Escape From the Oppression Olympics
Like most people, I have my pet theories about why tumblr is such a clusterfuck of identities and petty politics, and why so many people on tumblr engage in bizarre and reactionary behavior well past their teenage years. Even taking into account the Greater Internet Fuckward Theory, tumblr culture is of a very specific vein; the vilification of skepticism, the rejection of human empathy, the furious masturbation to textbook psychology issues to the point where you lose touch with the real world. The hydra has many heads; otherkins, transethnics, sapiosexuals, transtrenders, white knights, and social justice assholes from all walks of life, but at the heart of it is that one word that makes this damn website so infamous: privilege.
TRANS* DAY OF REMEMBRANCE is today.
Please take some time today to think about your various privileges in a society that prizes white, cisgender, heterosexual, able bodied, neurotypical, class privileged, allistic men above all others.
Male privilege is not having your parent worry about you while spending time with a guy even though you have known each other your whole life and are only friends.
Realization of Privileges.
- Men are afraid women will laugh at them or won’t have sex with them, women are afraid men will kill them.
- Rich people are upset that everyone else is calling them “greedy” instead of “job creators”, everyone else is upset that they can’t afford health care.
- White people are afraid of being called racist by people of color, people of color are afraid of being killed by white people (especially white people in positions of authority, like police).
- Straight people are afraid of having their “marriages ruined” by other people getting married, queer people are afraid of being beaten to death.
- Cis people are afraid of having to share a bathroom with someone different than they are, trans people are afraid of being murdered.
I figured this needed to be put out there.
what is the difference between these two images?
Pictures speak louder than words, especially when the pictures have words in them.
this privilege:
and this privilege:
a) about 10 years and a kick-ass job at Goldman-Sachs
b) racism denial vs. racism celebration
c) not a damn thing
I vote for d) all of the above.
UPDATE: Kimberlynn Acevedo, one of SlutWalk NYC’s organizers has posted a statement in response to the sign, and has announced plans to continue the dialogue. Here is an excerpt:
One of our march’s participants last Saturday held up and promulgated a racist, offensive sign. She was asked to take it down by one of our organizers as soon as it came to our attention. This sign symbolizes many of the critiques about SlutWalk not being a safe space for people of color, in particular Black women. We are taking it seriously and we absolutely condemn it and are horrified by it. This sign opposes the mission of SlutWalk NYC and its message is in direct conflict with the beliefs of its organizers. …
We are meeting with many of the groups which have critiqued SlutWalk NYC directly. We are meeting with Black Women’s Blueprint. We are attending an open meeting with Sister Song. We are holding a completely open meeting on October 13 at Walker Stage from 6-8 p.m. in order to discuss how to build a fighting movement. Further, we encourage everyone to take a look at the transcripts and videos of the speeches we have posted on our website and Facebook. We know we need to grow. We have been working on growth from the beginning. There were powerful, diverse and engaging speeches at the rally, many of which directly hit upon critiques of SlutWalk. THESE are the seeds of growth in our organization. We want to start a movement that passionately wants include the voices of all people, of all survivors, of all individuals who see merit in what it is that we are choosing to combat.
We hope you will join us.
[TRIGGER WARNING: HARASSMENT]
Male privilege is being in your forties and still being able to joke about how you would harass your 17 year old relative on the streets because it’s your own, twisted way of saying “My, you’ve grown”.
Male privilege is being able to call off your marriage/get a divorce/get a second wife after finding out your fiancee/wife has diabetes (my dad’s a doctor, he gets this all the time and he’s seen NO wife/fiancee leave her partner’s side after his diagnosis).
Submitted by radical-l0ve
#887
White privilege is not having to desperately come up with money to save your sacred land so it’s not turned into a highway.
Male Privilege #121
Not getting how powerless we feel.
I mean that “Field Guide to Chicks” bullshit, that has made my day different. In a bad way.
What can we do? That shit is offensive. It attacks what we’ve worked so hard to strive for. It’s not right. In any shape or form. Write to your local news station to tell them to cover it? Post the page about Vietnamese-American stereotypes on your facebook page and tell your friends to share it? Call it out everywhere online, talk about it to everyone you meet?
At the end of the day it still feels like that person thought it was okay to do that. And their audience does too. Fucking bullshit.
Male privilege is feeling like women’s issues are no big deal, and then crying that men are more oppressed than women, and still never feeling powerless when confronted with terrible, sexually objectifying, ethnicity-fetishizing, stereotypical parts of pop culture.
personal musings on white passing and space
Okay. From what I can see these are the main discussions that happened yesterday/last night/recently concerning white passing people (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). Now, I was travelling most of the day so I’m not really sure how inter-related the conversations are, but there appears to be maybe 3 distinct conversations happening? One is by two Metis people. One is that really good post by BlackGirlDangerous, and the last is that thing with a white passing privilege denier.
I have little comment on the Metis discussion because it is nuanced and somewhat specific to their communities (but also does a really good job of demonstrating white passing people interrogating that privilege). The BlackGirlDangerous (BGD) post and the weetz thing somewhat go together because they are talking about space and access to spaces. Now, the thing to really remember about the BGD post is that she is talking about people with grand parents or whatever who are poc and look not just white passing but are white with poc heritage. weetz was (I think) responding to a different post talking about wanting white people out of fat poc spaces.
I mostly actually want to talk about the BGD post because I think it is important and relates to the weetz business.
I’m Filipin@. My dad was born there and I grew up around my Filipin@ side only (the white side of my family lived in a different province). My mom is white Quebecois. So, I don’t fall into the category discussed by BGD. Being Filipin@ is my culture, I have direct access to it. However, my Filipin@ side has had some heavy mixing with white spanish and is fairly light skinned on their own. Mix with white and I’m super light skinned.
I rarely discuss my specific background, but it is important for this discussion. People need to know where I’m coming from.
When I was younger, I did not pass for white. I lived in a different city and, I don’t know what other factors influenced it. I was teased for having ‘slanted eyes’. I was called a ch*nk. As I grew up and people become more polite, I constantly had people asking me “what are you? what is your background? are you Chinese? Japanese?”. So. Light skin privilege but not passing.
Nowadays, however, I pass more often than not. And, may I say, that there is a large defining line between the privilege you get between being a light passing but visible versus someone who is white passing? Like enough of a difference that it still surprises me.
I never experienced the constant and violent racism that I know darker skinned people experienced. I had my own experiences which have largly stopped happening on a regular. It comes up every so often, but these days a lot of the racism I experience is because people don’t know that I’m not white or it is systematic when people have more than my skin to judge by.
All of this to say, that white spaces (while not exactly safe for me) are also not dangerous. It is possible that I could choose to say nothing when white people invariably start saying the racist shit they say when they think only white people are around. I could say nothing. I could spare myself the lovely experience of having that hate directed to my personally, instead of just being ambient hate or whatever.
But that is what this discussion about space is really about. Choice. I can and could choose to access white spaces. And while it wouldn’t be good for my mental health, it would be safe enough. Few white people would attack me. I have options and choices. And lets be honest, we all (sadly) must make some bargains with power in order to eat, make a living, etc.
The whole point to this privilege is that I have better bargains available to me. I can and could still choose to buy into white supremacy. I could decide to get my piece of the pie by following the well trodden path of many other oppressed people and start shitting on dark skinned poc. It is easy. White supremacy well rewards those people willing to support its tenets, especially if you are light enough to pass.
And this choice is *exactly* why I’m dangerous to dark skinned poc. Why my presence in those spaces could be triggering or threatening. Or make the space unsafe. I have this power to choose.
PoC only spaces are (and should be) a sanctuary for those people who cannot escape racism based on skin colour. It should be a place for commiseration, comfort, healing, solace, joy, etc. Spaces like this are deeply, deeply necessary. And they fail to serve their purpose if the people who need them most feel unsafe. This isn’t about skin policing, gate keeping, or anything about that.
Because we can all be nuanced about this. Nuanced about the spaces we create and for whom they are created. Maybe I’ll only go to white-free spaces and not PoC only in the future. Can you see the difference?
It is interesting how well I feel and understand the BGD article. I recently had that experience myself, where entering a poc space and seeing a blonde haired, blue eyed, whiter than me person (in this particular space everyone thought I was Latin@). It is jarring and makes the space different when you see people like this (she was a white Hispanic… yay for the american census!).
We also need to be clear about how all of this relates to identities, since that often seems to be why white passing people get all defensive and start shitting on people. PoC is a political label used for solidarity and cross race organizing. It should not be treated as an identity in and of itself (do correct me if I’m wrong). If you’ve become over invested in it and are white passing you should really reflect on why that might be. Especially if this investment means that you begin acting life a privileged shit head.
You are who you are. No one can take that away from you. Whether or not I have access to PoC only spaces will not change the fact that I’m Filipin@ mixed with white. Also, my current white passing does not change the fact that I was once (and occassionally still am) visible. My experiences are my own. My identity is my own. Forever and always.
You are who you are. But if you can’t figure out ways to be that person without shitting on people who you are privileged over? You, at the very least, suffer from a lack of imagination and/or, at the very worst, are upholding white supremacy. If you cannot find ways to discuss your own experiences with racism, white supremacy, and colonialism without appropriating or relying on your own personal experience? You are a shitty person exploiting the pain of others for your own gain.
If you are these things, you are exactly the reason why poc only spaces need and should exclude people like us. Expecting people you shit on to welcome you with wide open arms shoes and reveals how much you are still wallowing and mired in your privilege.
This is a masterful post.
I’m in a similar boat; I only started passing for white two years ago (when i moved to a different town), and the difference was…terrifying. I always had light/mixed privilege, even though I’m only 1/4 white (French).
The passing issue became slowly clear to me over time because of not only the things that white people would say to me, but the way more visible people of color acted around me or reacted to the things I said. I thought about it using my amazing powers of empathy (lol because I have autism which is rather relevant to this kind of social issue), and I realized that as a previously visible POC, if I lived in such a racist town, i wouldn’t want to hear SHIT any white person had to say about race or racism.
I decided it wasn’t my place to barge into POC spaces at that point, or start race conversations or open my mouth about it, because I wasn’t having the same experience they were, regardless of past experiences. Instead, I started taking the beating stick to my mostly white circle of acquaintances and friends and swatted out a somewhat safe space for myself, and cut loose a lot of people who just weren’t healthy for me to be around. It was more important to me to make sure visible POC, especially Black people, had their space rather than me getting all up in there, because I had to come to terms with the fact that as a “white” person, I had become dangerous to POC.
Rather than thinking that the fact that a large portion of my immediate nuclear family is black gave me some kind of “pass”, it actually helped me understand better why I needed to take the actions that I did.
Yes. Exactly.
We are dangerous. Especially now that I’ve encountered enough privilege denying white passing people to see that we are dangerous not only because we are indistinguishable from the oppressors but because many of us, from our own actions, have proven ourselves to be complicit and untrustworthy.
I’m not sure why so many white passing people expect those whose survival depends on recognizing (and avoiding) their oppressors should somehow be able to magically tell that this light skinned person who looks white is actually not white.
No one has time to fuck around like this. No one. This is life and death.
And my overall comfort < the survival of dark skinned poc.
Male (Fitness) Privilege
Male privilege is being able to go out jogging at any time of the day or night without fear.
Male privilege is not being ridiculed for exercising.
Male privilege is being seen as ‘tough’ or ‘strong’ because you lift weights.
(Male privilege is having personal trainers accurately gauge your limits.)
Male privilege is having comfortable clothing to wear to the gym.
Male privilege is access to almost all gyms.
Male privilege is being able to use the showers without fear.
Male privilege is being seen as attractive and desirable because of one’s exercise routine.
Male privilege is being able to pursue physical fitness and strength without ridicule, condescension, or assumptions about your sexuality.
(Straight) male privilege is when any lesbians shown will inevitably be white, thin and conventionally attractive in order to serve as fanservice. In short, straight male privilege is having gay men and even gay women STILL targetted to YOUR comforts.
Deconstructing Western Privilege: Are Foreigners in Africa Benefiting At the Expense of Natives
Add the Middle East while you are at it. Where I used to work, one of my managers was Lebanese but he had an European passport, Spanish as I recall. So, his salary was something above 40 thousand dollars PER MONTH.Ugandans do not see me as an African-American or a black American. Yes, they recognize the pigmentation of my skin and can clearly see that I am a black woman; however, I am still referred to as mzungu (a Luganda term meaning foreigner or ‘white person’).
No matter how “African” my features, Ugandans perceive me as an American – no hyphens needed. Ugandans I meet do not take my complex history as a black woman from America into consideration. To them, I am a Westerner. A native English speaker.
I hold the coveted American passport. I was educated at one of the United States’ most prominent private universities. I hail from the land of the free and the home of the brave.
This translates to my own version of ‘white privilege’ which I will refer to as ‘Western privilege’ – it just has a better ring to it. While this article comes from my perspective as a Westerner living in Uganda, I am going out on a limb to say that this ‘Western Privilege’ phenomenon is prevalent throughout the African continent.
“There are thousands of qualified, college-educated Ugandans living in Kampala who are unemployed, but Westerners are repeatedly able to apply for jobs and get interview after interview and job offer after job offer. I am sometimes offered jobs that I’m not even interested in. A few weeks ago, a friend told me that he could get me a job on one of Uganda’s top radio stations because, ‘with my American accent,’ the station manager would surely hire me in a second and pay me big bucks! I have no desire to work in radio so I politely declined – but the deeper issue is how these type of opportunities fall into my lap while there are so many qualified, educated Ugandans who are idle and unemployed all over the country.
A colleague of mine recently moved to Uganda from Ohio. Within 3 months of moving to Uganda, she landed a full-time job with one of the largest magazine publications in Uganda. Last month during a lunch meeting, she admitted that a Ugandan friend of hers was peeved because she got a job so quickly and he, a qualified candidate with a degree from a South African university, has been unemployed for nearly a year and unable to find work. Granted, she has journalism experience and holds a college degree but one has to wonder how many qualified Ugandan candidates were overlooked for this particular job position. I personally think more people, especially foreigners living abroad, need to think critically about if and how ‘Western privilege’ plays into equations like this.”
I HATE HATE HATE westerners at home so much. And the fact we are soo much subdued by their influence make me want to cry like for real UGH!!
(Source: redlightpolitics)
Classist justice
Far too often, I’ve heard radical queers and feminists, in their hipster garb, talking their academic jargon about checking one’s privilege and being accountable, and in the same breath mocking poor people. It’s not always explicit. Actually, in social justice circles, it hardly ever is. Many of you know not to say words like ghetto or white trash, or at least I hope you do, because of its classist and racist implications, but that seems to be where the anti-classist work stops. So, let me help you.
- Every time you push your vegan/vegetarian/pescatarian diet on people, remember that your diet is a privilege that doesn’t make you superior or more of an environmentalist, food justice champion, animal lover or good human. I know you know about food deserts. Well, you don’t have to live in one to not be able to afford to have a restrictive diet.
- Furthermore, poor folks went green along ass time ago. I don’t get why you feel so special about your mason jars and bicycles. Oh good for you for taking the bus when you could’ve driven. Do you want a vegan gluten-free cookie?
- Yes, Wal-Mart is evil. So, is Urban Outfitters. Get over yourself. The only reason why Wal-Mart is singled out is because poor people shop there and it is easier to distance yourself from the problem. So, stop judging poor consumers who are just trying to feed and clothe their families, and start working to dismantle capitalism, or at least organize for workers’ rights (preferably in a non savior complex kinda way).
- Your shitty college dorm room, apartment or shared house, does not make you poor, neither does shopping at Good Will.
- There is a difference between being broke and poor, much like the difference between acute and chronic pain. Learn the difference.
- For those of you who do work with poor folks, you are not special, and you are not a savior. Like I said before, drop the savior routine. It makes a big difference when you take the cues from the communities you are serving. And, just because someone isn’t a college educated career activist, doesn’t mean they don’t know what is best for them and their communities. So, don’t be a condescending ass when people don’t talk like you, and practice some real nonjudgmental allyship.
- Pro tip: classy, trashy, hood, ghetto, dangerous/sketchy/seedy (in reference to poor PoC neighborhoods), white trash, etc are all really classist terms and hella racist too. Think about it, why do we specify that the trash is white? Because all other trash must be brown, right? If you don’t have a claim to these words, don’t use them.
Anyway, the examples could go on, and if anyone wants to add onto this, please do. I just don’t understand how a community that prides itself on fighting body-shaming and slut-shaming, could be so unequivocally class-shaming. In your own words, you better check your privilege.
“Anonymous asked: tabarnac girl when you say ‘whitey’ and mean it as a derogatory term solely based on someone’s race how on earth are you being ANYTHING but racist?”
But…I still didn’t say that. But I’ll bite:
Because at the end of the day, that word will float into meaningless oblivion for that white girl. It won’t matter someone said it. Having “whitey” hurled at you is essentially a word that conceptualizes all that is positive and privileged about life born as a white person. It’s a mark of anger and frustration at the unfairness and inequality in place because someone is white - the right and ability to be ignorant and not questioned by society for it! To walk around uneducated about the world, about how things got to be the way they are, and to retreat the moment it gets hard or difficult or tough!
To glide away from unpleasantness. Being a whitey means that stuff doesn’t stick to you, not even words about your race. Whitey will never have a home denied to them based on the fact that they are a whitey. Will never be vilified in the media as a potential terrorist, as the face of crime, will never be killed by a cop even when they aren’t doing anything, will never be murdered in cold blood when carrying home a back of skittles and iced tea. Whitey will never be less likely to get a job or an education or to make less money than literally anyone else. Whitey is the ultimate achievement in a game where achievements are nothing more than what color you were born as. Whitey will win, every time, every game, every way. Whitey can be saturated in the media that looks like them, every time, all the time, and still complain they have no culture - following it up with stealing others’ cultures for the novelty of it - like shoplifting from the oppressed. Whitey is safety and protection in your home, in your neighborhood, on the streets, and expecting the police to be on your side. Whitey is rarely the reason you get beaten to death, or hung, or burned. Whitey means rightness, means imperialism happening because of you not to you! Whitey means you history and your culture is the pinnacle of Civilization, the best of humanity and everyone else is called backwards, or wrong, or pitied. Whitey is safety. Whitey is doing more crimes - murder, rape, illegal drug use and possession - in American than ANY OTHER RACE and still being convicted for it at a lower rate than blacks or latinos. Whitey is the magic ability to step all over other people and get away with it, to have that be the norm and unquestioned.
Being called whitey means your feelings are hurt for about five minutes and then forgetting about it. Because in the end, being Whitey has never ever systematically stopped you from anything, has never hindered your life simply because you were white in the same way being a person of color dictates how your life is different than a white person’s.
Can you even really call that derogatory?
— rebloggable by request. They are insulting me quite splendidly in French, however, if you didn’t catch the irony of calling me tabarnac. It’s roughly like ‘fucking girl’ so in addition to all that, they’re a misogynist. beautiful.
Male privilege is thinking you deserve a medal for finding plus-sized women attractive.
