User: faithhopetricks Date: 10 Aug 2007 18:01 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: Silence = Mort

I didn't steal any of those things; I didn't choose any of those things; I didn't deserve any of those things. I merely have them. My life is different because I am not marked as Other; I'm marked as Normal. I have privileges I didn't seek out or choose, and many of my friends don't.
When somebody talks about "white privilege", they aren't saying you're bad or oppressive. They're saying "Look! There's air! You're breathing it!" And saying "I didn't MEAN to breathe it" is irrelevant. It's there. You have been told it's there. What are you going to do about it?

I really like the way you put this. (I would say more, but I'm super groggy.)

User: jonquil Date: 10 Aug 2007 18:02 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Oh, thank you. I was having paranoid fantasies that I'd been a jerk in some way and that was why nobody was commenting. (It's being that sort of day, paranoid freak-out day. Feh.)

User: faithhopetricks Date: 10 Aug 2007 18:13 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: Silence = Mort

Aww, I hate that kind of paranoid fit! (Altho it is Friday, and I've noticed a big drop in LJ participation on Fridays.)

You probably already saw it but katallen posted something similar -- really got me thinking. (Usually I think "OH WOEZ ME I am just one lone White Girl what can I do," but posts like yours and hers make me think, well, duh, you can do something. And you should do something.)

User: thomasyan Date: 10 Aug 2007 19:08 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Once I checked LJ and saw that a whole bunch of people had defriended me: Their locked posts were no longer showing up. Omigod, how did I offend so many people, without noticing until now? Oh, LJ had logged me out?

User: jonquil Date: 10 Aug 2007 19:13 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

HEEE. I feel your pain. "What? She's not SPEAKING TO ME ANY MORE OH WOES!" Oh. Logged out, am I?

User: cofax7 Date: 10 Aug 2007 18:26 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

You're not being a jerk. I hadn't replied because I was caught in a conundrum of wanting say "Yes!" and also wanting to be a supportive friend and assert that you could send your kids to a good college because you have a good job that you worked hard for and have raised good smart kids.

So, um, White Privilege facing off against Imposter Syndrome. Two syndromes enter, one syndrome leaves!

User: jonquil Date: 10 Aug 2007 18:38 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Heeeeeee.

User: neadods Date: 10 Aug 2007 18:36 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I noticed a fair amount of this during the Doctor Who racial discussion (I know a fair amount of people who call it the racewank, but Daily Deviant - *that* was racewank!) Things would be pointed out and people were all "But I'm not racist!"

And in many cases... they aren't. They just aren't looking at the bigger picture, and I'm including myself because there was a whole lot of stuff brought up that I'd never seen or thought about either.

Best thing do to about it is to at least start listening when Other talks.

On a much more frivolous note, I will be happy to take you to the Birchmere sometime, where the bathroom stalls fit nobody.

User: kirinqueen Date: 11 Aug 2007 01:10 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: moulinrouge

I thought it strange that there weren't any Asian people around in this world where everyone used Mandarin words and wore Chinese-style clothing, but only for a minute.

User: septembergrrl Date: 11 Aug 2007 02:22 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

This is beautifully written. Thanks for saying it.

(And the lack of Asian-appearing people on Firefly bugged me, though I'm not generally super-duper sensitive.)

User: _swallow Date: 14 Aug 2007 00:01 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: serial

I have this batty theory that a lot of people think about social ills like racism in terms of their individual agency (like, you do not affirm racism in your personal actions, therefore You Are Not A Racist: the "but I am have POC friends and I never say the N-word" defense) or their basic character ("but sexual assault is Evil and we just believe that all our pledges are of such good moral character that they couldn't have assaulted any of the girls at that party") and this has to do with a Western Christian conception of sin.

Like, the Catholic who sins commits an individual, discrete act, which causes (this is how the nuns at my school represented it) the number of points you have in your Morality Bank to go down. You go to confession and perform the appropriately proscribed penance, and the individual, discrete action of saying several Hail Marys causes the number of points you have in your Morality Bank to go back up. Or: you sin, and it's an expression of your basically evil character.

I feel super self-conscious saying this out loud, because I am not even Christian and I don't want to be a religion tourist, but my roommate is Orthodox Christian and she blew my mind by explaining that the Orthodox 1. don't believe in original sin 2. don't believe in the sort of transactional, context-independent sin-for-penance model of sin and repentance. She said, "We think of sin as coming like buds from a tree," and then she later said "or like fruit left out on a table-- they're going to draw flies, are you going to take care of that?" and I feel like that gives me a better foundation for thinking about social ills-- it's not about my individual actions or who I am essentially; it's about the history of my context, the structures of privilege and power I was born into, the action I take within those contexts, the social and personal cycles that bring me into the same situation again and again. If my roots are poisoned or my branches grew crooked it's not my Fault in some deeply essential way (the kind that led some LJ commenter I read recently say MY SKIN IS WHITE AND YOU ARE SAYING THAT MAKES ME EVIL WELL DO YOU WANT ME TO SLICE IT OFF), and my response should not be guilt, but instead action-- what can I try to do to clean it up? If the cycles I live in are unhealthy, what can I do to change them?

Anyway. I've been chewing on that idea for months and the more I think about it the more I'm convinced that most of the people I talk to about social ills like racism have had their thinking sort of supported and framed by those Western Christian concepts of sin, even if they're not Christian or religious themselves.