Confusion

I just re-read the "Allies Talking" post, and realized I'd misremembered what it really calls for. I guess this is because my heart went out so much to women of color when I was reading up on the controversies and threads that had brought that post about, that what I wanted most to do was just be there to listen to them, to add my voice to theirs in saying how fucked up all of that was.

But no, what it's asking for is for allies to talk to each other about how to help people who come from our same backgrounds wake up and examine and get rid of their own garbage. I don't know that I'm very good at this myself; I get so mad, because it's hard for me to recognize that sometimes people really don't see what they're thinking and doing, don't see how dishonest and hypocritical they seem to me to be.

Particularly if they're my age or older (I'm 47), I think, "You were alive in the 60s and 70s. Were you in a cocoon, did you not see what was being done to people, do you not realize it was in the service of keeping you on top of the pile, or as close to the top as the combination of the dominant hierarchy and your personal configuration (sex, race, class, gender identity, sexual preference, et al.) allows you to be? Much less what still goes on, the vast inequities in opportunity, the battening of the prison-industrial complex on POC, the balancing the budget on the backs of the poor -- how can you not feel slimed by that, how can you not want to acknowledge and denounce and destroy that? And for god's sake, if you're supposedly a feminist, how can you have the audacity to tell people who've experienced forms of oppression you have no clue about what their priorities should be? What would you do to a man who tried that with you?"

But people get tunnel-vision. They feel overwhelmed or at least consumed by their own lives, and particularly if they've never been outside the bubble of their privilege (and if we're talking about upper class privilege, that's a very sturdy bubble), then without intending to be or to do evil, maybe even with the intention to be and to do good, they can become very lazy and unimaginative in their thinking. They can forget to do any kind of check of what they see against what it might look like from another perspective. They can forget that there are other perspectives. It's one of the main things privilege allows you to do, after all, so it's an ingeniously self-sustaining system.

I think I get the most mileage out of using myself as an illustration. I'm someone who made quite a few mistakes as a young woman. I drank, I did drugs, I was highly unwise in a number of ways. But because of my skin privilege and my class background, the only suffering I did for it was emotional. I didn't get arrested, didn't go to jail, didn't come anywhere near all the kinds of consequences that can attend the exact same behavior if you didn't go to a Seven Sisters school and have judges and lawyers in your family tree. Because when most people in this society look at me, I don't look like a criminal to them, even as I'm in the process of committing a crime. No, in the socially-constructed photo album that's being pounded into us by the surrounding culture 24/7, criminals look like poor people, people of color, deviants -- not like me. I was just a nice girl with some problems.

If I can get it to that level, if I can start making people think about the fact that you don't have to want to be a racist to have racist thoughts, and that you don't have to want to be a racist to benefit from racism -- in fact that you can hate racism passionately and still catch yourself making assumptions based on race that are bogus and condescending, and getting big bow-tied presents from a system that gives you unfair advantages whether you want them or not -- then sometimes things can proceed.

I liken it to shopping at a store with fantastic low prices, and then finding out that it's a kind of price club that only people who look like you can join, and that the prices are low because all the goods are stolen from people who don't look like you. At that point, no, it's not your fault that the set-up is so corrupt and godawful -- you didn't make the rules, and you didn't steal the goods. But if you keep shopping at that store and pretending everything's okay and you have every right to shop there, then, well, yeah, you're an opportunist and a racist, and don't expect any sympathy from me if people call you on it.