On privilege and intersectionality.

[draegonhawke]

This was hard to write, and even harder to post. Harder still to post publicly. Still, here it is - after having sat in my drafts folder for about four months, but thrown to the world at last.

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In an effort to help people understand privilege, its forms and complexities, I'm going to use myself as a case study. I'm going to examine a lot of the

Comments

[squeemu]

Thank you for posting this. I knew most of it, but there were some things that gave me pause think. I always forget that I have the cisgender privilege and this was a good reminder. (I also always forget that I have the privilege of being able-bodied.) (And I'm sure there are others I forget or never knew I had. Oh! Like being from the United States; I'd never thought of that in those terms before. I mean, I knew that it was really lucky to be born here, but I'd never applied the privilege idea to it.)

Another one that I had never thought of as privilege: being monoracial. I don't know why, but I felt sort of shocked and indignant tonight reading about your experiences. I mean, I know that almost all forms fail in terms of multiracial options, but for whatever reason (I suspect that reason is monoracial privilege), it never really hit home.

ONE MORE THING and then I will stop babbling: thank you for bringing up the fact that privilege can be uncomfortable. I'd never thought about it in those terms, either, although the general idea has come up before. (For example, I was talking to my dad tonight about Facebook, and he said he refuses to send friend requests to women, since it could come across badly. He asks them to friend him first. That is definitely something I have never had to consider.)

Thanks again for posting this and sharing it with everyone. It helped me re-think some things.