Thursday, May 15, 2014

Not seeing privilege and thinking you're oppressed

MRAs claiming it's sexism against men to focus on women's issues. Christians claiming discrimination and intolerance means society not supporting and promoting only their views. White people claiming it's racist to question if a white person might be racist. Cis-gender people claiming it's cis-phobic to call them "cis," or anything at all.

Privileged people are appropriating the language of oppression and social justice for themselves.

I suppose this is to be expected in a way. One of the defining traits of privilege is that society tends to be build in support of your worldview while marginalized views are perceived as unreliable accounts. So of course oppression and social justice concepts are just as susceptible to being reinterpreted through a privileged lens as any other cultural element. One's own privilege is very hard to see when it's the assumed backdrop of everything around you, yet it does still hurt to be accused of things you don't believe are true about yourself. If you don't see the inequality in the system you're commenting on, it certainly looks like those "other" people are simply complaining because they don't like something you, their "other" does, so why can't you do the same when you feel hurt by them too, right?

I think the important thing right now is how do we help people see the power imbalance and inequality that their group identity benefits from and contributes to when they claim oppression for themselves? How do we communicate the understanding that something hurting or being different from what you like does not by itself put you on the marginalized side of the privilege/oppression dynamic? That you can be privileged in some area because of some aspect of your identity, and still have things not go your way as an individual? That they're subconsciously devaluing other people's experiences and elevating the value of their own when the hostilely accuse the others having a secret agenda, by arguing against a simplistic strawman? That the study that has gone into these issues is real, and they're not as simplistic as they appear on the surface? That promoting and supporting minority/oppressed/marginalized identities and issues over privileged ones is not promoting inequality in the opposite direction, but is trying to right the balance of inequality and priority that already exists? How do we get people to see that inequality still exists and is still in their favor and is the very reason they can dismiss everyone else's views so easily, if even if doesn't feel like it? How do we show someone the very thing that's preventing them from seeing?

People can and do have paradigm shifts in their fundamental understanding of themselves and their relation to the world. That shift to a more complete picture and aware understanding of other people's experience is what we're asking, and there's no denying it's asking a lot. How do we do it?

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