On who can be --ist and the need for a new lexicon

[jedifreac]

I was out with a group of friends a few days ago and a conversation about my really inexpensive (but apparently has problematic plumbing) apartment came up. The origin story for Casa Jedifreac.

The truth is, my apartment is brilliantly cheap for the area I live in. The narrative behind why that is is a bit more complicated than that. If you ask

Comments

[yeloson]

So, when people say "only white people can be racist", this is using the definition that there is an entire system upholding the -ism. In this case, you happened to find someone who will give better deals to Chinese people... on average, being white is a better advantage, in the US. (In most Chinese countries, the racism supports Chinese people, although still there's influences of white supremacy that reaches there too

[jedifreac]

I think Taiwanese would be more accurate since the landlady was from Taiwan. At no point did I represent myself as Chinese. I view my Taiwanese ethnic identity as entirely separate from any Han, Hakka, Hoklo, Aboriginal, or European genetic ancestry I might have.

[yeloson]

Fair enough.

I love your writing

[rhymezer]

Let me start off by saying I really appreciate your writing and I'm always taken aback by how clearly you can synthesize information - and usually I'm surprised by your concision. Today that is clearly not the case, but I still enjoy it nonetheless

[jedifreac]

Everything you commented makes sense to me (and I hope you can tell that we are in agreement and I was commenting on the WoW thing facetiously.).

Here is the thing, though- when you are in the majority class, when you are constantly privileged, you don't notice when you get an easy-in, you only notice when others do. For example, it would be really easy for me to complain that there are no special scholarships for straight students, without acknowledging that on a systemic level if is already much more difficult for LGBT students to get into college given the issues they have to wrestle with in high school and quite frankly the day to day privilege they face in their daily lives. So I think in a way the friends I was speaking with would not necessarily have the self awareness to recognize when they face barriers and when they have easy ins, and when others do. It takes a certain amount of self awareness that you are more likely to develop if you have experience with privilege, but may not ever necessarily develop.

What do you do

Hmmm

[rhymezer]

Yeah, no I know we're talking about the same thing differently. It's something that I struggle with, from a young age I was actively engaging in these types of discussions and a handful of people really got into it with me and it made for some incredible dialogue. But it's also what we call preaching to the preached. The people who most need to hear it, will simply shut off and walk away. Or be like, Oh I'm not like that. Or my friends aren't like that. Or my family isn't like that so it's OK, ignoring again the larger systems at work. It led me to be very divisive and separating from a lot of my peers from a young age when racial epithets or homophobic remarks were murmured - at first I would call people on it. But after a while, years or decades of trying to get them to think critically about what they were saying and equating homosexuality with negativity or POC as less than whites, it simply became overwhelming and I feel with some populations you will get burned out constantly trying to defend a minority point of view

[essentialsaltes]

That my one alleged racially lucky break is comparative to what they can benefit from consistently.

That's the crux, I think. Your break was not particularly 'lucky', as if it came ex nihilo from the gods of chance; it's just that the kind of benefit that your particular knapsack of privilege entitles you to is rarer than the average white dude's in modern America.

I think this helps combat the us vs. them view of things. We all carry a pile of privilege due to our ethnicity, background, and whatever gets picked up along the way. But we should not lose sight of the fact that, in a culture dominated by X, people that have X badges get preferred more frequently than others who do not show the X.

[chaosthethird]

That comes back to what this whole article is about: the lexicon. When I think of "privilege" now, I don't think of it as a synonym for "an advantage", but as a institutional set of advantages, a legacy of advantage that straight/white/male/able-bodied/wealthy people have. The occasional "hook-up" that I might get from another black person in a store, or that Marissa got from her landlord, is not even in the same category. Those are situational, temporary, fleeting. Privilege is grounded, enduring, permanent.

[chaosthethird]

Way late to responding to this, but I've been caught up in a chain of your posts starting with the recent one about Marvel Studios at racebending, and ended up here