Read on Twitter
finally got round to reading this from @RuffneckRefugee & it is very incredibly good; 'The language of white privilege obscures systemic inequality by reducing it to individual actors'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/07/anti-racism-checking-privilege-anti-blackness
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/07/anti-racism-checking-privilege-anti-blackness
i think the past few weeks i've seen a specific silence from a specific demographic, that i am only aware of bc this twp account follows a wider range of ~arts professionals~ than my personal account.
it is q a damning silence, q a damning forgetting of all the promises and efforts this specific demographic was clambering over itself to make just a few weeks ago.
this individualised narrative of personal privilege never translates into structural change, and we all told u as much!! this demographic didn't listen, and i don't think they ever intended to.
'Why seriously challenge unequal resource distribution when all you need to do is renounce the privilege that gives you access to the very resources hoarded at the expense of others?'
'To the privilege-renouncer, there is little need to address an inconvenient fact: the immense economic order that spans the globe has historically needed a black underclass, both domestically and overseas, to survive.'
like, this is so neatly delivered to u, so clear and beautifully put. if you ignore it or don't understand it after reading this then i think ur doing it on purpose.
j gona reiterate that point above that the screenshot cut off: 'The prison scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism not as hostility towards those without privilege, but as a process that creates a “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”'
the way this discourse has ended at the point of acknowledging personal privilege - this speaks to the deep seeded liberalism at the heart of the art world. liberalism requires we see things as individual problems, requires individual solutions for these problems
we are never going to be able to do any of the work we talk about with any urgency if we refuse to even think about the way this works beyond the limits of one single and inviolable human individual. racism does not work on that scale. pls catch up, it's so vital.
