And that's the whipsaw right there: for everything you protest for, you're protesting against. Speaking as a privileged white male, who pretends and aspires to some enlightenment, pretty much every adversarial position of every diversity protest ever staged has been against me. And that's appropriate. I be the privileged white male. But every time a minority group wishes to increase their inclusiveness, they need a villain. And that villain is me. And that's also appropriate. But there is no. FUCKING. WAY. I have ever dwelled in a universe where a $64k a year liberal arts education was any more likely than me winning Miss Black Universe. By arguing that I need to "check my privilege" the implied statement is that the accuser has none. And that is why these discussions go so south so quick: The accuser is arguing that they can speak for the oppressed while the accused can't and both of them are a fair sight better off than the object of discussion. It's a debate where both parties swarm to wrap themselves in oppression street cred when the fact of the matter is, divisions have to be played up and buttressed out in order to increase the power of rhetoric. Seattle went all-gender restrooms like a year ago. I went to a club like two months ago. Walked into a bathroom. Took a leak. Walked out. Two girls were giving me the stinkeye. Why? Because I'd walked into the restroom that used to be the women's room. See, for most people, all-gender restrooms means everyone but cisgender males gets their choice. Why? Because cisgender males are wrong by default. And here I am, using the phrase "cisgender male" unironically, because apparently that's what I need to do these days to speak to people but lemme tell ya: If I weren't reaching very deep into my well of understanding I'd have a hard time finding any sympathy with a cultural movement that feels A-OK beating the shit out of me for every transgression real or imagined that they or their eight generations of ancestors have ever experienced due to people they may or may not imagine I'm related to. And if I were an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia I'd have a great deal of difficulty finding the empathetic position with someone who identifies as "LatinX."Marc Blecher, an Oberlin professor of politics, had problems with the program at the time, in part, he said, because thinking in terms of cultural identities often leaves out a critical factor: class. He believes the problem goes back to the early days of boomer politics, which he experienced as an activist at Cornell, in the sixties. “When we opposed the Vietnam War, we didn’t take seriously that all the draft dodging we were doing was screwing black people and poor people and forcing them to go fight,” Blecher said one afternoon, in his office.
yeah, they do that to me all the time. Real horse hockey. Could be worse, I guess - I haven't had the police called on me yet. See, I seriously disagree with that, and anyone who you have run into who has used privilege in that way is not only wrong, but an idiot. All the people who are going to Oberlin are privileged. Some happen to be more privileged than others, but they are all privileged to go to a high class school in a safe (if a little boring - I've been there) town in the liberal north of a midwestern purple state. This is the thing about privilege, and that is super hard for people to understand (including the people who use it most), is that Everyone has advantages that others don't, and everyone has disadvantages that others don't. You grew up in New Mexico (at least part of the time). That means that you did not have the priviliges of an incredibly good upper class middle school in New York - let's say. that is a privilege that someone else has over you. Anyone, of any colour who had the Privilege of doing so, should acknowledge that and use what they gained from that experience to help the people who didn't have that. That help might be Donating to a school board, or donating to a school library, or it might be investing their life into education and becoming a teacher so that they can give back. it might just be as small as saying "you didn't learn that in school? It's cool man, let me show you this trick for it..." You're a white man. That means that, as of right now, when you do business with people they take you seriously. When you were a teen, however, you were pretty into the goth scene (right? I feel like we had this conversation). Were you ever followed around in a convenience store because you were dressed a certain way or looked a certain way? That's a privilege that you have over the past you, the adolescent person who is judged because of his clothing and long hair. Privilege doesn't mean your life's not shit, it means that even in your shit life you've had some ups that other people haven't, or experience to make you wiser. The people who gave you the stink eye in the restroom? they're idiots, and probably reacted the way they did because they're unreasonably afraid of gender neutral bathrooms. They took that fear out on you, and that is fucking wrong. Short, sort of unrelated story time re: how I feel about taking shit out on other people. The worst my depression ever got was November 11, 2007. After being confronted with unthinking behaviour, I yelled at my grandmother (whom I love dearly) and drove off. I parked in a coffee shop parking lot and was weeping when my dad called me - my grandmother was afraid for me. I knew I had to change, and I could never treat my grandmother like that again. When I started sitting down and actually dealing with my depression, I made a rule. If I had an angry moment, or an upsetting end to a conversation, I would go over that situation and ask myself if my anger was justified, if I was right to be upset. If it was, then no regrets. If I wasn't, then I had to turn around, go back and apologize for my actions. I did this as recently as yesterday afternoon, when I went back and apologized to my supervisor for being an asshole about shit she can't change. So, when I see those people taking their fear out on you I get pretty mad. However, you have a privilege over them - the likelihood that you will be overpowered in a bathroom and assaulted is significantly lower than theirs, so you don't need that fear as much as they need it. It doesn't make what they did and said okay, but it does mean that I can understand why they are afraid. People of any colour, race or creed can have a privilege over any other person - it's not some system that sets itself up directly to drag you down as a cisgender heterosexual white male. That being said, it can be used that way, and I would assert is being used that way by some of these students, and that's why I said we need to look at their broad points because these people are an extremeexample. They also, like Tea Partiers, just happen to be the loudest. My gender neutral friend from Costa Rica would be upset, but I Imagine they would charm the pants off of the coal miners if given a chance.Walked into a bathroom. Took a leak. Walked out. Two girls were giving me the stinkeye.
By arguing that I need to "check my privilege" the implied statement is that the accuser has none.
And if I were an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia I'd have a great deal of difficulty finding the empathetic position with someone who identifies as "LatinX."
The problem here is you're arguing the abstract, from your personal experience and credo, and I'm arguing the concrete. Yes. Absolutely. There are aspects of my past that chip away at the "privileged" label. Yes. Absolutely. There are aspects of the underprivileged that chip away at their "underprivileged" label. BUT IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. I've spent 20 years of my life apologizing for my whiteness. I'm "allowed" to speak freely about Israel because I'm jewish enough for the Right of Return. I'm "allowed" to have an opinion about racism as one of the few white people in the world to experience racism at the hands of another ethnicity. But I'm not jewish. And the prejudice I experienced is a tiny corner case of what the overwhelming majority of non-white people go through routinely. The bullshit part is that in the kabuki of privilege warfare, these meaningless gambits are enough to have my arguments listened to as a white man. They don't make my arguments more rational. They don't buttress my facts. All they do is allow me to wave my hands in front of my opponent and say "I'm less of a straight white protestant male than that imaginary boogeyman you think you're debating, therefore you're obligated to at least pay lip service to my arguments on their merits." _wage used to do that shit all the time: "Your argument is invalid because my childhood was tougher than yours." The fuck does that have to do with GDP? The whole privilege debate should be logos rhetoric: "here are the facts, here's what they mean." But the whole privilege debate is pathos rhetoric: "here are the facts, your interpretation is invalid because you're privileged." There is NOBODY - No. One. - who does not leverage their diminished privilege in order to argue that someone else has too much. And when you're a white male trying to talk about this shit, arguing that you understand someone else's viewpoint is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that you have lots of black friends. This is why there's such a lower-class white backlash against "privilege" - it is assumed by default that all people with white skin and normative heterosexual preferences have more of it than every person without white skin or without heterosexual preferences. Us white guys aren't even allowed to argue that we have, at some point in the past, experienced hardship because it hasn't been institutionalized hardship. Yeah, the people giving me the stinkeye in the restroom are idiots. but their idiocy is sanctioned. At a baseline, being closed-minded is allowed if you're in the minority position - after all, you're oppressed. Which means, at a baseline, if you're in the majority you're an oppressor. Period. End of line. And you and I can talk in the concrete about what "you" and "I" feel and do but at the end of the day, it'll be a straight white male you don't know hating on your bathroom choices without knowing the first fucking thing about you and at the end of the day, it'll be someone other than a straight white male hating on me for, I dunno, resenting trigger warnings on ancient Greek plays and at the end of the day, you have it harder and I have it easier but this debate? It rarely fosters understanding.
"here are the facts, your interpretation is invalid because you're privileged."
The privilege model, moreover, was producing radicals who tried to convince American workers that they were getting more than their fair share, and that they should give up their already inadequate lifestyles, possessions, and class gains. It was manna from heaven for the ruling class. Holy shit.The term "privileges" was used to describe measures, such as relatively decent schools and medical care, to which whites received greater access. The problem with this conception is that these measures, rather than representing undeserved "privileges," were in fact reforms won by the working class through bitter struggle. These class gains represented the return of a small part of the great wealth held by capitalists that workers had produced. Privilege theory--on the basis of unequal access to these gains under racist American capitalism--converted hard-won class victories, reforms, and rights into "undeserved" workers' "privileges."
This article has totally dilated my understanding of privilege and racism, and of Marxism and capitalism in general. Pushing back the dark. Can you recommend anything more? Some thoughts: how enlightening but totally dispiriting it is to learn that privilege theory is so unproductively divisive on purpose. The theory's Stalinists-Maoists originators wanted to transmogrify the oppressor-oppressed relationship as then understood from capitalists-workers to Americans-Third World peoples. Privilege theory has been modified since its inception in the ~60s to its more contemporary meaning of white-skinned privilege at the expense of POC in the United States. While I could intellectually understand why I should excuse myself from, say, a Black Lives Matter protest I attended while in Boston, it always felt somewhat counterproductive. But I couldn't articulate it why (especially when being reminded of, and sometimes verbally attacked for, my whiteness and maleness and straightness. But I don't want to make this about me.) Whereas in the late '60s and early '70s, the raised fist--Black and white--expressed political, anti-racist, class solidarity for a generation, today's popular symbols of anti-racist resistance (hands raised in the "Don't Shoot" stance, hoodies, and "I am Trayvon Martin" signs) are sometimes argued by privilege advocates to be inappropriate for whites. In what would have been anathema to anti-racist movements of the past, some privilege advocates call upon whites to identify as whites--as part of a community with racists--instead of identifying themselves as anti-racist fighters. I think it a valid argument that racism is a tool of the ruling class to neutralize the working class's greatest tool, cohesion and unity. And furthermore, as total and urgent as racism and an awareness of privilege feels to my peers, it's fair to say that it is subordinate to the ultimate issue, the tension between the ruling-, landed-, capitalist-class and the working-class. But I don't know how likely it is that I could ever convince my black and/or activist friends to join a Marxist organizing group.The destructive and divisive atmosphere often found in today's privilege-checking culture reflects both the toxic sectarian factionalism of the theory's originators, and the light years we have travelled from the civil rights and Black Power movements. Then, white radicals in this country routinely participated in and helped organize demonstrations and activities in support of anti-racist causes and campaigns--the victorious "Free Huey [Newton]" campaign (involving the Black Panther's shoot-out with the police), an international cause célèbre, being one example. Then, Black and white militants joined forces in the interests of necessity and revolutionary unity. In today's left, by contrast, white activists may "excuse" themselves, or be discouraged, from joining and organizing anti-racist protests, on the "privilege" basis that they cannot possibly understand the Black experience of oppression and should not act like they do.
Ted Allen's own theory evolved in much the same direction.
I agree. It's a non-starter. That's why I never use it. As I am wont to say, Suffering is not a penis game where one drops trow to measure.
I wouldn't go this far, although I'm sure some people would. At the end of the day, being a white heterosexual male means that you are likely to experience advantages compared to people who don't fit into one (or any) of those categories. That doesn't mean that you should spend every second of every day trying to atone for that privilege, but that you should try to be aware of your position relative to others. Nor does it mean that any hardship you experience is insignificant or should be ignored because of your (relatively) privileged position. People who try to convince you otherwise are just narcissistic assholes, regardless of their ethnicity/gender/orientation. Which means, at a baseline, if you're in the majority you're an oppressor.
the fundamental basis of this discussion is that narcissistic assholes are allowed to be narcissistic assholes... so long as they aren't white males. And while the right to be a narcissistic asshole is a poor substitute for the right to be given the benefit of the doubt in pretty much every societal transaction, it still means that us white males must studiously bite our tongues when we encounter a narcissistic asshole... because otherwise, we're (A) racists (B) homophobes (C) misogynists (D) all of the above simply for calling a spade a spade, an idiom that dates to Plutarch, but which you're likely to get called a racist over because if someone thinks it's offensive, it's offensive.
I think you misunderstood the the ordinance. http://www.seattle.gov/civilrights/gender-justice-project/all-gender-restrooms seems to only apply to public spaces. I'm not sure a club that charges cover applies. Also seems to only apply to single stall bathrooms which should have been all unisex anyway but for some stupid reason werent.Seattle went all-gender restrooms like a year ago. I went to a club like two months ago. Walked into a bathroom. Took a leak. Walked out. Two girls were giving me the stinkeye. Why?