Why is it a +1 or a +2? Presumably, because there’s fewer of them, right?
It’s hard to argue that black people are given an easy ride in the education field if the vast majority of teachers are still white.
There have been countless articles about why black people with degrees don’t go into teaching that often (usually it’s pay), but my point was that in a state where $300M trimmed from the education budget is no big deal, everything counts right now. Jobs aren’t plentiful around here. Now, my job is (hopefully) secure right now, but most urban districts have affirmative action policies and actively recruit minority and male staff.
It’s been ‘a thing’ for awhile. Cite. Cite. Cite. Cite. Kids, too.
I was told a dozen times in my teaching program that minority teachers are better for our students than white ones.
Except of course she didn’t say that it was unfair that Indians are underrepresented in Renaissance Faire attendees. That’s just a bizarre, absurd thing you made up and attributed to her.
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Anyway these our nations were founded on the sweat and blood of our forefathers, not so we should feel obliged to feel uncomfortable or excuse our ways to accommodate others that have freely chosen to move here.
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. . . most people posting in this thread are Americans. Obviously you’re unaware, but a pretty significant part of the sweat and blood that was spent founding the United States was not white people’s. So in the context of the U.S., this is pretty far from being a valid argument.
It’s hard to take you seriously when you make a remark as flippant as yours was and then complain about my response, which was a lot more serious than your remark.
You’ve given me no reason to think that a person’s perspective isn’t an enormous contributor to whether or not they have an informed opinion, so I’m not really swayed here.
If you’re really reading what I said to mean that there’s one single perspective all straight people share, I think you’re deliberately trying to come up with excuses to take offense. Do you really have a hard time believing that straight people’s perspectives on gay rights issues are different than gay people’s? Then I don’t think you’ve done enough listening.
:rolleyes: The eyerolls come after the obvious, silly, patronizing, or inadvertently offensive speech, not before it.
It’s childish to try to argue that I’m talking about a magic “I’m right!” card when I made it pretty clear that I’m talking about having a more thorough, more informed understanding of the topic because I’ve, by necessity, had to think about it far more than someone who’s straight (and cisgender) has. You keep going back to this same tired well, claiming that I think members of minority groups have some special trump card by virtue of being oppressed or whatever. When in fact I’ve only argued that there are reasons why the opinions of members of minority groups should be given particular respect when the discussion centers around their issues. In fact, your response is a typical tactic used by defensive people to shut down discussions of their privilege, but it’s not an actual response to what I’ve said.
Where did I say otherwise? You are either accidentally or deliberately missing the entire context. Of course the ideal situation would be for the government to recognize certain kinds of unions, and let people decide for themselves or with their churches that they’re married.
But as I made clear, although for some reason you missed it, I’m talking about the context of straight people telling LGBT people who are advocating for marriage equality that this is the politically viable path to achieving it, when it obviously is not, as desirable as it would be. Read for context.
It’s unfortunate that you decided to completely fail to address the two central points I made about why people should, in some conversations, “check their privilege” – the inescapable asymmetry in which the various perspectives on an issue held by members of the majority are far more available to members of the minority (inescapable, in fact) than the converse, and the fact that even the most well-meaning people naturally tend to end up talking over others when this imbalance is in play. I think I presented good reasons for both of those, and you’ve failed to address them. Instead all I see are a bunch of repeated assertions that members of the majority have just as much insight to share – and no real reasoning to back those assertions.
This incapability to take what I’m saying seriously shines through in the rest of your response. For example:
Notice how I started off:
I did address it, pointing out that in broad strokes we agree. Did you miss that part?
As for the rest of your post, please let me know when you’re ready to post without silly little “read for context” insults. I read what you wrote carefully and responded in kind. If the best you can do is roll eyes, we’re done here.
No. It failed in any way to address those two points in any specific way. You clearly don’t agree with my conclusion, but you neither explained why you disagreed with them if you think those points are invalid, nor explained why you disagree with my conclusion that it’s sometimes necessary for people in the majority to make the effort of consciously shutting up if you think they’re valid.
I also pointed out exactly what context you had obviously missed. I reiterated my point and demonstrated why what you said about it was a nonresponse. Since you have no response to that, I can only assume this is bluster designed to distract from the fact that you can’t really respond.
At this point, I feel pretty comfortable guessing you’re a white heterosexual cisgender man, and obviously in our society that gets you a lot of wiggle room to refuse to respectfully listen to people who make you uncomfortable by pointing those things out, and to do things like make childish ultimatums like this when people don’t treat you with the degree of deference you obviously feel you deserve. Hence things like making a flippant remark about breasts and then saying something pissy and patronizing when my response to it isn’t sufficiently politer than your initial remark.
And that kind of distracting bullshit is pretty lamentably common when people are asked to confront their own privilege. It still doesn’t change the fact that it’s not a real response – it’s just an excuse not to respond because the topic makes you uncomfortable.
I agree with this pretty much whole heartedly.
This however, is essentially the definition of privilege. The common experience has always had enough airtime. If you are “the norm” then your experience has had plenty of airtime already and really doesn’t need to be threshed out again.
When someone says check your privilege, it doesn’t even necessarily mean you’re wrong. It’s that as the “norm” your viewpoint has been expressed enough already, and it would behove you to actually listen to the person who is being marginalised.
I come across this issue largely in 3rd wave feminism, which is the only “activism” I’m anyway involved with. And yes, it can be hugely grating for a man to come into a feminist space and tell women what they *should *feel. For example, too often in a discussion which involves women complaining about being whistled at or propositioned in the street, men will counter with “But I’d love it if women propositioned me!”. Which entirely misses the point.
Anyway, I don’t want to hijack this thread, which is about white privilege rather than male privilege. But I do think there are certain parallels, particularly in the tendency to dismiss all complaints as “not THAT bad” and the claims that ““X”'ism is over and really you’re just being oversensitive.”
When I am shopping and someone follows me around the room it is because they are providing customer service or want to make a sale.
Wait! You mean the real reason is because they think I’ll steal something!:eek: :rolleyes:
My point, which will probably will be ignored or missed, is that you know that this is the way people will react to you in a situation and that is what you see even when there is another interpretation. I don’t doubt that staff follow people around to see if they are stealing. I used to work in security. I profiled people who were acting strangely or looked out of context. Usually based upon what they were wearing, not their skin colour.
Nor do I doubt that because of your skin color it happens more to you than me. But there are times when my perception is the correct one and your’s isn’t. Do you actually see when that happens? How do you tell the difference? And how do you know that when you leave the store, that clerk doesn’t do the same thing to anyone else who comes into the store regardless of their skin colour?
And privilege means never having to worry about that.
I agree with the underlined part; I think “check your privilege” is a weird buzzwordy way to phrase it that rarely works.
It does–and it shows you exactly the way in which the person you’re talking to is missing the point. If you’re not interested in having a conversation with this person, why are you having a conversation with them? But if you are interested in having a conversation with them, then you now know how to proceed in order to educate them. And if you’re really, really good, then you might learn something about that particular person’s struggles with gender relations. But maybe not.
As I said, if you hear something you’ve heard a thousand times before, that’s too bad, because that’s the human condition. If someone is saying something that hijacks the discussion, it’s worth pointing that out (in this example, saying something like, “We’re not talking about what you’d like, here”). That’s totally legitimate. I don’t think privilege necessarily enters into it, however.
mister nyx, at this point I’m unsure how to express myself any more clearly to you, if you think I’m not addressing your points; I think I’m addressing them head-on. You, on the other hand, persist in ad hominems at me, bizarrely accusing me of trying to avoid conversation while you’re doing so. We’re done.
Maybe privilege is too loaded a term. Used correctly (in my experience) it’s a way of telling the person you’re talking to not to dismiss your viewpoints. i.e. If I was black and talking about how it’s tough to always be in the minority in some situations (a made up example, I don’t presume to speak for black people) and you said “Well it’s not really tough because X and Y, and personally I wouldn’t be offended because Z” then that is a situation where you should be told to check your privilege. Because you’re talking over someone who has actually experienced something in order to give your viewpoint about how you imagine it would be.
In the example you gave earlier, talking about prostitution, I think it would be wrong for someone to tell you to check your privilege unless they themselves were, or had been, a prostitute.
Of course I don’t worry about it. I’m not there to steal anything. And if you’re not there to steal anything, then it shouldn’t bother you, either.
In this example, I agree that the person who says it’s not so tough is being a jerk. My go-to example is Wendy Rose, a native American writer who talks about being on panels with (white) anthropologists, and she says something about her culture, and the anthropologist “corrects” her; she wrote about the utter rage that filled her with. Same dynamic, and it’s an obnoxious thing to do.
I don’t think “privilege” is the correct word, though, because “privilege” refers to something else. If we were discussing what white teachers experienced in a mixed-race classroom (say, the anguish we feel when we are unable to decrease the race gap), and a black parent started saying that there was no such anguish, that we were perfectly happy to fail black children, a similar dynamic would be going on. But clearly it wouldn’t be a case of that parent not checking privilege. It’d be an example of that parent being a jerk by thinking their imagination of my experience trumped my actual experience.
This is what I’m saying. We gotta listen to one another, and we gotta especially listen to folks who are experienced in the matter at hand. Saying “check your privilege” never, in my experience, solves things, and it’s not the most accurate thing to say when someone is being a jerk and promoting their imagination above the actual experience of someone else.
This, of course, is exactly the sort of promotion of imagination over facts that’s so deleterious to conversation; I am thrilled that you’re providing a real-world example.
You say it “shouldn’t” bother someone. But it does: it bothers a tremendous number of people to whom it happens. You’re imagining that it wouldn’t bother you, and using your imagination to dismiss the feelings of folks to whom it’s actually happened.
Instead of doing that, you should be considering:
a) the fact that it does bother a tremendous number of people; and
b) why it does.
And yet, in many threads here, men have gotten awfully offended about women seeing all men as threats.
White privilege means dismissing the experience of people who ARE bothered about being followed around a shop, and then telling them that they shouldn’t be upset about it because you aren’t.
I’m neither ignoring nor missing your point, but I am giggling at the oblivious irony of it.
Whereas I’d say “being unforgivably self-centered means…”
You have failed to respond, over and over, to specific things I say, like for instance when I pointed out your complete failure to address the context of that bit about civil unions and marriage equality. And then you made up excuses to refuse to discuss anything further. We were already done when you said you were refusing to continue because I wasn’t kissing your ass enough. That’s all that’s necessary to evaluate whether you’re interested in any kind of honest exchange. You would address my points rather than making excuses not to if you weren’t just trying to distract from the issue and shut me up.
Anyone who honestly and fairly compares the long, polite, and in depth post I wrote last night with the half-assed response you left today and then your further, even worse responses will be able to see what you’re doing.
mister nyx, I can’t possibly stop you from thinking I’m trying to shut you up, but that belief is just weird. You keep keeping on, though.
If someone else thinks I didn’t adequately address one of his points, please let me know.
I actually agree with you overall, and I don’t personally like the word “privilege” myself, purely because it invokes so much defensiveness in the people it’s applied to. But nevertheless it is the accepted term in academia for the type of behaviour we’ve both agreed it describes and being told not to use it because it upsets the people it refers to is slightly grating for obvious reasons.
Mind you, I would frankly LOVE to see the academic paper which uses “being unforgivably self centred” in place of the word privilege 