situations often really DO have all the privilege categories they’re described as having - that’s just not the most important thing in that particular situation.

Sometimes they can continue operating in this way for years, too, not only unchecked but with lots of supporters, because both they and their supporters insist privilege categories are ALWAYS the most important thing in any given situation and ALWAYS the final determinant of how much harm one human being can do to another human being.  

Or even if they don’t use privilege category terminology in specific, they can do a lot of harm to people by laying out the list of how marginalized and powerless they are in a bunch of ways, and this can lead to incredibly ugly situations where a bunch of people can *simultaneously* end up thinking there’s something wrong with them, or that they themselves are actually delusional or hallucinating in some way, because the person in question will not stop hurting them, after indoctrinating them with “I am not powerful enough to do that.”  And sometimes even specifically with “Whatever you feel as a result of what I do is your fault and a result of your own guilt, not anything I’m doing.”

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