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casting privileged people as permanently unlearning brutes and disadvantaged people as disproportionately wise and generous creates bizarre incentives to use your positionality as a bludgeon, or to distort your positionality to feel less horrible about yourself
Let’s use the example of Jessica Krug. She distorted her positionality because she felt horrible about herself, and then she used her fake positionality as a bludgeon. What happened here? Who taught her to think about herself the way she talked about white people? It’s odd.
You can find anecdotes of things she said when she was passing for black- very extreme racial rhetoric rooted in left-identitarian essentialism. But she was talking about herself. She knew she was born white, merely pretending to be black. Why was she saying it about herself?
Another example: I have a friend who I guess is minorly wealthy compared to me. A white cis male, who inherited a rental property & vacations every year. Who is he, If you ask him? Working class. Union parents, blue collar . Does being that, or saying that, make him more right?
I can think of a dozen plus examples of people tweaking the way they describe themselves for either generalized or specific contextual clout in left spaces. Search your feelings. You know it to be true
what if we just let people know that their voice is welcome, and they can come as they are, *and also* society confers advantages to only some that imply responsibilities with them, not just the burdens of original sin, but noble responsibilities
the idea that a privilege is not a cross to bear or a social embarrassment to obscure at all costs, but rather, a blinder you need help to look around, but also the rare opportunity to really do the right thing in a cruel world... that might be better
like, i see social democrats on my timeline pulling their hair out about whether voting or not voting is “privileged” - implying whichever side is privileged is morally wrong. it’s profoundly bad ethics. that exact confusion incentivizes krugism
the privilege of walking home at night w/o fear ought be universal. that priv, in an unjust system, is attached to the responsibility to abolish injustice and make it universal. the burden is not to prove you’re afraid too, it’s the noble responsibility of helping fix the problem
i assume people might flinch at the association between privileges and being “noble.” to clarify why i think that is a good frame: being privileged in a certain way doesn’t make you good or bad. it creates the POTENTIAL of using that advantage for good
if we emphasize that potential more, maybe less people will try to pretend they aren’t privileged for clout, or bludgeon others with unkind identity essentialism for quick victories at a deep cost
