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

7:09am 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.

I agree, I see the same thing going on.

I also see some white people who think that being poor or working-class means they’re not oppressive to anyone ever. They never think of poor and working-class people of color, poor and working-class disabled people, poor and working-class disabled people of color, etc. as people they have privilege over, overall.

But at the same time…

I do see this thing where if your privilege does mathematically add up a certain way, then your areas of oppression don’t count.

Rich white gay men, for instance. Even though they do have a lot of resources the poorer gay men of color don’t have. They still face oppression based on homophobia. And it can be every bit as deadly.

I want to see a community where people with different kinds of oppression are helping each other.

Rich white gay men. Poor trans able-bodied Latinas. Kids of all possible description growing up on the streets. Genderless DFAB people who face both misogyny and transphobia on a regular basis and don’t want to have to pretend one or the other doesn’t exist in order to fit into a too-rigid trans community or a too-rigid lesbian or feminist community. Nonbinary trans kids who’ve been thrown out by transphobic parents too disgusted to understand “what do you mean not male or female”? Black women with intellectual disabilities who’ve had to fight the idea that all black girls have intellectual disabilities, all their lives, except this person really does have one and has to deal with everything that means in her communities. Trans women trying to make it into the lesbian community. Nonbinary or genderless lesbians (both DFAB and DMAB) trying to make it into that community from another angle, for different but utterly valid reasons. Old men living in poverty with dementia, armed to the teeth because they’re terrified of the knock on the door that will bring them to the nursing home.

And all these people and more can and do work together in the real world. They work together without endless mathematical balancing acts of who has privilege more than who else. You don’t hear “If you’re white, it doesn’t matter that you’re disabled, Jewish, multigenerationially dirt poor, trans and gender-ambiguous in how you look, gay, fat, elderly, disabled in every possible category (physical, developmental, acquired, progressive, cognitive, emotional, mental, facially dysfigured, etc.),,.. being white trumps all of those things and renders them irrelevant.” Which yes I’ve actually heard – that because racism is so awful, it’s the worst of the oppressions, and anyone white, no matter how oppressed in other areas, just can’t understand how bad racism is. It’s usually followed up by a whole lot of ignorance (“Nobody’s ever been segregated or systematically murdered for being disabled” is one that makes my blood boil especially) about oppressions other than racism, that, yes, makes them sound trivial, and especially makes ableism sound trivial. (“Ableism? That’s just another group jumping on the oppression bandwagon in the footsteps of real oppressed people, like black people.”)

And yes, someone with every oppression except racism still benefits from white privilege – a person of color who was identical in all the other oppressions would have it far worse. But the way some people make it sound, benefiting from white privilege means that all your other oppressions don’t matter, or don’t matter much.

I’ve heard that since intersectionality is a term developed by women of color, then white people facing multiple areas of oppression and privilege alike have no right to apply it to our lives. And yet at the same time, we’re told that if we don’t apply intersectionality to our movements, we’re being racist. We’re just supposed to apply it in certain ways but not others. Certainly not to examine our own systems of privilege and oppression in a complicated system. They even laugh at the idea of white people trying to understand intersectionality, and in the next breath demand that all white people become well-versed in it.

And the gods help you if, like me, you’re someone whose cognitive disability makes words like ‘intersectionality’ make a mini-explosion in your head every time you hear or read them. You will get condescending “you don’t get it because you’re white” lectures, and “You don’t get it because you’re not multiply oppressed” lectures (even when the person in question faces fewer kinds of oppression than you do), and “privilege is a part of intersectionality too”. Yeah and none of this stops the little explosions in my head, so if it’s all the same to you, quit the condescending Intersectionality 101 lectures and learn about cognitive inaccessibility or something… keep using whatever language you want, though, don’t let me stop you, nobody can write so that everyone can understand easily, and I’m not sure everyone should try, especially if it’s the only word they have for something.

And I’ll just quote lichgem, the poster before me:

“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.”

Because that’s the long and the short of it. While people are fighting over which oppressions count, and how much oppression you need in order for it to count as worth protecting, worth community membership, people are out there dying.

People are dying for being people of color.

People are dying for being poor.

People are dying for being women.

People are dying for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, or any combination of these things.

People are dying for being trans. (Including every variety of trans, not just the ones that claim that being trans is only for them and not for others. In fact, in many cases the people being excluded from the trans community for not being trans enough are especially at risk for death.)

People are dying for being intersex.

People are dying for being fat.

People are dying for being disabled. (Every kind of disabled person: Physically disabled, cognitively disabled, chronically ill, blind, deaf, deafblind, partially sighted, hard of hearing, developmentally disabled, learning disabled/specific learning disabled, congenitally disabled, acquired disability, progressively disabled, visibly disfigured, and more. Every. Single. Kind.)

People are dying for being too old, or too young, for people to care about their rights.

And some of the people who are dying, are people who have white privilege, or class privilege, or other kinds of privilege that, around here anyway, people often view as making oppression all better, no matter how much other oppression you have, or how bad the oppression you face is. Because it only takes one kind of oppression, to die from it. And privilege might help your odds but it doesn’t eliminate the odds of your death by oppression.

I’m very aware that my white privilege has saved my life more than once. But I’m also aware that I’m poor, DFAB (and still facing sexism despite not having a gender identity), genderless, lesbian (the closest I can get to a label for my sexuality, not going to try to do better, not in this world), fat, and multiply disabled. And I’ve had my life threatened on numerous occasions for reasons related to each one of those things, let alone the combination all together.

So if someone tells me being white helps keep me alive, I won’t argue with them, but if they tell me it’s a magical passport to no-oppression-land I’m going to argue like hell. And I’ve seen people treat it like exactly that – especially being white, being male, and being rich. Those things certainly help a person, sometimes a lot, but they don’t eliminate other oppressions. If they did, the world would be a very different place. We wouldn’t have rich black guys arrested for trying to get into their own homes, we wouldn’t have rich white women carted off to mental institutions on national television, things would just be… a lot different. Race, class, and money may be some of the Big Three oppressions that people pay attention to, but they’re not always the most important oppression or privilege in a given situation.

And I am very wary of:

1. Anyone who thinks that membership in any or all of the Big Three privileges (white, rich, male) magically eliminates any other experience of oppression that person might have. Not that it makes no difference, but it doesn’t magically make the oppression go away.

2. Anyone who thinks that oppression is something you can calculate mathematically and figure out who is more oppression than who else.

3. Anyone who thinks that their own oppression (or the one of their oppressions that they personally experience as the worst) is the worst of all oppressions.

4. Anyone who dismisses a real kind of oppression as just “jumping on the bandwagon of wanting to be oppressed”. I’m looking at you, everyone who says this about ableism, and then makes nauseatingly ignorant remarks about how we’ve never been segregated, mass murdered, used for free or cheap labor, etc.

5. Anyone who is more invested in figuring out who to shut out of their oppressed community, than in figuring out how to include as many people as possible so that more people will be able to survive their oppression with a community behind them.

Any of those five things, they put me on guard like nothing else in these discussions.

[Tangent: Which, by the way, means? When I say that ableism is tangled around the roots of every kind of oppression, I’m not doing #3. I’m just trying to explain that every oppression, somewhere near the core levels of that oppression, uses ableism to prop itself up. This doesn’t make ableism worse than all other oppressions, it doesn’t make it the fundamental oppression that if you took it away all oppression would fall apart. It just means that to get rid of any kind of oppression, you have to get rid of ableism too, because ableism is embedded deeply into every oppression you can think of. And not just in a “there are disabled people who face this oppression too” way, more like a “black male leaders all have schizophrenia,” “women are the weaker sex,” “running away from slavery was a mental illness,” “people of color have lower IQs,” way – as in, ableism is used to prop up every kind of oppression at every level, in a way that most other oppressions do to each other only in part. I don’t know why it ended up this way, but if you want to end oppression you have to understand ableism or you’ll just pass the ableism on to some other group that deserves it no more than yours does. And to understand ableism, you have to know that ableism is not a list of forbidden words, it’s a systematic oppression that results in horrible atrocities happening to disabled people, literally in your backyard, on a day to day basis. I’d recommend Jenny Morris’s Pride Against Prejudice for a good introduction to ableism, from a feminist perspective.]

Here’s an online copy of Pride Against Prejudice for those unable to afford to buy a print copy:

http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/morris-Pride-and-Prejudice.pdf

Notes: