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Date: 2013-06-04 11:02 am (UTC)
liv: A woman with a long plait drinks a cup of tea (teapot)
From: [personal profile] liv
I very much recognize the emotional experience that you're describing here, suddenly encountering facts that break a previously held belief that okay bad things sometimes happen, but it's mostly a safe place and mostly a good place for the people in it. And yes, it is terrifying. I had a very good friend who sat with me while I worked through being terrified and found a way to face that fuller but less comforting picture of reality.

Acknowledging that everything in this comment is accurate, I suppose my question is, and then what? The privilege frame seems to me to be confronting someone who feels like a not particularly advantaged person in your society, if one is just scraping by, someone enduring a meagre, hard-scrabble existence, and responding, essentially, well, who cares about your trivial little problems, most people on this planet are much worse off! I don't really want to do that, if there's some straight, white, culturally Protestant man who feels unloved and alienated and threatened and his economic situation is uncertain and all the other myriad problems he has, I want to establish a sense of solidarity and say, this society is rotten because you are one of the luckiest people in it and yet your life is still more scary and miserable than it is happy. And yes, I need him to understand that people from gender, sexual, religious, ethnic etc minorities have all the same problems of alienation and economic threat and so on, plus some other problems due to systematic discrimination, historical and current. I don't think that's best communicated by emphasizing that unhappy, scared SWM are privileged, though.

The housing example is a powerful and pertinent one, yes. I've been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on housing discrimination against African-Americans and it's blowing my mind with just how pervasive and how deliberate that was. And a good example of literal privilege, I bet there's loads of white Americans who have no idea how much their families benefit from this deliberately skewed and racist housing market. I'm fairly sure that this country is heading rapidly for a huge crisis of housing policy too, though hopefully it's not quite so overtly racialized.
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Miscellaneous. Eclectic. Random. Perhaps markedly literate, or at least suffering from the compulsion to read any text that presents itself, including cereal boxes.

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