iFederico posted:

Most rhetoric around 'checking your privilege' or self flagellation about being white are more of a signaling mechanism that you are a better human being than an actual attempt at doing anything meaningful to improve the lives of oppressed people.

Basically: http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/11/19/its-pretty-simple-really/


If you want to do something good for oppressed people, go do it. If you are a wealthy (by global standards) person, the best way for you to do so is to donate a meaningful fraction of your income to a good charity, silently, every month. If instead, your goal is to feel good about how much better you are than the hoi polloi, post on twitter/message boards about privilege.

Keep in mind, every single tweet and post you've ever made about privilege, every brilliant super burn which received 50 likes on twitter has done less to improve the life of a marginalized person than a 100 dollar donation to Doctors without Borders, and this is an empirical fact you cannot escape from. If you value the lives of poor people, work towards improving them.

Fargo Fukes posted:

The last few pages of this thread have been a marvellous example of how much good identity politics and privilege theory have done for the right. I mean, they've just been a gift from God for the powers-that-be. Informed by what we've read here, lets run a thought experiment:

***

Forty years ago an urban community is struggling with ever-increasing rent. There is a call for rent controls, leading to a community meeting. People are connected to the issue and feel strongly about it and so the first meeting is well attended by citizens across the political, economic and racial spectrum. Voices are heard, a strategy is formed and acted on. Even if the protest/letter-writing campaign/sit-in/movement comes to nothing, people at least got together and shared their mutual struggle in being forced to live under exploitative landlords.

At the very worst, the city becomes aware that rent is a political issue, and worries about the tensions involved in ever-increasing prices.

***

Six months from now an urban community is struggling with ever-increasing rent. There is a call for rent controls, leading to a community meeting. People are connected to the issue and feel strongly about it and so the first meeting is well attended by citizens across the political, economic and racial spectrum. The first action in the meeting is to inform everyone to be aware of their privilege around women, PoC and other minorities. Someone asks what does race have to do with anything, rent is high whether you are white or black. There are gasps from the academic bench, this person is informed they are a shitlord, the correct term is Person of Colour, they should learn what "intersectionality" means and by the way it is not my job to educate you.

The bench, stunned by this shocking display of white privilege, realises that the meeting cannot continue until a correct vocabulary controls are drawn up and that everyone has had a chance to establish their preferred pronouns. To avoid "mansplaining" and "whitesplaining" a procedure is drafted to control who may speak at any given time. Whilst rent may affect everyone, due to intersectionality it doesn't affect everyone equally and those already oppressed must be given more time to be heard, a committee is founded to establish the oppression and privilege of everyone in the movement so time and authority can be controlled accordingly.

Nobody comes to the second meeting.

Rent goes up.

Effectronica posted:

Awareness is important, but mostly for the oppressed group. Consciousness-raising sessions were aimed at women, and increasing gay visibility at liberating closeted people outside of areas with strong gay communities. Awareness of yourself as part of a larger group and of that group as powerful is something that can be very meaningful. So why creating a sense among whites that they are powerful oppressors is supposed to fix problems I don't know. From what I see, all it does is promulgate self-loathing.

UP AND ADAM posted:

Political correctness gone mad.

edit: Anyone who spends all their time on the internet needs a reality check, but I'm not seeing the cause and effect of internet SJWs run amok ruining the good name of the progressive movement. Is there really a large contingent of real-life people that this has spilled over to, affecting their view of young people and the left? Or is that just more of the same fatigue that has existed since young people took to counterculture movements? I would like to hear more about that, instead of braindead strawmen thought experiments. Those can remain on 4chan and reddit.

Ernie Muppari posted:

that's a really weirdly formatted longass hipptheticle sanrio

UP AND ADAM posted:

Political correctness gone mad.

edit: Anyone who spends all their time on the internet needs a reality check, but I'm not seeing the cause and effect of internet SJWs run amok ruining the good name of the progressive movement. Is there really a large contingent of real-life people that this has spilled over to, affecting their view of young people and the left? Or is that just more of the same fatigue that has existed since young people took to counterculture movements? I would like to hear more about that, instead of braindead strawmen thought experiments. Those can remain on 4chan and reddit.

quote:

The mildest sexual innuendo and humor, even if it does not refer to women in any way, can be seen as demeaning. Last year the Internet was in an uproar after a female computer specialist tweeted a photo of two men at a tech conference to chastise them for exchanging jokes about suggestive-sounding technical terms such as forking and dongle. A leading feminist blog, Jezebel, quickly branded the jokesters—one of whom lost his job for this offense—“sexist dudes.” The Jezebel author, Lindy West, actually admitted that she had repeatedly made similar jokes herself—but insisted that in the context of a male-dominated industry, such humor excludes women.

Fargo Fukes posted:

So your argument isn't that identity and privilege politics is worthwhile, your argument is that it doesn't affect the real world and is therefore irrelevant? Seems to be moving the goalposts.

Rodatose posted:

You call those in question "stuck at relative uselessness," but I consider those who are so far removed from experience that they can only give unworkable polemics to be an active detriment to a movement. Whenever someone who actually goes out and talks to people tries to talk an undecided or opposing person, they not only have to address the substantial points of their movement, but they have to address a bunch of planted misconceptions, too. They go at it going uphill, against someone whose thoughts have already been skewed by people who have gotten to them first and associated your Good Things with a whole bunch of divisive unpleasantness.

InsanityIsCrazy posted:

There was a big mess last month over the Rosetta comet landing, which was covered pretty heavily. Here's one.

UP AND ADAM posted:

I don't go on tumblr, but I always thought that privilege theory was just an adequate framework for understanding how some dynamics of our world work. The arguments against that kind of discussion have always seemed like bad-faith testimonies or anecdotes amplified beyond their significance, by people interested in dismissing progressivism or trolling. If there are situations like the post below describes, how are they different than activists from the days of old conforming to the slogans and behaviors of their contemporary activist groups, turning off mainstream thinkers with their own unpalatable methods and extremism? The internet offers new and exciting ways for ostracized people to gather and put on airs of superiority, but as far as the actual general population of potential leftist activists in academic circles, it seems to me to be filled with the same combo of laziness/ignorance/insulation that has typically made them the wide-eyed child branch of the movement.



I suppose this is the kind of thing that I don't see as having a huge significance after it falls out of the news, as much as Reason Magazine contributor Cathy Young does. Aren't there many other issues an infant leftist can bear witness to and cause him to investigate further? Don't they overshadow stuff like this?

UP AND ADAM posted:

I suppose this is the kind of thing that I don't see as having a huge significance after it falls out of the news, as much as Reason Magazine contributor Cathy Young does. Aren't there many other issues an infant leftist can bear witness to and cause him to investigate further? Don't they overshadow stuff like this?

GlyphGryph posted:

Can you point to victories that it has achieved, and meaningful social change? Has identifying privilege helped? If it's not a useful strategy, we should stop doing it. If it's only a useful strategy in a subset of situations, we should try our best to resort to it only in those situations.

You apparently have thought about this quite a bit - do you think it is important? If so, why?

SedanChair posted:

Just off the top of my head, abolitionism, ending Jim Crow, women's suffrage, the Chicano movement and LGBT rights.

GlyphGryph posted:

Are you just... trolling? You can't be serious.

Abolition was a victory achieved by recognizing privilege? Really?

Can you explain this? Defend it? What was the mechanism? Because this claim seems literally insane on the face of it, and I haven't gotten past the first item in the list.

GlyphGryph posted:

Are you just... trolling? You can't be serious.

Abolition was a victory achieved by recognizing privilege? Really?

Can you explain this? Defend it? What was the mechanism? Because this claim seems literally insane on the face of it, and I haven't gotten past the first item in the list.

SedanChair posted:

SedanChair posted:

Effectronica posted:

Do you really think that southern whites weren't aware that they were superior to blacks under Jim Crow?

SedanChair posted:

The issue had to be concentrated and put in really stark terms. Allies were created, mostly northern.

Effectronica posted:

OK. Northerners were not involved in Jim Crow. They used a separate system of segregation, one which is still largely with us. Jim Crow was a deliberate system that involved a constant reinforcement of white superiority and black inferiority. Your depiction of it as something that was solved by white people navel-gazing (not to mention that the mostly Jewish early allies of the civil rights movement were barely white) is insanely dumb. It's possibly even dumber than saying abolition happened because white people realized that slavery meant that black people were being treated as inferior, but probably not.

SedanChair posted:

poo poo moron, I guess I got confused by you talking about Jim Crow. I was talking about slavery. But in the case of Jim Crow northern allies helped to end it as well. Freedom Riders?

sausage eyes posted:

It is not even a theory, it is basically just feminist/class/race analysis for dummies and after that no value.

Seriously no one should be comfortable telling another adult to check their existence for the advantages they might have unless you are in a first year gender studies tutorial. The only outcome is to piss someone off who might be sympathetic to you.

The creepy purging wrong opinions thing is real and needs to stop as well as a bunch of other group psychology stuff that most people on the left should be familiar with and sadly are not....whole thing is sad and kind of funny.

GlyphGryph posted:

What evidence do you have that identifying their privilege is what made those northerners allies?

Because the slaveowners were definitely aware of their privilege, and they weren't allies.

SedanChair posted:

Again, justice can't happen without awareness.

SedanChair posted:

If people are evil and love to oppress others, awareness isn't going to help. Those people have to be controlled.

Funky See Funky Do posted:

I've always wanted to know. Is D&D a parody debate forum or a legitimate debate forum? If it's the latter then there's a whole bunch of folks here that aren't even close as smart as they think they are. I make bad analogies as a joke and you guys seem to see it as an art form.

Blue Star posted:

Just a quick question:

Those of you who are complaining about leftwing activists going on about privilege and being cult-like: are you white and male?

Funky See Funky Do posted:

I've always wanted to know. Is D&D a parody debate forum or a legitimate debate forum?

Effectronica posted:

Awareness is important, but mostly for the oppressed group. Consciousness-raising sessions were aimed at women, and increasing gay visibility at liberating closeted people outside of areas with strong gay communities. Awareness of yourself as part of a larger group and of that group as powerful is something that can be very meaningful. So why creating a sense among whites that they are powerful oppressors is supposed to fix problems I don't know. From what I see, all it does is promulgate self-loathing.

SedanChair posted:

Again, justice can't happen without awareness. And what do you think privilege is, a magic spell? If people are evil and love to oppress others, awareness isn't going to help. Those people have to be controlled.

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Its always funny when someone makes a general statement like "white privilige is bad" and then some butthurt nerd takes it personally and is all "well white privilige never did anything for me, blah blah blah"

Its like yelling "hey rear end in a top hat" in a crowded room and seeing who turns around being all like who, me?

Popular Thug Drink posted:

"It's a waste of my time to talk to these people" *continues to respond to every post*