On privilege and intersectionality.

[draegonhawke]

This was hard to write, and even harder to post. Harder still to post publicly. Still, here it is - after having sat in my drafts folder for about four months, but thrown to the world at last.

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In an effort to help people understand privilege, its forms and complexities, I'm going to use myself as a case study. I'm going to examine a lot of the

Comments

[squeemu]

Thank you for posting this. I knew most of it, but there were some things that gave me pause think. I always forget that I have the cisgender privilege and this was a good reminder. (I also always forget that I have the privilege of being able-bodied.) (And I'm sure there are others I forget or never knew I had. Oh! Like being from the United States; I'd never thought of that in those terms before. I mean, I knew that it was really lucky to be born here, but I'd never applied the privilege idea to it.)

Another one that I had never thought of as privilege: being monoracial. I don't know why, but I felt sort of shocked and indignant tonight reading about your experiences. I mean, I know that almost all forms fail in terms of multiracial options, but for whatever reason (I suspect that reason is monoracial privilege), it never really hit home

[eiviiaru]

This is a really interesting post, yeah. I'd never really thought about the multiracial part in that way -- the "a mutt's a mutt" bit -- but it really is shockingly true. (Then again, lumping minorities into big wads seems to be standard; look at the "Asian" and "Native American" labels, applied broadly to people of a huge variety of cultures, most of which have as little in common with each other as the European nations the larger culture can all keeps separate.) I may re-read this later, think about it more, and see what I can unpack.

If nothing else, it makes me want to make a delineated post about what it means to be fat (well, fat and female -- I think there is something of a gender divide here). You're right that it's a case of a lot of tiny little things, but they really do snowball.

[rathera]

Would you mind if we included this essay in the Hackgender project (http://www.hackgender.org) with a link to your LJ? Your discussion of the complexity of privilege as it relates to gender and sexuality is particularly interesting, and we're always collecting personal reflections on gender identity and the resulting social conflicts. Thanks!

[draegonhawke]

I'd be honored to have it included! I'd prefer if links went back to the Dreamwidth version, http://magistrate.dreamwidth.org/9177.html, but other than that, I'm game!

[transnomad]

You did a much better job with this than I could have. I would, though, suggest that it's important to consider not just where we grew up, but when. From a generational standpoint, had our parents been born and met twenty years earlier, it would have been illegal for them to marry, assuming our father could even have immigrated to the United States and received a professorship in the first place - certainly possible, and knowing him I'd probably put odds on it, but certainly less likely. A hundred years ago it would have probably been impossible, and that's just a fraction of human history