Oppressor Guilt
One of the reasons white suburbanites in the segregated suburbs get a rush of fear when they see a handful of black people in their neighborhood is guilt. "They must hate us, they must be bent on revenge and inclined to do violence, because I sure would be if the things we've done to them had been done to me".
Oppressor guilt of this sort is of very dubious benefit to the oppressed. Yes, it's possible that such guilt motivates people to try to be more fair, to set aside their prejudices, some of the time, but what I've observed is that the fear of retaliation gets expressed as a doubling down of oppressive reactionary tactics. The white suburbanites vote for "law and order" politicians and ask for police protection, and the police doing the protecting then do the things that gave rise to Black Lives Matter, stopping people for the infraction of Driving While Black and interacting with them as active threats to the community.
It should not come as a major surprise that right-wing conservative politicians ride the wave of these kinds of fears, identifying an out-group as the Culprits who are to blame for things not being the way they should be. Jews, the natives, Catholics, immigrants, the insane, gay people, atheists, someone who is already a marginalized people who can be pointed to as the epitome of what's wrong with today's society, some group that we can blame. This kind of appeal resonates with fearful oppressors whose oppressor guilt makes them fantasize a horrible day of vengeance that they need to be protected from. If those scary people can be branded a menace, we can hate them with justification and feel less guilty as we trod them down.
But it's not just the conservatives, surprisingly enough. The left is also really really fond of the idea of having a culprit to blame. They use a different model, of course: rather than identifying a powerless outgroup, they target the most privileged and powerful. Rich white heterosexual able-bodied men. Now, faced with the choice of designating already-marginalized members of an out-group as the perpetrators or instead designating the rich straight white guys, it seems compellingly clear that the conservative folks are doing a much more horrible moral wrong in their choice of a social scapegoat.
But that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. What's more interesting, I think, is a closer exam of the left's designation of Culprits. Let's go there. Instead of preaching to the proverbial choir about the evil wrongness of the conservative right in blaming powerless out-groups for the ills of society, I'll perhaps be able to challenge you a bit, are you game?
You know the drill: those privileged straight cis white guys are the culprits because they are the oppressors; oppression benefits them, right? They have power, so if they wanted things to be any different, things would be different, and they aren't, so it's totally their fault that things are unfair and unequal, yes? And since they won't change things without pressure, we just have to light the fires and then hold their damn feet to the fire, ain't that so? They bloody well are the culprits, then, aren't they?
Join me in this thought experiment. Pretend I have magical wish-granting powers and I offer you this choice: you can either be the alpha oppressor yourself and have hegemony and power over all the other peoples, with all the benefits and luxuries that that entails, or you can live in a world that is totally without oppression, a world of equality and voluntary cooperation. (And no oppressor guilt anywhere to be found).
I could point out that if you choose to be the oppressor, you lose the moral high ground, even if you're only making that choice in a hypothetical scenario. Because then you're essentially saying that your real objection to oppression is that someone who isn't you gets to be the oppressor, and you want to hold that position. But for the second time, that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. You didn't choose that anyway, did you?
Let's look at your choice. You're saying you see more benefit to living as equals, that it would be more to your personal advantage to live in a world that didn't have oppression in it. I am in complete and utter agreement with you.
Well, unless you think rich white cis able-bodied guys are biologically different in their brains or something, you just realized that they don't benefit from oppression. Let me say that again for emphasis: rich white privileged cisgender English-speaking able-bodied male folks, the folks with the greatest possible number of privileges imaginable in our social system, do not benefit from oppression. Oh, they benefit from being in their social location and not a far more marginalized social location, sure, no doubt about that, but they are not better off than they would be if they lived in a world that didn't have oppresion. You said the latter was preferable to you. Extend that to them, the awareness that it would be preferable to them, too.
It is important to understand that our social system works a lot like a Parker Brothers© Monopoly™ game: the winner of the game isn't winning the game because of being a horrible selfish person, but because the rules of the game reward being a selfish person who bankrupts all the other players on the board, and even if everyone tried to play nice and be less competitive while playing Monopoly, the game still rewards the most competitive person who acts in that fashion. It's the rules of the game. Not the personality characteristics of the players, but the rules of the game.
I will not at this point elaborate on why and how we have ended up playing a social game in which competing to marginalize other people while concentrating advantage into our own hands happens to be the objective, but we have.
This is a blog about being genderqueer. The relevance of all this is that oppressor guilt is not our friend; straight cisgender people are not our enemy, nor should our communication with them be geared towards shaming them and holding them personally responsible for our situation. Most of them don't understand what we have to go through, except to the extent that we explain it and they choose to listen. Even then they may not get it. And it may threaten them, threaten their existing ways of understanding sexuality and gender and so on. They're going to ask dense and annoying questions. Often. Their fears will drive them to distort what we've said and twist its implications into ridiculous interpretations. It's going to continue to piss us off.
But honestly, I don't think they dreamed all this up one day in the primordial paleolithic Boys' Bathroom and then imposed it on us. They don't have to put up with what we have to put up with (and I myself don't have to put up with some of the stuff that many of you do, to be honest), but although the suffering of marginalized people is worse, I think we need to move beyond the simplistic temptation of designating a culprit. Ignorance is enough of an enemy.
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I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
Oppressor guilt of this sort is of very dubious benefit to the oppressed. Yes, it's possible that such guilt motivates people to try to be more fair, to set aside their prejudices, some of the time, but what I've observed is that the fear of retaliation gets expressed as a doubling down of oppressive reactionary tactics. The white suburbanites vote for "law and order" politicians and ask for police protection, and the police doing the protecting then do the things that gave rise to Black Lives Matter, stopping people for the infraction of Driving While Black and interacting with them as active threats to the community.
It should not come as a major surprise that right-wing conservative politicians ride the wave of these kinds of fears, identifying an out-group as the Culprits who are to blame for things not being the way they should be. Jews, the natives, Catholics, immigrants, the insane, gay people, atheists, someone who is already a marginalized people who can be pointed to as the epitome of what's wrong with today's society, some group that we can blame. This kind of appeal resonates with fearful oppressors whose oppressor guilt makes them fantasize a horrible day of vengeance that they need to be protected from. If those scary people can be branded a menace, we can hate them with justification and feel less guilty as we trod them down.
But it's not just the conservatives, surprisingly enough. The left is also really really fond of the idea of having a culprit to blame. They use a different model, of course: rather than identifying a powerless outgroup, they target the most privileged and powerful. Rich white heterosexual able-bodied men. Now, faced with the choice of designating already-marginalized members of an out-group as the perpetrators or instead designating the rich straight white guys, it seems compellingly clear that the conservative folks are doing a much more horrible moral wrong in their choice of a social scapegoat.
But that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. What's more interesting, I think, is a closer exam of the left's designation of Culprits. Let's go there. Instead of preaching to the proverbial choir about the evil wrongness of the conservative right in blaming powerless out-groups for the ills of society, I'll perhaps be able to challenge you a bit, are you game?
You know the drill: those privileged straight cis white guys are the culprits because they are the oppressors; oppression benefits them, right? They have power, so if they wanted things to be any different, things would be different, and they aren't, so it's totally their fault that things are unfair and unequal, yes? And since they won't change things without pressure, we just have to light the fires and then hold their damn feet to the fire, ain't that so? They bloody well are the culprits, then, aren't they?
Join me in this thought experiment. Pretend I have magical wish-granting powers and I offer you this choice: you can either be the alpha oppressor yourself and have hegemony and power over all the other peoples, with all the benefits and luxuries that that entails, or you can live in a world that is totally without oppression, a world of equality and voluntary cooperation. (And no oppressor guilt anywhere to be found).
I could point out that if you choose to be the oppressor, you lose the moral high ground, even if you're only making that choice in a hypothetical scenario. Because then you're essentially saying that your real objection to oppression is that someone who isn't you gets to be the oppressor, and you want to hold that position. But for the second time, that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. You didn't choose that anyway, did you?
Let's look at your choice. You're saying you see more benefit to living as equals, that it would be more to your personal advantage to live in a world that didn't have oppression in it. I am in complete and utter agreement with you.
Well, unless you think rich white cis able-bodied guys are biologically different in their brains or something, you just realized that they don't benefit from oppression. Let me say that again for emphasis: rich white privileged cisgender English-speaking able-bodied male folks, the folks with the greatest possible number of privileges imaginable in our social system, do not benefit from oppression. Oh, they benefit from being in their social location and not a far more marginalized social location, sure, no doubt about that, but they are not better off than they would be if they lived in a world that didn't have oppresion. You said the latter was preferable to you. Extend that to them, the awareness that it would be preferable to them, too.
It is important to understand that our social system works a lot like a Parker Brothers© Monopoly™ game: the winner of the game isn't winning the game because of being a horrible selfish person, but because the rules of the game reward being a selfish person who bankrupts all the other players on the board, and even if everyone tried to play nice and be less competitive while playing Monopoly, the game still rewards the most competitive person who acts in that fashion. It's the rules of the game. Not the personality characteristics of the players, but the rules of the game.
I will not at this point elaborate on why and how we have ended up playing a social game in which competing to marginalize other people while concentrating advantage into our own hands happens to be the objective, but we have.
This is a blog about being genderqueer. The relevance of all this is that oppressor guilt is not our friend; straight cisgender people are not our enemy, nor should our communication with them be geared towards shaming them and holding them personally responsible for our situation. Most of them don't understand what we have to go through, except to the extent that we explain it and they choose to listen. Even then they may not get it. And it may threaten them, threaten their existing ways of understanding sexuality and gender and so on. They're going to ask dense and annoying questions. Often. Their fears will drive them to distort what we've said and twist its implications into ridiculous interpretations. It's going to continue to piss us off.
But honestly, I don't think they dreamed all this up one day in the primordial paleolithic Boys' Bathroom and then imposed it on us. They don't have to put up with what we have to put up with (and I myself don't have to put up with some of the stuff that many of you do, to be honest), but although the suffering of marginalized people is worse, I think we need to move beyond the simplistic temptation of designating a culprit. Ignorance is enough of an enemy.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts