Theme
4:23pm September 7, 2014

And after I reblogged that cartoon that turned out to have been written by an anti-SJ troll or something…

…someone privately sent me a link to this:

Explaining White Privilege To A Broke White Person

Which covers a lot of the same ground, but with a lot more nuance, I think.  A lot more awareness that yes, even if you’re living in poverty, you still have privilege.

When I first reblogged that comic, I was not trying to send the message that poverty somehow negates every other kind of privilege a person can have.  I was just trying to show the weirdness of the experience of being dirt poor and having nobody acknowledge your lack of class privilege because they’re too busy noticing all the areas where you do have privilege.  The way privilege turns into a zero sum game where you’re either “privileged” or “not privileged” and if you’re both, you get caught in some kind of no-man’s-land where nobody is willing to acknowledge your existence.  At least, that’s what I took out of the cartoon.  Other people saw it as simply denying that a poor white person could have white privilege.  Given the track record the author apparently has, they might be right about the intent.  I don’t know.  I just know that I read it as about the frustration of having people throw really simplistic versions of privilege in your face and expecting you to swallow them regardless of what your actual life experience is.  And I’ve certainly heard some weird ones.

Anyway, I’m not sure what I should say about having reblogged that comic.  People might want me to apologize.  But I’m not a mind-reader.  I can’t tell when something’s written by someone who otherwise mostly writes anti-SJ bullshit any more than I can tell when something’s written by someone who otherwise writes mostly SJ bullshit.  And I’m kind of offended at the idea that anti-SJ bullshit is worse than SJ bullshit, given that the two look nearly identical to me on face value.  But if you reblog something by someone who writes anti-SJ bullshit you’re evil, and if you reblog something by someone who writes SJ bullshit, well that’s okay then no matter how stinky the bullshit is.

Worse, I’ve got a serious serious problem with a related thing I’m seeing on tumblr of late:  The idea that you shouldn’t reblog anything written by The Wrong People.  So like, if a friend of mine is Politically Wrong In All The Wrong Ways, then by association so am I, and not only should nobody reblog what my friend writes, but nobody should reblog what I write, and nobody should reblog anything written by anyone who reblogs what I write, and so on and so forth.

To me, that’s disgusting.  It’s immoral.  It’s dangerous.  It’s a form of social control by shunning and it ought to ashame anyone who tries to do it.

And I see echoes of that in the “Don’t reblog that cartoon, it’s written by an anti-SJ person” thing.  I have no fondness at all for the anti-SJ world, mind you.  Half of it is people doing their best to deny that their privilege exists (mostly by mockery and trolling and making fun of SJ people), and half of it is disillusioned SJ people turning all the worst SJ tactics around and using them against SJ people.  Just as in the SJ world, there’s also a small minority of people who ended up there because they thought about things a lot and thought this was the only place they could end up.  I honestly think if you got both the anti-SJ and SJ people who thought that way, and put them in a room together, they’d like each other and come up with interesting ideas, but I doubt that’s going to happen.

Anyway, I’m not going to apologize for not knowing who wrote a cartoon I reblogged.  I’m getting sick of having to apologize to people for not knowing who I’m reblogging.  Whether it’s not knowing the cartoonist was an anti-SJ troll, or not knowing where a reblog of a reblog of a reblog of a reblog came from once it got to my dash (I do not and cannot check the origin of every post I reblog and I refuse to even try, but have gotten in trouble at least twice for not doing so), it’s just pointless and impossible.

If the above link turns out to be by someone awful as well, oh well, deal with it.  The nature of tumblr is not knowing where everything comes from or where it’s going.  The attempt to socially control people by making them fear the consequences of reblogging the wrong people makes me sick to my stomach.  Or maybe that’s just the gastroparesis.  Either way, it does make my brain sick.  Because too much of this is imposing complex social rules of the type that most autistic people find really difficult, which is a trend I’ve seen in tumblr social circles since I got here, and it’s only gotten worse with time.

(Yes, I know there are autistic people who excel in these circumstances and have even done their part in setting up the rules.  That’s because not all autistic people are identical in abilities or in political views.  It doesn’t mean the rest of us can all do what they do.)