sexgenderbody

how to find race and privilege fail in one easy lesson

I shared my recent thoughts on privilege, white-face on brown voices, male face on feminist voices and cis-het face on queer voices over at DailyKos.  It’s a good site for group politics and like any group of people, it has blind spots and privilege issues.

In general terms, conservatives tend to celebrate privilege.  They not only admit it exists, but openly seek to gain and exploit it.  This leaves the undoing of privilege in the intellectual bucket of liberals and progressives.  Being progressive and privileged is not desired and can be embarrassing, so also generally speaking, liberals and progressives can be tempted to deny their privilege.  

And that is how very often, we end up smack dab in the middle of race fail.

I won’t post them all, but take a look at the comments on the thread there.  

Here are a few of the nuggets left for me in the comments:

• It’s only a conversation about “white man’s burden” if Kipling is mentioned.  (god, this could have saved me hours of arguments)
• when dismissing tumblr, refer to it as twitter
• declare that you have no interest in knowing about it or what ‘cis’ means.
• it doesn’t help anything to pummel the white man
• when the topic is privilege masses ignoring brown / queer / female voices for cis-het-white-males who repeat those ignored voices, talk exclusively about a cis-het-white-male
• as always, when race or privilege are the topic in a white space of hundreds of thousands of readers, the most common reply is: crickets