Re: Thoughts on Shoehorning unrelated content into works of entertainment.
DanGero, you're right. We all have some privileges, some advantages, some lucky breaks in life.
The description of privilege in one of my above posts refers to something bigger though. It refers to stuff on a systemic, societal level. A few examples:
1. If you're white (non-Hispanic, too), you probably won't ever be stopped in an airport, on a train or harassed at a Starbucks or in some other public place because you're hanging around and "looking suspicious". This has happened to people of colour and Hispanics many, many times. White employees have called the police on black people lingering at a Starbucks. A black woman was detained and questioned for forty-five minutes because a white university student saw this woman sleeping on a sofa in a public area and called security; turned out the black woman was also a student and had every right to be there. This sort of thing happens a lot more than we'd like to admit that it does. So if you're white, it has almost certainly never happened to you. If it did happen, I can be fairly confident that it wasn't because of the colour of your skin.
You can go through life with the certainty that this is extremely unlikely to happen to you. Hispanics, people of colour and anyone who is non-white, in general, do not have this certainty. Many of them will absolutely go through life not being harassed much about their skin colour or ethnicity, but most will get at least something. Virtually every person of colour that I know has experienced some form of systemic oppression based on race.
Not having to worry about that? That's white privilege.
2. If you're male, and fit the physical stereotype of being male (i.e., you are not gender-fluid, you were not assigned female at birth, etc), then you are less likely to be sexually harassed or physically accosted. This absolutely does not mean that you can never be a target; perish the thought. What it does mean, however, is that unless it has happened to you, you likely aren't walking around worried about people trying to grab, touch, assault or rape you.
Men can and do get sexually harassed, though the numbers appear to be pretty biased the other way. No one, ever, should be sexually harassed. No exceptions. It's an extremely ugly thing to do to someone.
Women, unfortunately, are schooled from a young age to take precautions. Don't walk down this dark street after nine in the evening. If you have to walk through a parking garage after work, go with a friend or be on the phone. Don't wear that dress, that shirt, that lipstick, because someone might see it as tempting. Don't flirt, because if you do, you might be later accused of leading your assaulter on. This is still a problem. It's still happening far, far too often. There are risks that we say that women just shouldn't take, choices they just shouldn't make. Now imagine for a moment being a woman, and being aware of all of that stuff. You're walking around, doing your best to cause no harm to anyone, yet you have to do all these things, and avoid all these other things, because you might get harassed.
If you're a dude, the likelihood is that you don't have to worry nearly so much about this. And guess what? That's privilege, too. Male privilege, in this instance.
I could carry on, but I hope you get the point. Privilege is the sort of thing where if you're experiencing it, you don't think about it and will probably want to reject it out of hand. Oppression, on the other hand - which is essentially the opposite of privilege - is something which can shape the very way you lie, and something which will have an impact on your life in an everyday sense. I would suspect that we all have similar ways in which we are experiencing oppression, and some of us have shared privilege as well.
It is a bad idea to say "Well we all have some privilege", because that just boils everything away and tries to pretend that problems, which are still very real, don't exist. It pretends, for instance, that female privilege and male privilege, black privilege and white privilege, are all absolutely equal, and it's all okay because everyone has it bad. This is just a bad and erroneous misrepresentation of facts.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
