I continue my pleading that the way to defeat liberalism is to encourage it.
This thread is delightfully instructive.
When you go to argue take the position that gays have it harder than straights and thus deserve deference.
Blacks have it harder than whites.
Women have it harder then men.
...
And then wait for the day when blacks, women and gays have to decide amongst themselves which one deserves more deference.
It's not IF that issue arises, it's only a matter of when.
But by then they will be so accustomed to assuming their own privilege--rather than strive for mere equality--they will savage each other as only they can.
And be sure to smile.
Here are some delightful tactics for what I lovingly refer to as OPERATION: Sink the Pink
Matariki (14,612 posts)
If you are the member of a privileged group AND call yourself progressive
Please have the courtesy of listening, and really trying to hear, what folks who aren't part of your privileged group have to say about their experience with attitudes and discrimination in our society.
Please DON'T call them 'thin skinned', 'unable to take a joke', 'overly sensitive', etc, etc - and expect to be considered a progressive member of this community.
Acknowledge that if you haven't had to experience the bigotry or social disadvantages that the person speaking has - that you are really in no position to tell them that they're 'overreacting' and so forth. Worse, that by doing so you're actually helping to maintain those injustices and your own personal privileged over other people's.
Please think about that the next time you're being dismissive to folks on DU who try to explain why a certain word isn't acceptable, why a certain joke isn't funny, why a certain attitude is hurtful. Please stop telling the targets of those words, jokes, and attitudes to just shut the **** up.
Liberal America: where your freedom to hold a view is based on your skin color and gender
intaglio (4,617 posts)
105. Well, the OP claimed no "status as victim"
They only claimed that others are holders of a privileged position.
The only defense they made was that others who are not in the same position as the less privileged be allowed to make their case before being shouted down. In other words that their belief be defended with logic and reason before being dismissed out of hand by those who have no personal knowledge of the situation. You have indulged in dismissing the OP out of hand with exactly the ossified mindset and reliance on foul mouthed assertion of right rather than reason.
Then you use that interesting phrase "burned at the ****ing stake" a charming and nonsensical choice of words with a whole history of bigotry behind it.
Firstly, someone burnt at a stake surely has prima facie evidence of victimisation.
Secondly, the most common image evoked by your insensitive choice of words is that of the witch; people who were victimised and who were, in the main, women.
Thirdly, what was the point of you using the f-bomb in this context except as a way of shouting down someone whose view holds yours to be archaic and illiberal - a case which, I believe could be defended.
Matariki (14,612 posts)
7. thank you.
I'm constantly baffled by threads on DU where men are telling women what is and isn't sexism or Caucasians telling African Americans what is or isn't racism.
That's not to say that the majority of people on DU don't 'get it' - I think most do. But there's a loud minority who, no matter what you say to them, no matter how you try to explain the issue - from experience, they're right back at you with 'outrage brigade', 'no sense of humor' etc. Like there's something stopping up their ears.
dawg (5,077 posts)
17. Excellent post.
We need to listen to each other and respect each other. I have seen people on this board argue relentlessly in order to defend their "right" to make crude and insulting remarks about one group or another. I don't understand that attitude at all. We should be fighting about the issues on a board like this. But we shouldn't be saying things to offend each other. And if we slip up and do offend, we should apologize.
Apparently Israelis and rednecks are a privileged group at DU who deserve no consideration and/or get what comin' to them.
Matariki (14,612 posts)
20. I'll pretend your question isn't disingenuous and answer it.
Last edited Tue Feb 26, 2013, 10:17 PM USA/ET - Edit history (2)
You experience a societal privilege when you are part of a group that has some form of social advantage. I don't mean each individual, but the group itself. All the obvious things - pay ratio of men to women. Being able to drive or walk in places without being targeted by the police because of your skin color. Not have your reproductive rights be someone's political battleground. Having most people in authority or where you work or hope to work look like you. The list goes on.
To point out privilege isn't an attack on you, it's just asking for a little awareness and courtesy toward those who have to deal with the negative consequences of not being in a particular socially privileged group when they talk about those disadvantages.
Like I said, privilege is usually invisible to those who benefit from it.
And yet, here is a society--DU if the term may be permitted--that has decided that a class of people deserve less consideration because things they neither did nor even publically agree with, i.e. own slaves or beat women. Communism, being a community first ideal, disregards the individual's guilt or innocence and makes them subject to the fury of the mob.
And mobs only have power so long as they remain a mob. As soon as they disband they cease having identity and power.
So as soon as they lynch all the honkies they will find a new target. And then once they've exhausted that group they will find another...and another...and another.
They will destroy anything and everything to retain the power they cannot earn by merit.
This is the old pagan symbol for those who reject God seeking to become as gods:
It is a self-consuming image and it describes DU quite aptly.
bettyellen (19,042 posts)
88. \you make *your choices* sound like a huge burden- yet say you are comfortable
with having this "demanded" of you? It does't sound that way.
the demands you speak of do not actually exist. that's all in your head. no one expects anyone to be a martyr or a white night. lots of other people do the right thing AND feel guilty when they act the ass. they don't think it earns them special treatment.
you do have a choice, as do the rest of us. free yourself of the false construct that your life is not your own. if you're a white hetero man in the USA, your choices are much wider than most.
cliffordu (28,585 posts)
91. Yep you are exactly right.
Again, your post instructs and enlightens.
bettyellen (19,042 posts)
93. Good- you needed that!
Arrogant little bitch, isn't she?
cliffordu (28,585 posts)
94. Consider me sufficiently enlightened.
bettyellen (19,042 posts)
99. better enlightened than a white knight with a martyr complex.
patrice (46,080 posts)
113. A privilege is ANYTHING that is taken by means of ANY advantage & not through any consensual
exchange.
Though all privileges, meeting these criteria, are privilege, not all privileges are identical, some are greater, some less.
There are a couple of important variables here:
- any advantage could vary from conventionally recognized cultural advantages, to more idiosyncratic situational advantages;
- anything taken can vary in value from less to great and can vary from the most concrete, like goods or possessions, to more ephemeral phenomena, like emotional balance, self concept, or even intellectual property.
The reason the specific variables in the two sets identified just above are important is because they determine, for want of a better term, the degree of a given privilege.
And the reason that's important is because it means that recognizing privilege can be difficult if no advantage is identified or if the advantage that is most relevant to the taking is identified in-validly and/or if nothing is identified as having been taken or if what is taken is invalidly identified.
I think a problem we are having in discussing the kind of topics in this thread is that there is an underlying assumption that all of this is the same for everyone, or ought to be, when, though there are commonalities, the variances I mention above can be just as individually significant.
I propose that the first step to dealing with the problems that arise from these faulty assumptions would be that if one claims the autonomous value of how these variable factors manifest in one's own experience, that claim cannot rationally exist as a singularity, because to do so is a contradiction of one's own claim, to say individual experience is the determiner here and then deny other individual experiences that vary "too much" in comparison exclusively to one's own criteria, negates the whole foundation for the discourse which is the putative objective of any claims.
Yes, there is a collectivity to claims about privilege, or lack thereof, but those collectivities, unless they are THE end in and of themselves, are comprised of individuals, who are making claims about the validity of their individual experiences of greater and lesser degrees of privilege in themselves and in others, so if the basis is the independent value of that individual fact, then unless that's ALL individuals it's a taking also and, therefore, a privilege.
This is one of the foundational principles of what is referred to as Diversity, which may be a missing concept here.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
Be sure to throw this line around a few times:
Matariki (14,612 posts)
24. It's like fish thinking there's something wrong with other creatures drowning in water
She can be a real barricuda.
1StrongBlackMan (4,820 posts)
25. I have used that exact analogy ...
when explaining some peoples' inability to see their priviledge.
Matariki (14,612 posts)
30. It's woven into our very language
Last edited Tue Feb 26, 2013, 11:15 PM USA/ET - Edit history (1)
The way words for female are used interchangeably as synonyms for weak or cowardly. Or words for color values like 'light' and 'dark' are used interchangeably for 'good' and 'evil'.
It can be exasperating to try and explain the prevalence of this stuff and what growing up and living in it is like when you "don't breath that water".
Some people unfortunately take the mere discussion of this as an attempt to take something away from them. Instead of as a desire and demand for overall fairness and respect for everyone.
Herman Cain may be a dick but at least his companies were in the black.
gollygee (11,862 posts)
118. I call that The Beyonce Defense
White men do not have privilege because Beyonce makes a lot of money. Sometimes it's Michelle Obama, or Oprah. And yeah, not always women, so then it's President Obama or Jay-Z or someone.
The underlying theory is that if any individual woman or person of color has more money than any white man, there is no such thing as privilege. What it feels like that means is that every single white man SHOULD make more money than every single woman and person of color in order for things to be normal.
Beyonce and Jay-Z are given a free pass on being materialistic, arrogant, extravagant 1%ers precisely because they are not white.
Jasana (63 posts)
27. Matariki, they get it. They really do...
They just can't understand why a woman wouldn't want to go to a union meeting and hear the joke, "Dad, what's the difference between a vagina and a *unt. Son, vagina is a woman's sexual organ. *unt just describes the rest of the bitch."
They just can't understand why that 15,897th boob joke I heard bored me to shit and made me want to flush joke teller down the toilet.
I could go on but why bother? They already get it.
ChaoticTrilby (152 posts)
28. K&R
Very tired of men trying to explain to, or dismiss, women about the sexism that women have experienced for centuries. What? Do they think we're too stupid and air-headed to figure it out when we've experienced it first-hand? Utterly intolerable. I'm reminded of that short story about the Yellow Wallpaper, and how that lady felt being "explained"-down by the most well-meaning, bull-headed, men. Ugh.
And that goes for every sort of privilege-lording that I've ever seen from the outside. It just bothers me on a very innate level because, even though I'm not part of any racial minorities, I feel the flames of rage lick at my eyes when someone else of my "group" tries to "educate" racial minorities about discrimination. They don't need people to. They've known it all too well, all their lives. To act as if they don't strikes me as profoundly disrespectful and condescending.
As disrespectful as it is for me, an asexual, to be told by random hetero-/homo-/bi-/etc.-sexuals that I'm "just going through a phase" or "just sexually repressed."
With that off my chest, thank you very much for posting this. You've said everything I've been screaming at my computer monitor (albeit in a much less eloquent manner) for years now. Thank you.
Men! Do we really need to hear from THOSE people?
Demo_Chris (1,165 posts)
29. Look at these priviliged tykes
I sure hope they feel ****ing guilty for all that privilege. I think we should make it a point to tell them every day how lucky they are.
ChaoticTrilby (152 posts)
31. It is possible to be part of a privileged group while being part of a non-privileged group.
They're white. They are also poor. If you've ever read To Kill a Mockingbird, you know what I'm going to say next. Between a poor white boy and a poor black/Hispanic/other minority boy in the United States, the former has white privilege over the latter. But then, a wealthy person of any race has class privilege over both.
Furthermore, the fact that you're posting this pathos-laden appeal in this thread just screams that you either missed the point completely or you're trying to erase the difficulties that people of racial minority groups go for in favor of an "everyone has it rough, so let's just focus on people who are lower class" attitude. Speaking as a white, working class, lady, how very nice for you. Just go ahead and keep plugging your ears about the difficulties that racial discrimination enforces. I'm sure it'll work out for you.
However, if you want to get a clue-bat to the head, here you go: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
Also, acknowledging one's own privilege doesn't mean you have to feel guilty about it. That would just be silly. However, you should feel guilty if you try to dismiss others' lack of privilege or speak to them in a way that could be interpreted as condescending. That is what the OP is trying to dissuade others from doing.
So, if one of the poor white kids pictured snarked at a non-white person who claimed to be poor but also had an ObamaPhone and a color TV DU would be totally sympathetic and not take race in to account...
Right?
And on it goes. Many run in looking to claim an ever-larger slice of the grievance pie and any doubters are lambasted for being privileged, their arguments, ironically, dismissed out of hand by virtue of their race, gender or sexual preference.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022432447
