You may not like hearing this, but if you value equality and consensual relationships, and would personally prefer interacting with other people as mutual and free agents rather than exploiting or coercing them by having power over them if you had that choice, that means you *would not benefit* by having power over them.
That’s what benefit means – to have it better than would be the case otherwise. So if having power over others does not appeal to you as preferable to egalitarian relationships, you’re saying power over others would not improve your life, would not make it better. It would not benefit you.
And if that’s the case you can’t righteously assume that anyone in power necessarily benefits from that situation. You can’t assert that they would not also prefer equal and fair consensual social relationships if they could choose, not unless you can show that at the individual level they had the opportunity to make such choices and chose to oppress, chose to occupy positions of power.
I’d like to point out also that if you believe it to be true that power intrinsically is of benefit to those who do have power over others, that it is inherently desirable, then you’re saying that you would oppress if given the opportunity, since that, once again is what “to benefit” means – that it would be in your personal best interests, that it would bring you happiness, joy, satisfaction, pleasure, and so forth to have power over others. If there is a valid reason why you would not, that implies that it would actually be to your benefit to not do so. Whether it be conscience or a sense of justice and fairness, or a pleasure from interacting as equals and being trusted and being able to trust, or a wish to be in God’s good graces, or whatever, these reasons count as benefits when making such a choice.
Power is real. Inequality is real. Oppression is quite real, and struggles against it are noble and good and courageous and should be admired and lauded. What is not real is the notion that because you're rising up against oppression, you get to identify some culprits, evil people who can be blamed, perpetrators who can properly be thought of as unfairly getting away with oppressing. Power isn’t what we’ve been led to think it is. It defines the powerful as well as the disempowered. It isn’t a substance that one can possess and wield however one chooses. Most power is specifically the power to obtain this or attain that precise thing. Very seldom does a position of power give a person the power to dismantle the structures of authority that establish that power. Many people in social power were born to it, and far more were given a vastly unequal start within a system where people compete for it. Most of the social structures that specifically oppress categories of people – racism, patriarchy, colonialism, class stratification, etc – are solidly in place and individuals defined in a position without their participatory consent, the male white English-speaking wealthy western-nation able-bodied lucky privileged folks as much as the others.
Don't get me wrong -- many people in positions of structured power over others delight in it, revel in it, get a major part of their sense of worth from being able to feel like they're better than someone else. I'm very much exposed to that phenomenon, having endured bullying from fifth grade boys, assaults from fraternity boys in wealthy Long Island suburbs, and abuse of authority at the hands of police officers and psychiatric ward staff. Certainly they believed that having power over other people was a desirable commodity! But in all such cases it seemed like they were compensating for feelings of gross inadequacy. We're familiar with the trope of poor marginalized whites in the south making up for their sense of inferiority by abusing blacks so they can be better than someone, at least.
But that doesn’t make them right. And to go forth with the attitude that oppressors have it better in life than the rest of us do? It's the mindset of a child who thinks the misbehaving children are having a better time in life until and unless the teacher catches them at it and takes their pleasure away from them. It is not the mindset that creates a revolution. It's the mindset that creates a rotation. A rotation of the people in power. It's an old old story, people rising up against their oppressors so they can take the oppressor's comfy seats and make the former oppressors groven, put them up against the wall, show them what it feels like ...and guess what? After a very short time it's not just the former oppressors who seem to deserve the bottoms of our uprising's jackboots. And it's "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
And dammit, you're better than that.
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And yes, my book is supposed to come out this month from Sunstone Press, but I *still* have no concrete news to report yet. Stay tuned!
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Showing posts with label culprit theory of oppression. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culprit theory of oppression. Show all posts
Thursday, January 16, 2020
Friday, October 11, 2019
False Dichotomy
There’s a false dichotomy between “born this way” and “choice”. We encounter it in the MOGII communities, where there’s a rapid embrace of the notion of inherent genetic and brain differences, first for gay and lesbian people and, more recently, for trans folks.
That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.
In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.
So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.
Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???
Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?
It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.
I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.
Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.
Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.
———————
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That’s not the only place you find it, though. That same ongoing discussion can be found in the perpetual arguments about free will versus determinism. You ever dropped in on those? The backdrop for those discussions – often hinted at but not always explicitly identified – is the criminal justice system and whether or not it is morally defensible to punish criminals for their illegal deeds or if, instead, we should recognize that they are products of their environment and did not choose their behaviors. If you want to delve back further, this argument dates back to whether God shall punish evildoers for the evil that they have done or if they were preordained by God to have done those things in which case it isn’t their fault.
In other words, the notion that they didn’t choose is used to excuse behaviors that are labeled criminal or immoral.
So if we slide back over to the arguments about whether gay and trans people have choice, the argument that they don’t starts to look a lot like gay and trans people’s identities are being excused and forgiven, as if they needed to be excused or forgiven. As if being gay or being trans was akin to being a thief or a murderer or something. Uh huh.
Are you in a big hurry to buy into the notion that who you are needs to be excused or forgiven, on the grounds that “you can’t help it” ???
Why are our identities on trial? In all these discussions, there’s an unquestioned taken-for-granted assumption about what needs excusing or forgiving in the first place. If you want to discuss criminal justice and punishment, for example, how about we discuss Officer Daniel Paneleo, he whose chokehold on Eric Garner resulted in “I can’t breathe”, and, behind him, the entire police-enforced structure of racist social control. Do you want to start off from the position that Officer Panteleo can’t help it, that he’s a product of his environment and should not be held accountable? That we can’t expect him to change? That he was not a maker of choices? That he is not responsible?
It’s a false dichotomy. When a person makes choices, the kind of person that they are dictates what kind of choices they will make, and yet those are still choices. There isn’t one “self” there who is a decision-maker but who is “affected by” or “determined by” their own biology or their socialization and upbringing, as if those are external to the “self”. They aren’t. A person’s identity consists of all of their environment, their personal history, their built-in nuances from genetics and biology to the structure of prior beliefs and values – that’s all a part of who the person is. If you take all that away there’s no “self” left to do any deciding. But if we consider all that stuff as part of who the person is, the expression of that self takes the form of choices that the person makes. It’s how we experience ourself, as choice-makers.
I certainly do. In second grade, I looked around; I saw girls behaving one way and boys behaving a different way, generally speaking. I was in situations where I chose my behaviors, and the behaviors that I chose were the ones more typical of girls than of boys. I was proud of it, and rejected the notion that I should be ashamed of it. Could I have made a different set of decisions and still been true to who I was? No! But they were still choices. I was affirming who I was.
Last month I was assaulted by an angry individual on 14th Street in New York. I was wearing an orange skirt at the time. He was coming my direction in heavily congested foot traffic and collided with me as we passed; I thought it was an accident but a split-second later he came up from behind me and began pounding my back and head, all the while yelling, “I didn’t hit you! I never hit you!”. Now, sure, social forces and his personal history and widely shared beliefs about gender-appropriate behavior no doubt shaped his worldview, but he also made choices. His choices are a part of who he is, and I hold him responsible for all of that. I could make the same point about the people who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Florida awhile back. I’m not out to pin the blame on the culprit, nor am I a true believer in the moral sanctity of retributional punishment, but we are activists here; we are active. We act. So let’s get one thing established: if I am allocated choice at all to any degree whatsoever in my life, I choose to be as I am, a gender variant individual, and if you think to hold me morally accountable, bring it on, baby. I wouldn’t want to be any different and I make no apologies for who and how I am.
Quit acting like choice is a dirty word.
———————
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————————
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Wednesday, December 19, 2018
Skirt
I purchased and wore my first skirt not for transgender reasons but for feminist reasons. It's sexist to designate a garment as only for one sex when there's nothing about it's physical design that makes it accommodate one body structure and not the other. I liked skirts, they looked more comfortable than pants in the summer, and they looked fun to wear. And there was no reason I shouldn't wear a skirt if I wanted to, so I did. I wanted to flaunt my attitude towards sexist expectations.
There also were what could be called transgender reasons as well, though. The entire reason I had such a vested interest in challenging sexist expectations was that I'd been one of the girls as a child, growing up, and had retained that history and sense of self up through junior high and never fully stepped away from it.
Being a girl didn't mean wanting to wear skirts or needing to do so in order to feel fulfilled or appropriate. It meant being the way I was; what I wore and what my body was like had nothing to do with it. Girls were more mature than boys as children, more social, less antagonistic and violent, more patient, far more self-disciplined and able to hold themselves up to an internal standard, smarter, better at classwork, more sensitive, and more elegant overall. And I was competing with them, keeping up, proudly their equal. And the boys were an embarrassment, pathetic disgusting creatures for the most part, and I didn't want to be thought of as one of them.
I never sought to be perceived as female. I was proud of being a girl as good as any other girl despite being male. So I didn't crave a purse of my own to take to school or yearn for my own pair of oxford patent leather shoes.
Years later, the skirt thing was a way for me to be back-in-your-face to a world that had gradually managed to make me feel like maybe something was badly wrong with me.
None of this is entirely alien to a 2018 transgender community's view of being transgender. But it was pretty foreign to the 1980-vintage understanding of what it meant to be transsexual. And unlike a person in similar circumstances who did want to present as female, to be thought of as female, to transition to female, my experience mapped pretty comfortably to 1980-vintage feminism. I saw it as a feminist issue and framed it accordingly.
These days I frame my issues as those of a genderqueer activist doing identity politics, so I've had feet in both camps.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * *
There is political tension between some feminists and some transgender activists. I want to look at that in more detail today.
If you are transgender or are more familiar with a transgender perspective, come along with me for a view from a different window. The way transgender people talk about sexual polarization and the assignment of traits and roles to the two binary sexes is worrisome and problematic to many feminists, because it erases gender inequality (as if men and women were equal, just different) and instead stresses the inequality between cis and trans people (as if cisgender female and cisgender male people were equally privileged, whereas transgender people are at a social disadvantage compared to them, with less power).
Feminists also tend to be uncomfortable with what they see as a certain type of gender essentialism from transgender people. Feminism argues against the notion that there are all these built-in, inherent differences between men and women, whether it be a built-in appropriateness for the wearing of a skirt or a set of behavioral characteristics like being accommodating or flirty or whatever. Transgender spokespersons often embrace the notion that men and women are quite different, that they are different types of people with different ways of being in the world--it's just that some people's physical configuration got them misclassified as one of those two identities when in reality they belonged in the other category. Or, to put it another way, feminists see themselves as trying to tear down the political fence between the sexes, and they perceive the transgender phenomenon as consisting of people who consider the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, and tunnel under it to get to the other side, leaving the fence fully intact. Transgender paints the world pink and blue. Transgender people appear to celebrate the liberation of the skirt not because guys as well as gals should be able to wear them but because it's trans-affirmative for AMAB people to wear one.
Now let's switch. If you are a feminist, or are more familiar with a feminist perspective on gender issues, let's examine how feminist political behavior often looks to transgender people.
First off, for a person who (like I myself) considers that who they is one of the girls or women despite being male (or being in a body classified by other people as male at any rate), the presenting edge of feminism is the declaration that the female experience is less desirable, although for social-political reasons, not because being female is itself a less desirable condition. Still, that paints transgender women as a political "man bites dog" (or a "cat chases dog") phenomenon: if women are oppressed by men, and the situation female (in all its social aspects) therefore a less desirable situation, why are there people who clearly qualify to be considered as and treated as male doing their best to opt out of it and seeking to be accepted and regarded as women? Well, there are answers to that within feminist perspectives and feminist thought, answers that don't disparage the males (or "people assigned male at birth" if you prefer) who do not wish to continue to be subjected to the situation male; but those aren't the answers that many transgender people encounter when they hear feminists speak about transgender women. Instead, they hear feminists get defensive about this very question, as if transgender people had said to them that there is no women's oppression--see, here are people who could have lived their lives as men but they opt to be women instead. Transgender men, meanwhile, embody what so many people think lots of women would want--not out of penis envy but male-privilege envy. Transgender men, in fact, are often welcome in feminist circles, where they are viewed as female-born people who have chosen a transgender pathway as a coping mechanism for escaping the femininity cage imposed on women. But transgender people don't see this acceptance as a counter to feminist's suspicion and dubiety towards transgender women, perhaps because it is a quiet and low-key acceptance.
Feminists appear to many transgender activists as rigidly committed to binary ideas of power: that the only relevant unfair distinction within the polarization of men versus women is that of power, that it and only it is desirable, that men have it over women, period, end of story, and that therefore no male person or person perceived as and categorized as male can have any legitimate complaint about gender and how gender is set up in our society.
I'll confess that I have found it difficult to enunciate within a feminist context why I have a personal stake in this, why masculinity is toxic to me as a male and why and how it is in my personal political best interests to resist it, as opposed to doing so for chivalrous pro-women reasons. I will tell you that I have found within radical feminism a strong strand of thought that overturns the desirability of power over other people, itself, as a patriarchal notion, but I will also tell you that ordinary everyday feminism as one may encounter it is more likely to come from the more binary "who benefits / who suffers?" kind of analysis, the "culprit theory of oppression", and it does indeed leave no point of entry from which to be a sissy femme male activist against patriarchy.
I don't know if the conflict and friction between feminists and transgender activists is merely receiving more press coverage or if it is indeed worsening. It certainly seems to me to be intensifying. Transgender activists have more social power now than they did decades go when Jan Raymond flug down the gauntlet with The Transsexual Empire; they have labeled feminists who do not regard transgender women as real women TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists) and with considerable success have painted them as hateful bigots who need to be shut down, as people who have nothing positive to contribute to the dialog, as people against whom physical violence is deemed appropriate.
I'm not much disposed towards physical violence myself but I find this sufficiently frustrating that I will admit to fantasies of grabbing transgender activists in one hand and feminists in the other and smacking their heads together. Stop it!! We should be listening to each other, all of us. The stakes are high, and this is counterproductive infighting that benefits the status quo. Quit trying to trump each other's victim card. If social liberation is only an acceptable goal for whoever happens to be the most oppressed, we're never going to make any progress. Read each other's material. (And mine, dammit. You can learn from perspectives that differ from your own, and I come to you explicitly as an ally of both but member of neither of your two camps, with my own vantage point).
———————
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————————
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There also were what could be called transgender reasons as well, though. The entire reason I had such a vested interest in challenging sexist expectations was that I'd been one of the girls as a child, growing up, and had retained that history and sense of self up through junior high and never fully stepped away from it.
Being a girl didn't mean wanting to wear skirts or needing to do so in order to feel fulfilled or appropriate. It meant being the way I was; what I wore and what my body was like had nothing to do with it. Girls were more mature than boys as children, more social, less antagonistic and violent, more patient, far more self-disciplined and able to hold themselves up to an internal standard, smarter, better at classwork, more sensitive, and more elegant overall. And I was competing with them, keeping up, proudly their equal. And the boys were an embarrassment, pathetic disgusting creatures for the most part, and I didn't want to be thought of as one of them.
I never sought to be perceived as female. I was proud of being a girl as good as any other girl despite being male. So I didn't crave a purse of my own to take to school or yearn for my own pair of oxford patent leather shoes.
Years later, the skirt thing was a way for me to be back-in-your-face to a world that had gradually managed to make me feel like maybe something was badly wrong with me.
None of this is entirely alien to a 2018 transgender community's view of being transgender. But it was pretty foreign to the 1980-vintage understanding of what it meant to be transsexual. And unlike a person in similar circumstances who did want to present as female, to be thought of as female, to transition to female, my experience mapped pretty comfortably to 1980-vintage feminism. I saw it as a feminist issue and framed it accordingly.
These days I frame my issues as those of a genderqueer activist doing identity politics, so I've had feet in both camps.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * *
There is political tension between some feminists and some transgender activists. I want to look at that in more detail today.
If you are transgender or are more familiar with a transgender perspective, come along with me for a view from a different window. The way transgender people talk about sexual polarization and the assignment of traits and roles to the two binary sexes is worrisome and problematic to many feminists, because it erases gender inequality (as if men and women were equal, just different) and instead stresses the inequality between cis and trans people (as if cisgender female and cisgender male people were equally privileged, whereas transgender people are at a social disadvantage compared to them, with less power).
Feminists also tend to be uncomfortable with what they see as a certain type of gender essentialism from transgender people. Feminism argues against the notion that there are all these built-in, inherent differences between men and women, whether it be a built-in appropriateness for the wearing of a skirt or a set of behavioral characteristics like being accommodating or flirty or whatever. Transgender spokespersons often embrace the notion that men and women are quite different, that they are different types of people with different ways of being in the world--it's just that some people's physical configuration got them misclassified as one of those two identities when in reality they belonged in the other category. Or, to put it another way, feminists see themselves as trying to tear down the political fence between the sexes, and they perceive the transgender phenomenon as consisting of people who consider the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, and tunnel under it to get to the other side, leaving the fence fully intact. Transgender paints the world pink and blue. Transgender people appear to celebrate the liberation of the skirt not because guys as well as gals should be able to wear them but because it's trans-affirmative for AMAB people to wear one.
Now let's switch. If you are a feminist, or are more familiar with a feminist perspective on gender issues, let's examine how feminist political behavior often looks to transgender people.
First off, for a person who (like I myself) considers that who they is one of the girls or women despite being male (or being in a body classified by other people as male at any rate), the presenting edge of feminism is the declaration that the female experience is less desirable, although for social-political reasons, not because being female is itself a less desirable condition. Still, that paints transgender women as a political "man bites dog" (or a "cat chases dog") phenomenon: if women are oppressed by men, and the situation female (in all its social aspects) therefore a less desirable situation, why are there people who clearly qualify to be considered as and treated as male doing their best to opt out of it and seeking to be accepted and regarded as women? Well, there are answers to that within feminist perspectives and feminist thought, answers that don't disparage the males (or "people assigned male at birth" if you prefer) who do not wish to continue to be subjected to the situation male; but those aren't the answers that many transgender people encounter when they hear feminists speak about transgender women. Instead, they hear feminists get defensive about this very question, as if transgender people had said to them that there is no women's oppression--see, here are people who could have lived their lives as men but they opt to be women instead. Transgender men, meanwhile, embody what so many people think lots of women would want--not out of penis envy but male-privilege envy. Transgender men, in fact, are often welcome in feminist circles, where they are viewed as female-born people who have chosen a transgender pathway as a coping mechanism for escaping the femininity cage imposed on women. But transgender people don't see this acceptance as a counter to feminist's suspicion and dubiety towards transgender women, perhaps because it is a quiet and low-key acceptance.
Feminists appear to many transgender activists as rigidly committed to binary ideas of power: that the only relevant unfair distinction within the polarization of men versus women is that of power, that it and only it is desirable, that men have it over women, period, end of story, and that therefore no male person or person perceived as and categorized as male can have any legitimate complaint about gender and how gender is set up in our society.
I'll confess that I have found it difficult to enunciate within a feminist context why I have a personal stake in this, why masculinity is toxic to me as a male and why and how it is in my personal political best interests to resist it, as opposed to doing so for chivalrous pro-women reasons. I will tell you that I have found within radical feminism a strong strand of thought that overturns the desirability of power over other people, itself, as a patriarchal notion, but I will also tell you that ordinary everyday feminism as one may encounter it is more likely to come from the more binary "who benefits / who suffers?" kind of analysis, the "culprit theory of oppression", and it does indeed leave no point of entry from which to be a sissy femme male activist against patriarchy.
I don't know if the conflict and friction between feminists and transgender activists is merely receiving more press coverage or if it is indeed worsening. It certainly seems to me to be intensifying. Transgender activists have more social power now than they did decades go when Jan Raymond flug down the gauntlet with The Transsexual Empire; they have labeled feminists who do not regard transgender women as real women TERFS (trans-exclusive radical feminists) and with considerable success have painted them as hateful bigots who need to be shut down, as people who have nothing positive to contribute to the dialog, as people against whom physical violence is deemed appropriate.
I'm not much disposed towards physical violence myself but I find this sufficiently frustrating that I will admit to fantasies of grabbing transgender activists in one hand and feminists in the other and smacking their heads together. Stop it!! We should be listening to each other, all of us. The stakes are high, and this is counterproductive infighting that benefits the status quo. Quit trying to trump each other's victim card. If social liberation is only an acceptable goal for whoever happens to be the most oppressed, we're never going to make any progress. Read each other's material. (And mine, dammit. You can learn from perspectives that differ from your own, and I come to you explicitly as an ally of both but member of neither of your two camps, with my own vantage point).
———————
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————————
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Monday, May 14, 2018
The Complex Problem of Dealing With the Oppressors
Item: When rallying in protest against yet another incident in which the victims were blamed for their own victimization, one of the oppressed said, "I am so tired of people asking what the Victim could have done differently. It's not the Victim's behavior that caused this. It's the Perpetrator's behavior that has to change! It's the Perpetrators who are doing this, not their Victims!"
Item: When asked about a proposed support group to help privileged people realize the good that they would personally gain from ending inequality and oppression, one of the oppressed said, "I don't feel like We should be giving our energy to Them, supporting Them and nurturing Them in the changes They need to make. That's what We always do, that's always been Our role, devoting Our time and effort into helping Them cope and make Their lives better. We need to give Our energy to each other for a change instead!"
I've participated in both of those conversations, in various forms and at various different times, and I figure chances are good you have, too. In the case of the first item, it's pretty compelling that perpetrators or oppressors are ones whose behaviors are most in need of changing; they're the ones most directly perpetuating the status quo and least involved in doing things that would bring meaningful social change.
It's the second item where things get trickier. If you're like me, you're situated sometimes on the marginalized side and sometimes on the mainstream side of the various dividing lines. Maybe you're female and of a racial or ethnic minority but able-bodied and a US citizen. Or perhaps you're a diagnosed autistic-spectrum person living in an economically depressed and politically repressive nation but you're male and not of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity. So at some point in your life, because your own experiences with being marginalized and oppressed makes you personally sympathetic and politically committed to allying with other oppressed people, perhaps you too have found yourself trying to get feedback about what you should be doing and how you could be doing it better, how to be a better ally and supporter. Yeah, maybe you admit to yourself that you hope for some pats on the back or high-fives for being a relatively good person over here on your mainstream and privileged side of one of those dividing lines, as opposed to being one of the jackboot-wearing sneering oblivious ones who are mostly just part of the problem. But if that desire for approval is self-serving, the desire to check in and get some critical feedback is at least in large part motivated by wanting to do a better job at being a socially conscious and righteous person, trying to listen and stay informed, right?
But most likely you would not be here, reading this, if you had never also been on the less favored side of one of those dividing lines. So chances are good that you've been a participant in at least one or two conversations and discussions in which people on your side, the marginalized and oppressed side, have found it important, essential, and liberating to see the mainsteam established privileged folks as Them, as the Problem, as the Oppressors. Why? Because although they are largely oblivious to what they do, they do hurtful things, and they occupy positions of power that give those hurtful things destructive energy. And because you, you personally and all these other people here in the room with you, the others who share your definitional situation, you didn't start this, they othered you folks first. And so, as a group, you spent years, decades, lifetimes, feeling inferior in the face of a definition of Normal that was devised around Them. You felt apologetic and wrong and in need of changing yourself for not being like Them. Or you felt inappropriate and illegitimate any time you were caught behaving or expecting equal treatment as long as you had this Difference defining you as less than, as not entitled. How could you and your people ever rise up against that without starting off with a rebellious and self-assertive "It's us against them, and we are on our side instead of against ourselves from now on" --?
If they're treated or invoked as absolute rules, the two items are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. If it is Their behavior that needs to change, and We are agents of social change, we can't focus our energies entirely on ourselves and expect to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We do have to affect Them. We do have to succeed in affecting Them. We do in fact have to succeed in transforming Them into people who are no longer on the opposite side of a meaningful dividing line. As no longer The Problem.
That's not to say that the most important method of having an effect on the privileged isn't, indeed, to become stronger and self-affirmed people. Nor is it to deny that oppressed people do need to turn to each other and devote their strengths to each other.
But once we have done so and have turned away, in large part, from blaming ourselves and embracing this external definition of ourselves as wrong, deviant, inferior, and undeserving of equality, we do need to affect them. And we do need to maintain a mindspace that has room for the concept of those people, the folks who are defined as Them, ceasing to be a Problem. We need to have in our heads the imagined possibility of ourselves winning, which means ceasing to be oppressed. Furthermore, we need to interact with individuals as individuals. Each person among them who is trying to detach from ongoing participation in the patterns that keep us down is a potential ally.
Each such person will continue to breathe air and walk the streets against the backdrop in which people in their majority / privileged / mainstream / oppressor category are still doing the damage, being the Problem. But that doesn't make them not allies, not at the individual level. It occasionally means that their best intentions fall short of being any kind of guarantee against egregiously wrongful individual behavior. They'll disappoint us. It will sometimes seem like a frustratingly bad return on our invested time and emotional energies.
Remember, though, that they represent the locus of change.
————————
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Item: When asked about a proposed support group to help privileged people realize the good that they would personally gain from ending inequality and oppression, one of the oppressed said, "I don't feel like We should be giving our energy to Them, supporting Them and nurturing Them in the changes They need to make. That's what We always do, that's always been Our role, devoting Our time and effort into helping Them cope and make Their lives better. We need to give Our energy to each other for a change instead!"
I've participated in both of those conversations, in various forms and at various different times, and I figure chances are good you have, too. In the case of the first item, it's pretty compelling that perpetrators or oppressors are ones whose behaviors are most in need of changing; they're the ones most directly perpetuating the status quo and least involved in doing things that would bring meaningful social change.
It's the second item where things get trickier. If you're like me, you're situated sometimes on the marginalized side and sometimes on the mainstream side of the various dividing lines. Maybe you're female and of a racial or ethnic minority but able-bodied and a US citizen. Or perhaps you're a diagnosed autistic-spectrum person living in an economically depressed and politically repressive nation but you're male and not of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity. So at some point in your life, because your own experiences with being marginalized and oppressed makes you personally sympathetic and politically committed to allying with other oppressed people, perhaps you too have found yourself trying to get feedback about what you should be doing and how you could be doing it better, how to be a better ally and supporter. Yeah, maybe you admit to yourself that you hope for some pats on the back or high-fives for being a relatively good person over here on your mainstream and privileged side of one of those dividing lines, as opposed to being one of the jackboot-wearing sneering oblivious ones who are mostly just part of the problem. But if that desire for approval is self-serving, the desire to check in and get some critical feedback is at least in large part motivated by wanting to do a better job at being a socially conscious and righteous person, trying to listen and stay informed, right?
But most likely you would not be here, reading this, if you had never also been on the less favored side of one of those dividing lines. So chances are good that you've been a participant in at least one or two conversations and discussions in which people on your side, the marginalized and oppressed side, have found it important, essential, and liberating to see the mainsteam established privileged folks as Them, as the Problem, as the Oppressors. Why? Because although they are largely oblivious to what they do, they do hurtful things, and they occupy positions of power that give those hurtful things destructive energy. And because you, you personally and all these other people here in the room with you, the others who share your definitional situation, you didn't start this, they othered you folks first. And so, as a group, you spent years, decades, lifetimes, feeling inferior in the face of a definition of Normal that was devised around Them. You felt apologetic and wrong and in need of changing yourself for not being like Them. Or you felt inappropriate and illegitimate any time you were caught behaving or expecting equal treatment as long as you had this Difference defining you as less than, as not entitled. How could you and your people ever rise up against that without starting off with a rebellious and self-assertive "It's us against them, and we are on our side instead of against ourselves from now on" --?
If they're treated or invoked as absolute rules, the two items are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. If it is Their behavior that needs to change, and We are agents of social change, we can't focus our energies entirely on ourselves and expect to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We do have to affect Them. We do have to succeed in affecting Them. We do in fact have to succeed in transforming Them into people who are no longer on the opposite side of a meaningful dividing line. As no longer The Problem.
That's not to say that the most important method of having an effect on the privileged isn't, indeed, to become stronger and self-affirmed people. Nor is it to deny that oppressed people do need to turn to each other and devote their strengths to each other.
But once we have done so and have turned away, in large part, from blaming ourselves and embracing this external definition of ourselves as wrong, deviant, inferior, and undeserving of equality, we do need to affect them. And we do need to maintain a mindspace that has room for the concept of those people, the folks who are defined as Them, ceasing to be a Problem. We need to have in our heads the imagined possibility of ourselves winning, which means ceasing to be oppressed. Furthermore, we need to interact with individuals as individuals. Each person among them who is trying to detach from ongoing participation in the patterns that keep us down is a potential ally.
Each such person will continue to breathe air and walk the streets against the backdrop in which people in their majority / privileged / mainstream / oppressor category are still doing the damage, being the Problem. But that doesn't make them not allies, not at the individual level. It occasionally means that their best intentions fall short of being any kind of guarantee against egregiously wrongful individual behavior. They'll disappoint us. It will sometimes seem like a frustratingly bad return on our invested time and emotional energies.
Remember, though, that they represent the locus of change.
————————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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