groverat

To better understand the suffering caused by generalizing about privilege, I'd like to know what the suffering involves.

i.e., How do white males suffer in North America based on people believing in white/male privilege?

Does it impact employment? Social mobility? Educational opportunities?

Examining my own life, the suffering I have experienced with regard to belief in white/male privilege are all interpersonal/personal feelings. I have been made to feel (as opposed to simply feeling for my own internal reasons) uncomfortable for being white/male in a very tiny handful of spaces (feminist spaces during college, primarily).

I, personally, have not experienced any meaningful harm or suffering due to other people believing me to be privileged, but my experiences are only mine and I would like to hear other people share their direct, concrete (as possible) experiences.

To me it does.

I teach in inner-city Houston.

I have done it since I was 24 and I will never do anything else. Death himself is what will pull me away from these kids.

@sinusoidal, I hear what you're saying and it's something I addressed in post #42. If you haven't gotten a chance to read it, maybe you could and see that a lot of us have the same reservations you do. (Also, you're reading a North American website full of North Americans from an outside perspective, which is tougher for you.)

I would bet that a lot of resentful feelings come from simplistic approaches to the ideas of patriarchy and power and privilege. Our own experiences, whatever they are, offer contradictory evidence to a simple "white male power" narrative.

Here's what I've found: I don't like incomplete answers, and some other people don't mind them. And that's OK.

A group of feminists (with me, because I'm one of them) can sit around and talk about these ideas and be simplistic, and my ears will ring when someone makes a generalization or makes a "man tears" joke.

I get it (brain), but I don't get it (gut). It goes back to the "they're attacking ME" paranoia. The lizard brain reacts to a perceived threat that doesn't actually exist. I know (brain) that these people do not hate men and they do not literally believe that ALL white people have more overall privilege than ALL black people, but my gut reacts to the surface level meaning of the words in a way that theirs doesn't.

I really don't want to get too Internet-psychiatrist, but many of us are just concrete thinkers. We're nerdy, and a feature of nerddom is difficulty with abstract thinking. Others can play much more comfortably in the world of half-true/half-defined metaphor and our mind are trying to build castles of hard stone at all times. Press button quickly, get result. Do it again. And again. And again. Our brains are wired to reward that. Some people find that boring, even depressing.

Also, we're supremely conflict-averse. Small inter-personal problems become large interpersonal problems and perceived insults turn us into Montresor from The Cask of Amontillado.

So then I get to challenging my presumptions, and challenging myself is always far more satisfying to me than challenging others. (You can tell I've thought a lot about this stuff over the years. I've had to.)

Getting a little too into "Here's why I'm mad at other people" territory. Frustrations are good, but they should be shared from the perspective of seeking to get further understanding, not just vent.

As for the lock, I think (HOPE!) GB is starting to realize that simply pushing this type of discussion off the site hasn't helped, and that the smart move is to encourage this discussion but in a way that is non-toxic/non-argumentative.

@vocalcannibal - That's a cool example, thanks. :)

@carryboy

I totally understand what you are thinking re: guilt. I've been there many times and I still land there sometimes.

What I would respond with, what has helped me work through that sticking point, is to ask, "Is anyone really telling me I should feel personally guilty? If so, are they worth listening to right now?"

Got someone yelling at you in an unhelpful way? Brush that dirt off ya shoulder.

A hater, as it were, doesn't define how we engage with the world. My view of social issues, of kyriarchy, or empathy, is not impacted by other people's negativity. I mean, it is sometimes, but that's my battle to fight.

So fuck all the haters. :)

Duders, if you’re feeling like fighting someone, take it to PMs. I’m proud of you boys.

Remember: Journey, not Nidhogg.

@tobbrobb

I still get frustrated, too. It’s a natural thing and no reason to beat yourself up for having a genuine emotional response.

Feeling as if I’m the one under attack in a situation that doesn’t involve me is a problem I’ve had forever and I’ll always have. I’ve embraced that it’s a part of me and that it’s a thing I have to check myself for.

@joshwent

Working with inner city kids, I have been called racist a dozen times. At first I fought back and have joined in when black colleagues have fought back on my behalf.

What has given me peace and made that situation better overall is to genuinely entertain the question, “OK, what about my behavior created the appearance of racism?”

It’s back to the defensiveness that a lot of us feel. It is my tremendous luxury as a white male that an accusation of racism really won’t hurt me as long as I am honest and caring throughout the process.

I hope that you see how that parallels with your Bayonetta-shirt analogy. lol

@carryboy

The “white guilt” thing is another really emotional sticking point for a lot of us.

The way I see it is not “you should feel guilty for having white skin”, but “you should understand that you have an inborn privilege that manifests in different ways and exists because your forbears abused others.”

And even this is hard, because my people were poor as shit all the way through. Despite being Southern all the way back to landing from England, my people never owned slaves, because we were always broke dumbasses.

What helps me through that is looking at it through the lens of kyriarchy. All of society is a mass of intersecting relationships. Let me try to highlight that through some real-world situations I find myself in

- I am in a meeting with female colleagues. Administrators (male or female, black or white) more readily listen to me over non-white, non-male colleagues. This is built into our genetics. I am tall, large, and my voice is deep. I project authority more easily than my black or Hispanic female colleagues, even to other blacks and Hispanics. I have seen this phenomenon over and over and over again. I will just go with the flow and end up leading meetings. Merits are only a small part of it.

- For 2 years we had a STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL, tall black woman working in the school. If she and I were at a meeting, she naturally dominated. Her beauty carried our attention, despite whatever “merits” might exist. We wanted her to talk. We wanted her to hold court so we could look at her and listen to her. (Dude, seriously… oh my god.)

- If I am calling on a student in class, I am going to bias towards a more attractive voice or face. This is, again, an unconscious genetic impulse.

- There was an argument about a rap lyric. Me vs. a black male colleague. Everyone believed him, even though I was right and I’m a bigger fan of rap music.

When we reduce our conversation to “patriarchy” and “white privilege”, we ignore a million different factors, and I think many of us smart, nerdy white guys tend to get angry about it. “BUT THERE ARE A MILLION VARIABLES YOU ARE IGNORING!”

I find it liberating, really, to try and figure out all the complexities and embrace my own role in it.

It is awesome being privileged. No reason to fight it.

Thank you so much to everyone for being cool so far. I think this conversation is something many of us have been starving to have.

I know what @andyle2k means, but I actually think most of us are sick-to-death of the current drama and that our own personal feelings belong to us and not to the screaming Twitter war. It's a good chance to just be an individual person and speak only for yourself instead of as a soldier in a war we didn't start. Anyway...

@tobbrobb

Thank you.

I see something in your writing that I am seeing a lot of lately, specifically this, that I really want to talk about in a way that keeps in the spirit of the thread, which is to address my own experience with this as a younger man (I am in my mid-30s now) and how/why it no longer impacts me.

I'd like to not be preached to or looked down upon for my gender.

I'm going to talk briefly about my own experience I grew up poor, and got into a very good university and worked my way through that university. As is predictable, my first exposure to the language of feminism and the attitudes of feminism came from feminist students at my university.

It's 100% natural to feel defensive when attacked. And I felt under attack to some extent, because I was. The young women I was around were feeling the full fire of conversion and found feminism to be empowering. I am someone who listens, so I was a sounding board for them as they got their feminist legs under them and developed the ability to speak to men. At my most defensive, I couldn't see that they, themselves, were unfinished products and that their own accusatory tone was borne of their own freshness to the concept and my own inability to distinguish the subtle difference between "men oppress women" and "you, as a person, oppress women". We were both learning and growing into this new way of looking at the world and we were both very uncomfortable with it.

I looked at these young women, whose lives were quite privileged, act like they were the center of the injusticeverse. I had just been in high school with them and now they're blaming me for the ills of our nation? I'm lesser to you because I was born male?

What I realized over time is that I had control over my defensiveness and that they had no weapons that could hurt me unless I chose to let them hurt me. Again, I'm not talking about villains or bad guys, just dumbass college kids like me who think they know everything... just like I did. It wasn't even until I was out of college that I realized that even the most radically angry feminist couldn't hurt me and that I had no reason to restrict my view of social justice through their lens (either as someone who agreed or disagreed with them).

Starting to work with inner city kids blew it all wide open, though.

I am very happy with how this is going! :)

@carryboy

1) I’ll try to strip down what I mean when I say “patriarchy”… societies have various power structures and everyone in that society is raised in various power structures. There are a million variables within all that.

Kyriarchy speaks to the multi-faceted nature of power in situations by context. This is useful to me because it speaks to the real-life experiences many of us face and provides a more complete framework than patriarchy, which speaks primarily to male/female issues.

Patriarchy is, to me, a system of male domination, perpetuated unconsciously by people within that society. Patriarchy is an aspect of the kyriarchy that we have in the USA. It sits alongside race, economics, etc…

I think both concepts are separate and useful on their own terms. I’m no expert, it’s just what these things mean to me.

2) I think cultural appropriation is a really tough nut to crack. If you look at the GB “2Human” video you can look at it a bunch of different ways. If you don’t know the guys, you see some white video game guys mocking a black subculture. If you know the guys, you know they genuinely love that stuff and they’re self-aware. Or maybe you do know them and you still think it’s kind of gross.

I really like what @kjebka has to say about just taking someone’s opinion and respecting it.

Not to speak for him, but cultural appropriation is only potentially damaging when the dominant culture does it. My feelings on it are actually really difficult to articulate based on where I work and with whom I work every day.

Really, it boils down largely to a very honest examination of intent and a willingness to defer to the marginalized voice.

@yinstarrunner

Could you expand on what you mean by “Modern Feminism”?

It is interesting to see “feminism” qualified (as I mentioned earlier with “intersectionality) and how that changes a person’s perception.