FUCK. I’ve done this exercise before, but it’s been factors like “if you’re male”, “if you’re able-bodied”, etc. Putting it in these terms is somehow more powerful because it shows the consequences of those kinds of privileges. And then when he says, “None of these statements have anything to do with anything any of you have done” … ugh, I started crying. It’s like the “It’s not your fault” scene; as kids we internalize all this shit as somehow our fault. And the looks on the faces on the guys in back. Fuck.
Think about what he says. Lots. It isn’t about what you do. Think about it right now. BEFORE you read more, cause what he says is more important.
It was a bit hard for me to grasp at first because I needed someone to transcribe it for me – so even as a white relatively-well-off person I would not have even placed in the race because the instructions were all verbal and I can’t understand speech.
and i’d be left behind despite my advantages because my two steps are slow and small and taken with a cane. but those of us who are disabled know this lesson already, of course.
what was a revelation to me was the faces of the handful of white men at the very front, the ones who’d taken two steps every time. they were proud at first, and only started getting worried at the end, i think. and when they turned to look back, i could see that very human urge to go back and help. it reminded me that a lot of the time, privileged guilt is like survivor’s guilt – it’s not that you did anything wrong, it’s nothing you earned, it’s a sign you care about your fellow humans.
you can’t change your advantages of birth and upbringing, nor should you want to. the takeaway is that when you reach the finish line and get your hundred bucks – when you reach adulthood and have financial security and mobility and so forth – you look for kids getting left at the starting line and see what you can do to help.
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.
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.
just moving along like everyone else 