as small as a world and as large as alone

9:27pm July 9, 2014

missivesfromghosts:

princess-neville:

princess-neville:

People trying to act like everything has to work in a privilege/oppression framework

i feel like tumblr sj perpetuates the attitude that only privilege/oppression issues matter and anything else is just a silly an unimportant concern, which leads people to try to shove everything into a privilege/oppression framework, which often just doesn’t…work. i feel like instead of that, we should acknowledge that issues of oppression are important, and other issues that don’t involve oppression, or don’t Always involve oppression, can be  important too and are worthy of caring about without acting like there is one Privileged and one Unprivileged group in the equation. 

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Completely agreed.

I tried to warn people recently that it’s dangerous to frame every interaction in terms of the privilege/oppression dynamic involved.

Like not “You told me this.”  But rather “A nondisabled man told a disabled woman this.”  The second one automatically takes on the connotation that the oppression and privilege status of the people involved is not only important, but the most important feature of the interaction.

And sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s okay to phrase things like that.

But other times it’s not true, and phrasing things like that just misleads people as to what’s actually going on.

Plus, phrasing things like this is the first step in a process that’s happened to me and others I know, that’s really obnoxious.  It starts out “You just did _______ to a disabled woman.”  Next thing you know, people start describing you as “That person who does _____ to disabled women, habitually.”  When, at most, you only did it once, and, it’s possible you never actually did it at all, at least not the way the person is describing.

It becomes a weapon.  

And, yes, privilege/oppression is not always the most important thing going on, and sometimes it’s barely relevant to what’s going on at all.  The last time I tried to talk to this, I got an angry response from someone who said that privilege/oppression is always the most important part of an interaction.  Which kind of scared me, because it’s not.  Sometimes it’s important, other times it’s less important, and other times it’s as close to irrelevant as a huge power dynamic like that can get.

Not all situations are the same, and you can’t play paint-by-numbers with oppression to figure out what happened and who is right and who is wrong.

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