as small as a world and as large as alone, lichgem: kishona: judal-is-my-spirit-animal: ...

3:45am August 25, 2014

kishona:

judal-is-my-spirit-animal:

Tumblr’s idea of social justice is so fucked up that people who are dirt poor and barely have enough to survive are considered privileged if their skin is the wrong color or they’re the wrong gender.

but being poor doesnt erase your white privilege? nor does it erase your cis privilege or male privilege, or whatever else? privilege in this regard doesnt mean “you dont/cant have any problems because youre a, b, or c” it means “because you are a, b, or c, you dont have the problems that people who are NOT a, b, or c face.” sure, you may not have d privilege (in this case, being poor or in poverty), but you have a privilege and b privilege. etc.

for example. im poor, white, cis, and female. i do not have rich/class privilege, nope, not one bit, nor do i have male privilege. however, i do have white and cis privileges. i have many problems in my life, yes, many associated with my social class and my gender, sure, but i cannot attribute any of my problems to my whiteness or being cis. many non-white and trans people face emotional and physical danger every day, and i never have to worry about that stuff because im white and cis. THERE is my privilege.

hope this makes sense.

I don’t know what the OP’s experiences are, but people do things like conflate being white with being middle class, or acting like being dirt poor and barely scraping by isn’t enough for people to care about you and want to protect you if your privilege list mathematically outweighs your oppression list. People often DO have an oversimplified approach to privilege and oppression that frequently fails to look at how each affects people’s lives in different situations. And you know, just having one oppression is enough to get you killed, and dead is dead, but people want to put people on a hierarchy of ‘who to give a fuck about’ that somehow inevitably ends up excluding really vulnerable people who could really use community support.

A lot of people do treat privilege and oppression like a point system, and at that point it’s not, ‘I’m denying my privilege,’ it’s, ‘People are literally deciding that my life can’t be as bad as it really is and that I’m not worth helping.’

And I think conversations like this really need to go beyond 101 ‘everybody has privilege’ talks.