Visualize a trans girl at the age of twelve, coercively attired by
her white christian parents into wearing the garments they consider
appropriate, and her hair cut short without her consent. Assume the
parents use a combination of pressure and threat and actual physical
force.
Clearly she's in a marginalized and relatively powerless situation,
and yet she's white and christian in a culture that extends privilege
to people bearing those aspects. Furthermore, she has both male and
cisgender privileges extended to her, whether she would prefer to be
perceived as such or not.
Privilege is complicated, and we are all living intersectional lives,
perhaps far more than we realize it.
There isn't a single person you've ever met who doesn't belong to
some privileged identity groups, nor have you ever met any who
doesn't belong to some marginalized ones.
That doesn't negate the reality of the identity factors that you are
able to observe. We categorize people, not because we are so
determined to shove everyone into a box and ignore their
individuality and uniqueness, but because we gain some understandings
of them when we do so. We get a sense of some of what they are going
through or have likely experienced.
We are creatures of pattern recognition. We can't think without
generalizing. It's how our minds work.
Where there is evil in the world relevant to making general rules
about people, it seems to come in when we
* turn a description into a prescription and create an "ought to"
rule out of a general rule; or
* treat individuals as if exceptions do not matter, and that whatever
is true in general of the group in which they are categorized is true
of them personally; or
* forget that categories are concepts, and that the same realities
can be sliced up differently in order to view things differently
When we recognize or identify a social privilege that is unfairly
bestowed on a category of people, the implicit message is that it
could be different -- that it could be equal -- and that calling
attention to people's privilege counteracts the tendency of privilege
to blind people to aspects of how things are.
I appreciate being shown or reminded of where my privileges exist.
It is not a good thing to be blind to that. Ripping the disguise off
power differences in society is a different thing from dismissing
anything that isn't all about power differences as less important.
When we do the latter, we enthrone power as the only thing that
matters.
The ultimate blindness of privilege is that it leaves you not knowing
the story of others.
--
Allan Hunter (she/he/they \they're all wrong, not picky)
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