jumpingjacktrash:

privilege discourse undermines intersectionality when it’s presented overwhelmingly along one axis at a time.

this is a good post about white privilege. but actively detrimental to an intersectional understanding of community needs if your takeaway from it is that whiteness is the ur-privilege.

so i invite everyone to go back and reread that, substituting a privilege they themselves have for ‘white’. here’s a chart of axes of privilege for the general united states:

but be aware there may be sub-communities where the domination dynamic is locally flipped, for extra confusingness; for instance, in a university setting, someone young or young-looking is going to be less respected than someone old or old-looking, as it’s assumed the young person is a student and the old one’s got tenure. this doesn’t erase the dynamic in media where the young person is a hero and the old person is a villain or a prop, or in non-academic workplaces where the young person is vastly more employable.

here’s a brief article i think states things fairly clearly.

in short, privilege is an extremely complicated dynamic, and the tumblr habit of acting like the more axes of oppression you can claim the more above criticism you are is actively harmful to the cause. what we need to do is the opposite. we each need to find the area where we have power to uplift others.