firecat

I agree with what the following post says about privilege.

http://community.livejournal.com/debunkingwhite/794697.html

The post does not explain how it all works, it just explains the general shape of it.

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From:

webmaven.livejournal.com

Hmm. Section four is a bit hard to take in the current form, and lacks nuance. In particular "participate" and "being" don't quite seem right. Maybe "implicitly support" would be better for the former, and I'm not sure what would be better for the latter.

Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but there is a 'silence equals consent'-ish idea here that is getting lost by polarizing "partaking of x privilege implicitly supports anti-x oppression" into "having x privilege inevitably makes you an anti-x oppressor".

Finally, the last bit of it (4.5) is certainly true, but doesn't follow from the rest of the section. It should be promoted to it's own section.

From:

firecat

How would you propose to rewrite section 4?

I don't think it's perfect, but I agree with the general gist, which is that you can't ever accurately declare, e.g., "I am white, but nothing about my being white and nothing about my actions ends up furthering oppression of people of color."

I am particularly aware of this in issues of sizism. If a person loses weight for whatever reason -- even illness -- and their weight loss is noticeable, that fact ends up reinforcing fat-negativity, simply because fat-negativity exists and some people make assumptions about what the weight loss means, and have opinions about the weight loss, and so on. They might have no intention whatever to reinforce it, might even be against reinforcing it, but it happens anyway. Insofar as a person can't avoid this effect, it's a form of victimization. But it's a form that might end up also benefitting the victim (because society says that thinner = better).

That doesn't mean "no one should ever lose weight" and it doesn't mean "everyone who loses weight is bad." It means that you can't opt out of affecting other people and reinforcing the system by your existence and actions.

From:

webmaven.livejournal.com

It is true that no one can say "even though I am an X, nothing about my being an X and nothing about my actions ends up furthering not-X oppression", but that isn't the same thing as saying "being an X automatically makes you a not-X oppressor".

The fact that losing weight for any reason ends up reinforcing fat negativity does not make the person losing weight sizist, and neither does being thin, which is what section 4 taken as a whole currently says.

Perhaps just the supporting sections need to be rephrased, especially 4.1, which says "if you have white privilege, you will be racist." That could be rewritten as "if you have white privilege, you will contribute to racism."

There is a subtle but important difference between unavoidably contributing to not-x-ism simply due to being an x, and actually being not-x-ist.

From:

firecat

I prefer not to label people and to maintain a distinction between a person as a whole and their behavior and influence, so I would be inclined to agree with you.

I don't think I understand the concept of privilege as a whole well enough, though, to be telling the writer of the post that they "need" to rephrase a particular section.

I need to actually do some work today (the "racefail" conversations have been eating my life and I'm behind), but if I get some time later I may post a comment there asking if there is a reason for using the "being an X makes you Xist" formulation, especially in the case of racism.