If it’s a good description of how people whose thoughts align with @HMS_Irruncible’s view the issue, why is it a poor metaphor?
I don’t think the metaphor is simplistic. I think the way we treat people when we follow the logic outlined in HMS’s posts is simplistic, and the metaphor correctly points that out. The conflict comes from treating people in this way, not from pointing out the treatment.
@Spice_Weasel 's post is excellent, and she talks about all the issues that arise when people try to rank all the disadvantages. She gives excellent reasons for why “oppression pyramid” is a damaging metaphor.
Also, she and i quite obviously travel in very different circles.
Okay, I’m happy to say that we should listen to the poor white man in a conversation about poverty. The middle class black queer woman might have useful advise about how to deal with the issues (and powerful cishet white men often have good advice on how to actually, you know, change laws and stuff) but on the topic of how poverty affects people, you should listen to poor people.
People who think like that are applying that as their metaphor and it is a poor one.
OTOH people who think that there are no degrees of privilege and lack thereof for different groups and identities are naive.
What does this mean exactly? Does it mean there is a sense in which
?
Because my personal experience is that when I try to point out that there are circumstances in which eg white people or men may be at a disadvantage, the response is that overall and in wider society, white people and men do have more privilege.
I thought you meant that calling that behavior an oppression pyramid is a bad metaphor.
If you meant that using that framework to begin with is a bad idea then I am not sure where our point of disagreement is.
Our disagreement certainly isn’t here, either.
Glad to hear it. I’m not accusing everyone who supports social justice of following this paradigm, but it really is pretty common.
Her post shows the damage from progressives trying to rank disadvantages, and acting accordingly. Will you accept that this is a real phenomenon that we should be able to name and talk about, even if you still disagree on how common it is or about specific claims?
I think you can talk about it without using terms that encourage that way of thinking. I note that @Spice_Weasel only barely used the term, to tie her discussion to the title, after clearly describing real problems using words that accurately described those real problems.
Using language that encourages strife and misunderstanding is playing into the bigots’ hands. IMHO.
Also, i hang out with a lot of progressives. This might be a common problem, but it’s not a universal problem among progressives.
IMHO, the underlying action is what really plays into bigots’ hands. Not to mention, the underlying action is bigoted in and of itself.
I spend lots of times around progressives, too; I agree, it’s a common but not universal problem.
I have recently started spending more time around conservatives (people I picked out to be closed with trend liberal to progressive; people who entered my life because they have kids my daughters’ ages are a mixed bag). Classic racism is a common but not universal problem. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be addressed.
I think is the case with all kinds of groups, from families to schools to politics to workplaces and beyond. We are not often taught the skills to come to decisions and take actions in a reasonable, conscientious way. In a society built on hierarchies of wealth and power and authority, from the family to schools to politics to the workplace, a lot of transactions seem to be zero sum games and getting what we need and want becomes a struggle against others. It is no surprise that groups of people who want to change things are also caught up in this, however much their principles would dictate a better approach. Add in the hostility of people and organizations and groups that want to keep and reinforce hierarchy and authority, and again, not surprising that progressives too often use the tools lying around.
No. It means what it says. Not a simple pyramid of pain. Real people are not any single identity, and all of those who share one aspect of identity have their own complete selves.
To flesh out.
I, a white male heterosexual Jewish American, can however appreciate that antisemitism exists and be concerned about it, and simultaneously recognize that in this particular country at this particular point in time it is not the most pressing issue and that legal residents, not white in particular, being persecuted under the false banner of fighting antisemitism is a bigger problem.
I can fight against antisemitism while also appreciating the privilege I as an individual have and acknowledge that right now it shouldn’t be the number one issue to address.
Make sense?
It may be most common online. Most of my experiences with it were on blogs (back when I agreed with most of it) and on social media more recently. I’ve had plenty of progressives earnestly explain things to me that when I repeat them here, I’m told are a right-wing fantasy.
When I tried to describe what I meant, your first response was the same as everyone else’s: that it’s something conservatives nefariously invented. So is it really the name that’s the problem here?
It’s useful to have a shorthand term for a set of related problems. I’m not wedded to this one, but I’m extremely unpersuaded by any argument that these problems shouldn’t be named at all. That seems a lot like trying to sweep them under the carpet.
Here’s another example I gave earlier in the thread, which no one responded to:
This is fairly recent and may reflect that men have been more able to get higher-paying jobs that do not require university degrees than women can get. For example, where I live, men have about 95% of the jobs in construction. Women are about 95% of the nurses, but that requires a college degree. Construction does not. And union construction jobs tend to pay better and have better conditions than union nursing jobs here.
I would say that the problem you are trying to describe is not actually the attempt to jam all kinds of privilege (or lack thereof) into a single hierarchy, but the unwillingness of groups to listen to people who have too much privilege. So any words you choose to use to describe the problem ought to focus on that, and not on the actual attempt at ranking.
And i still think that the idea of a single hierarchy is something mostly pushed by conservatives, to discredit the idea of oppression at all.
I suspect so. None of those I know in the real world think that simplistically.
Not really. That has been the same when men were the main people getting college and advanced degrees and now. It isn’t what changed.
There have been multiple threads on this subject. No, I do not think “the response almost universally is that it’s boys and men who need to change” … seriously.
Nor is it simply stated “when black kids do worse in education, the response is that education needs to be changed to fix this.” Usually there is more discussion about institutional and systemic contributions … not the same thing.
How about, “inappropriate considerations of privilege”
You can’t really address a problem without understanding the underlying cause. In this particular case, the unwillingness to listen is predicated on having constructed a hierarchy of privilege, a pyramid if you will, where the voices of those who are marginalized are elevated and those considered having more privilege are often dismissed or even actively told to remain silent. “Check your privilege” is an invitation to shut up rather than a suggestion to think about things through a perspective other than your own.
It has been turned into that through rhetorical abuse, but it’s not what it should mean.
I agree. It’s sad, because privilege theory and intersectionality are valuable tools when examining the complexities of social interactions. Privilege is a difficult concept for some people to grasp, and it becomes even more difficult when the word is wielded as a club in conversations.
Well, hierarchy is a better word than pyramid, because it automatically implies that we’re taking about a social construct, not some actual thing. And it’s a better description, too. (Are you meaning to say there are more people lower in that pyramid? Because that’s my first image when i think of pyramids.) I still think the problem is better described as
though.
Is anyone confused about there being a large triangular structure called the Pyramid of Oppression? How is that any more confusing than the Food Pyramid?