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Writer's pictureS. A. Crow

Guest Author Post by Allan Hunter


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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