Trusting my judgment while acknowledging my bias
Getting a touch burned out on social justice issues right now. Since I graduated I made a real effort to become an educated feminist, and you really can't responsibly study feminism without various other intersecting issues, so these things are my main form of informative reading these days. I care a great deal, want to learn as much as I can, and do what I can to live responsibly in a world with so many problems in these areas, but there's so much badness that it's been a bit overwhelming lately. I feel bad saying that, since as an extremely privileged person I can avoid dealing with any of it if I want to, when so few others have that choice, and since it hurts me personally so much less than many others I should have more strength to deal with it. But in the interest of self-care, to enable me to participate positively at all, I think it's okay if I acknowledge when I'm getting overwhelmed and need to recharge once in a while.
The one thing I am struggling with right now that I'm not so sure how to handle is how I feel like I can trust my own judgment so little when it comes to evaluating the situations and the best course of action in social justice issues. As I said, I am an extremely privileged person, a straight, white, cis, het, educated, Christian woman from a rich background who has but rarely even encountered a lot of sexism personally directed at her. All my life I've lived in a status quo that serves me, and has made me comfortable in it. And I worry that it's conditioned me to be resistant to ideas that challenge the notions I'm comfortable with-- like, how much or little racism there is in me, or how much I benefit from my privilege versus my own hard work. Or, worst of all, how bad/racist/homophobic/whatever any given behavior and situation is. So it's made me afraid that however I assess something, I can't trust that assessment because it might be too influenced by my privileged bias.
I know the basics. I know I am the sort of person who just needs to shut up and listen in most conversations (concerning queerness, race, poverty, et cetera). I know I don't get to speak for people in different circumstances, or decide what their reaction should be. I'm pretty good about those. But sometimes I run up against something that doesn't sit right with me. It doesn't sound like the assessment made of the situation is actually correct. Here's a fairly mild example. There was that nice Coke commercial during the Super Bowl where I think America the Beautiful or something was sung in a dozen different languages, many of them not your standard western-European ones. I thought that was very nice. But then one of the blogs I read reacted to it with how meaningless it was since Coke is a capitalistic imperialist company that benefits from unjust labor practices in third-world countries. My first reaction was, "Oh, come on, for Christ's sake! Representation matters, that commercial's diversity was a seriously good thing and it's not fair to devalue it just because it doesn't fix all problems." But is that because I'd rather enjoy some nice feel-good lip-service rather than take a company (who I have given probably THOUSANDS of dollars to over my twenty-seven years of life) to task for things that seriously hurt disadvantaged people?
I don't know. I have a really hard time telling if, when I react negatively, it's because there's something genuinely off about it, or because I'm a privileged person who doesn't like threats to the status quo that might paint me in a light I don't like. It's not that I want to have my lily-white privileged feelings coddled so I don't have to feel bad about my participation in the corrupt system. If my impressions of things are influenced by that ingrained part of myself, I want to know, so I can do what I can to stop reacting based on it. But I want to be able to trust my own judgment. There isn't always going to be a proper authority there to tell me what's problematic and what the most responsible course of action for me to take is. It's frustrating. I don't want any reassurance or anything that I'm doing okay or whatever, so don't worry about that. I'd like to develop the skills to identify that stuff on my own, plus to identify when I'm dealing with a bias that is clouding me.