Re: [OT] Terminology [was: Affecting Institutional Change (Yeah Right)]
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On 05/11/07 11:08, Amy Templeton wrote:
> Calejar wrote:
>>> Ron Johnson wrote:
>>>> There are those of us who believe that claims of
>>>> discrimination became trite many years ago.
>> Amy Templeton wrote:
>>> I'm inclined to disagree; it is more subtle now, but it still
>>> exists. Do some reading on the concepts of privilege and
>>> intersectionality and if you don't buy it, we can talk more
>>> then (or if you do, either way).
>> Can you briefly explain the issues (preferably without jargon, so a
>> laymen can understand them) or at least provide link?
>
> Certainly!
>
> Privilege tends to be an especially tough one for a lot of people,
> because nobody really wants to acknowledge it. Basically, it's the
> idea that, based upon the "statuses" (sociologically speaking--so
> race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, etc.) people hold, some
> people start off, by default, in a better position than others. For
> example, a man doesn't have to worry as much as a woman does when
> walking down a dark alley in the big city at night, doesn't have to
You add the "as much" qualifier, but don't realize that I want to
get beaten up (or shot) and robbed just as little as you want to get
raped.
> overcome a stigma associated with going into scientific and
> technological fields (in many places, girls are implicitly and
> explicitly told in school that they're "not as good" at these
> things and far too many accept this analysis unquestioningly), is
"Math is hard"
"Those guys is the Science Club are soooooo much nerds. Who would
ever want to be like them."
"/Popular Mechanics/ or /Seventeen/?"
> allowed to be upset without "that time of the month" jokes, etc.
> These are just a few examples of "male privilege." Conversely, if a
> man cries he is in a position in which he could be thought less of
> by his peers--so there are some privileges men don't have, like
Men are only allowed to cry while watching /Brian's Song/.
And a little when their mothers die.
And I see no problem with that.
> access to certain forms of expression. Similarly, white people are
> well-established as "in charge" in, say, the corporate world.
> Although thanks to affirmative action there are now some (often
> tokenized) people of color in the upper echelons of some
> businesses, for the most part it is white people who gain
> promotions (not due to racism, but not necessarily due to
> differences in ability either). These are just a few examples...if
> you would care for more I could give you a more extensive and
> possibly better-written list at a later date, or point you to a
> citation for such a list.
And in China, "yellow" is promoted more than "white".
This "preference for your own" is also states "birds of a feather
flock together". It will *always* be so.
White *hatred* of blacks, OTOH, is or should be intolerable.
> So, fine--this could be called a lot of things, if not for the
> defining aspect of privilege: not having to think about it. People
> in a position of privilege have the option to pretend that these
> things are not going on under the surface (a man doesn't have to
> think "boy am I glad I'm less likely than a woman to get sexually
> assaulted walking down the street," for example).
>
> Perhaps an example of how this can be particularly damaging is that
> an able-bodied person doesn't have to think about the steps leading
> to the only door of a shop--so there is no pressure to make the
> shop more accessible, leaving people with certain types of physical
> handicaps out on the street. On a large scale, this leads to
> normalization of certain unwholesome practices (like not making
> buildings universally accessible) throughout a society, which in
> turn leads to marginalization of the people who don't have the
> option of "activating" that privilege and not thinking about it.
I have a seizure disorder which means I can't drive, plus various
other congenital physical "issues".
Do I complain and whine? Do I demand free transportation from the
government? No.
> Intersectionality is simpler to explain: basically, it's a refusal
> to examine only one aspect of identify in isolation of all others.
> A lot of social movements end up being single-issue; for a long
> time, for example, the women's movement did not acknowledge issues
> of race, class, and sexuality, but lately there's been a growing
> awareness of these issues. This single-issue problem tends to come
> from activations of privilege; the heterosexual, white,
> middle-class women dominating the movement, for example, simply did
Heterosexual women dominating the Women's Lib movement?
> not have to think about the particular issues that women of color,
> queer women, lower-class women, and women with more than one of
> these "other" statuses face, and so only the problems facing
> middle-class heterosexual white women would get discussed and
> worked on. Put simplistically, it's just acknowledging that
> "racism" can't be separated from "sexism" can't be separated from
> "classism" can't be separated from "ableism" (quotes because I
> don't like "ism"s, because they tend to oversimplify things)
> because they're products of the same systems, ultimately, and
> because it's the people who bear the brunt of multiple "ism"s who
> are in the worst position, generally speaking. And this particular
> analysis doesn't really allow for too much
This all stems from "birds of a feather".
> oversimplification--after all, a lower-class, able-bodied,
> heterosexual white man does not have access to the resources
> available to a rich, able-bodied, heterosexual black woman; but
> then again, he still doesn't have to worry as much about being
> attacked on the street.
Sure he does.
> So by refusing to gloss over the fact that
> not all white people, not all women, not all able-bodied people,
> are in the same position as each other, it's possible to create a
> more nuanced analysis of how the various systems of race, class,
> gender, sexuality, religion, ability, etc., interact, instead of
> just screaming about racism or sexism or ableism. Yes, these
> problems exist, but none of them are simple and they really can't
> be boiled down to "some people are just *bad* and discriminate
> against other people because they're *bad*," and they are much less
> obvious if taken in isolation. Again, if you would care for
> statistics, citations, and better articulation, I would be glad to
> provide these at a later date.
>
> Amy
>
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
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