Are you at all familiar with idioms? Wait, is this sea-lioning? Instead of talking about the actual problem we’re busy engaged in a tedious discussion about terms.
The food pyramid was intentionally meant to encourage you to eat more from the bottom than from the top. The change in size was the key thing the image was meant to convey.
Do you want to convey that there are a ton of people at the bottom of this pyramid?
Yes, and i recognize a bad idiom that’s designed to promote bad ideas when i see it. And the fact that it obscures the actual problem is the reason we are having this discussion.
Sure, that’s part of it. The more disadvantaged checkboxes you want, the fewer people there are who meet all of them.
What bad ideas do you think we “designed” this idiom to promote?
I think we are having this discussion because the actual problem is painful to discuss.
To be clear - there are individuals who will find a way to wield virtually every concept as a rhetorical club. Or to mix metaphors, use a scalpel to stab rather than dissect.
And others who are intellectually lazy and just assume that whoever scores highest on some oppression scorecard is automatically more virtuous and to be supported.
Useful concepts get abused. Nothing new in that.
Which illustrates why it is a crappy metaphor. To me the fewest are those with the most privilege, the 0.1%ers in the privilege lottery. Many more who have some aspect that is lesser. Depending on context. So yeah in the context of discussing poverty the perspective of a poor white Appalachian deserves to be heard more than that of a queer Black multigenerationally middle class woman. And in the context of implicit racism or explicit homophobia the reverse.
Ignorance over what is relevant as experience in a particular context and what is in that context abuse of privilege is not communicated by that metaphor.
- I did no such thing, and this over-reading of intent is getting quite old.
- I did respond and say that it depends on the situation.
- Nobody has nominated me the presiding officer of deference politics, I am not the expert or inventor, others have their own voices, and I find it a bit creepy that you’re dragging my name across multiple threads on this board like some kind of trophy scalp on this topic.
It seems like some people in this thread really want to discredit the whole concept of deference hierarchy by leaning into a strategy that resembles the “reverse racism” tactic, digging as hard as possible to contrive a hypothetical discussion, i.e. about white poverty, in order to demonstrate that it introduces situations where a white person would be unjustly prevented from having their voice prioritized. I can only say that this misses the point, which is why I really don’t want to give the strawman any more oxygen than it deserves.
People want this to be a set of bright-line rules like a condo association, so they can pull on the thread of “liberal hypocrisy” and “reverse racism” that brings the whole thing down like a house of cards. I described it in simplistic terms for rhetorical convenience, hoping that a truism like “it’s OK that white people’s voices aren’t always the loudest in the room” would be obvious and universally agreed enough that it would help some make sense of the concept, but clearly that’s not the strongest motivation in play here.
For the frequent flyers who can’t let go of the “what about white poverty” gotcha, I’ll say that maybe there are situations where it might make sense to prioritize a white voice on the topic. Possibly. It is complicated, because life is complicated, poverty is complicated, and this is about life, not a pile of debate-club rules.
Yeah, i, also, assumed the top of the pyramid is the people with the most privilege. And you say it means the opposite? Great metaphor you have there.
That’s on okay term, too. It describes a real thing. I’m not going to automatically discredit your post if you use it. I will automatically discredit any post which relies on “oppression pyramid”, as the poster is carrying water for racists, even if they aren’t, themselves, racist.
Well I read you saying this:
That’s where I get my understanding of your intent from. Which is very different than “it’s OK that white people’s voices aren’t always the loudest in the room”
Instead it reads like saying anyone who disagrees with your general rule is just an upset cishet white, likely dude, upset that they can’t dominate. Because that is what you said.
I imagined it the other way around. The top of the pyramid is one guy who’s white, male, cis, heterosexual, able bodied, super rich, Christian, intelligent, handsome, and whatever else is on the wheel of privilege. The guy who ends up all the way at the other end of the room when you do a privilege walk. If you say something bad about someone above you on the pyramid, you’re punching up, which is good and praiseworthy. If you say something bad about someone below you, that’s punching down, which is bad.
Conservatives imagine it as an inverted pyramid, I think, with the white men at the bottom getting dumped on and blamed for everything, and then white women getting somewhat less attacked, and more and more deference the higher up you go.
Not necessarily addressing DemonTree specifically, but just because her post is the closest one to use as an example — there we go with another description that leaves some people going “wait, the what of what?” and wondering if this is just something the writer came up with to make a point or is some real thing.
I really don’t care about the term “pyramid”. It isn’t my term; I just don’t like the implication that the underlying phenomenon doesn’t exist, or isn’t a problem. If you don’t like the term, we can call it something else.
This, on the other hand, is a thought terminating cliche.
A privilege walk is a teaching tool. You line up your students and have them step forward if they’re (white, cis, straight, had both parents through childhood, etc) and backwards if they’re (black, gay, trans, had divorced or dead parents, etc) to demonstrate that different people start the race of life from different points.
It’s absolutely not something DemonTree made up; my wife did these at least a half dozen times throughout her higher education en route to being a teacher, and done it herself with leadership groups and similar she taught.
It’s hardly obscure or unusual.
And today I learned that exercise has that specific name. Ignorance fought.
(And, because of generational tier of course, I never got to experience it in my own schooling. )
In reality you’d probably end up with some kind of normal distribution rather than a pyramid, especially if you included a lot of different axes of privilege. I think ‘pyramid’ is supposed to convey that it’s not a strict ordering like a chain; from the top there are many ways to take a step down: race, sex, sexuality etc.
But does no one else think exercises like the privilege walk, or writing down all of one’s privileges and/or disprivileges are likely to leave students with the impression that there is a hierarchy of privilege, with some people having more and some less?
Interesting. I haven’t seen that, either.
Does it give the impression that some people have more and others fewer privileges? Yes, i imagine that’s the point of the exercise.
It doesn’t, by itself, suggest there’s some canonical ranking of privileges, though. It does suggest that some of the individual categories are always more or less privileged than their counterpart, like male vs female. Which i don’t think it’s always true, nor an especially helpful idea to promote.
Is it a good thing to do in a classroom? That probably depends on how it’s handled.
I think you are the first progressive I’ve spoken to who has said this isn’t true. AFAIK it’s usually stated explicitly, eg on privilege wheels like these:
In general, and in most circumstances, all other things being equal, a Black person has less privilege than a white person (in the US). Similar for women vice men, trans vice cis, LGB vice straight, etc. This is just a fact (or as close to factual as any sociological assertion can be). Dishonest (and stupid) conservatives, MAGA, and others hostile to both the truth and to social justice values twist this fact (which is a “mostly” statement, not an “always” statement) into bullshit like “Malia Obama has less privilege than a drug-addicted, homeless white veteran”.
I wasn’t asking if there was a simple pyramid of pain or whether people are reduceable to a single identity.
If instead I said “I don’t believe white people are more privileged than black people”*, what sort of responses would I be likely to get?
Are you referring to Trump randomly deporting legal residents on trivial or spurious grounds? I guess doing that on the basis of antisemitism could be considered a misuse of left-wing ideas, although I don’t think it’s the one we’re discussing.
It’s not really addressing the issue at hand. My observation is that historically, antisemitism from right-wingers (typically white) has been taken very seriously, while antisemitism from Muslims and other POC has been minimised and excused by the left for various reasons (the assumption these groups were less dangerous because they lacked power, fear of inciting Islamophobia, and possibly a paternalistic assumption that they didn’t know any better). And the same was true of sexism, homophobia etc. Do you disagree that this has been the case?
* Note for the reading comprehension impaired: this is not my actual view.
@puzzlegal, what I am usually told in these discussions is that while Malia Obama can have more privilege than the drug-addicted, homeless white veteran, the drug-addicted, homeless white veteran still has more privilege than a drug-addicted, homeless black veteran. No ifs, ands, or caveats. When I have brought up specific circumstances where this may not be true for individuals, I’m told that it’s still true overall, with the implication that this is the important thing. I assumed this was a standard belief of those concerned with social justice, IMO very reasonably,