You all know my deal with stoopid, spoiled Americans. Despite any problems I may have in my life or any problems we have in this country, I can honestly say that I try hard to remember every single day of my life that simply by luck of being born in Massachusetts in 1962 I have never had to worry about war on my doorstep, genocide, starvation, enslavement, dying from a curable disease through lack of healthcare, forced marriage, or being beaten or raped without legal recourse. In other words, I've got it better than 98% of the people who live or have ever lived on planet Earth. I can be well-fed, safe, and self-determining while whining about the post office and pulling spurious statistics out my butt.
Okay, do we have that out of the way? I want to talk about how people on teh internet (and apparently in the kind of ultra-liberal academic venues I do not frequent) use the word "privilege" as a sort of a weapon of mass destruction in argument. If you identify as part of any kind of non-dominant group (i.e. if you are nonwhite, female, queer, fat, whatever) all you have to do is tell the other person that they are speaking from white/male/het/thin/whatever "privilege" and they are then a.) automatically wrong and b.) offensive for even having an opinion. It's the ultimate rhetorical scam. The fact that the people wielding this weapon are apt to, y'know, be PhD candidates with degrees from Princeton or the like makes it doubly amusing and/or like I'd like to feed them a huge helping of STFU (depending on where in the PMS cycle I am personally). I mean, yes, I realize your life would have been easier if you were a white straight guy with abs of steel. But the fact you've got an Ivy League degree and the time to think about this? Take my first paragraph and up that spurious statistic to 98.5%, 'k? Thx.
Okay, do we have that out of the way? Let me be clear: above and beyond the stoopid spoiled American thing, I am well aware of the ways in which I have privilege and the ways I do not, and I've talked about some of this in here before. I'm white (and so is my son, and yeah, I know for a fact that's made at least some small difference in how he's been treated psychiatrically). I'm quote unquote average in my sexuality (as far as anyone I'm not fucking needs to know, that is). I'm, with copious amounts of cosmetic and grooming help, at least somewhat conventionally attractive (and while I somewhat resent having to make the effort, as is well-chronicled here, I don't resent it enough to not want the advantages it brings). I'm not so old that I've hit that "invisible middle-aged woman" thing yet. I'm not disabled in any visible way (the crazee is invisible to almost everyone because I work hard to keep it so). On the other hand, I am female which means I deal with minor annoyances like catcalling and major issues like the fact that I'll never make a real lot of money because both my lines of work are in female-dominated professions and that means no big bucks. And then there's the one that's actually been painful to me at times in my life, class. That I've had to learn to tone down my accent and speak in a way that isn't normal for me in certain situations simply to convince ignorant people that I am in fact intelligent, capable, and not totally lacking in sophistication? I don't think that's cool.
However. Here's the thing that I seriously don't get about this concept of privilege: why am I supposed to feel bad about the privilege that I have? I think it's horrifying that people are starving in Zimbabwe; I don't feel guilty that I am not. I think it's a travesty that a young black man in American with severe mental illness is more likely to end up in prison than a mental hospital; I don't feel guilty that my severely mentally ill white son got compassionate and at least somewhat competent care. Conversely, while I may think it sucks that there are some of my little patients whom I would tell, in front of their parents, "I know it's wicked hahd, but you're doin great!" while there are others to whom I would feel compelled to phrase that really differently, I don't see that as...I dunno...anything but unfair, and I guess I just don't expect life to be fair.
(Should I be expecting life to be fair? I kinda see that as a set up for disappointment.)
Anyway, I know that even questioning this line of thought leads to paragraph #2: you're wrong and furthermore, you're offensive. Ah, well.
We won't even go into the friend who told me this long story this weekend about being horrified when his first phone call to a woman he met on an online dating service revealed that she talks just like me, even though she's a doctor, even though it seems at least tangentially germane to this post. Ahem. I'll just let this outrageously offensive whole thing go, because really, life's not fair.
xoxo
4 comments:
I wish people didn't make so much of dialect, and whomsoever made the comment can take a flying fuck IMHO. I come at this from the opposite angle. Although my father was one of those gung-ho ditch the old country immigrant types, there was a lot of Brit in what we learned to speak and write at home. Much of my life, that's cost a lot of ridicule from people who assumed I was stuck up, and never thought that it was just how I spoke. I guess either way we can't be responsible for other people's insecurities, eh? Even those guilty about their privileges.
(Had to throw in the "eh?" because I just got a Canada Day card from a friend north of the border.)
Most important question: did you eat any poutine (is that how you spell it?) for Canada Day?
I'm figuring the instinct for tribal identification is the almost overwhelming culprit, both in our verbal tendencies, as well as our presumptions over others'. I was raised in one of the best-known archetypically "privileged" boston suburbs, and have chosen to live in one of massachusetts' classically maligned small cities, which gives me the widest possible range of choices with which to answer the question "where are you from?". So far I'm overwhelming from the latter, except to those who are actually from here, who instantly recognize that I'm not from my lack of identifying accent.
The fascinating part to me is how people seem prone to always tag with the least generous label possible. Barack Obama is black, and even given my own propensity not to be able to bury (that's "burrie", not "berry") my true lack of a wicked pissah accent, if I say I'm from Lowell, there's a distinct reaction based on that on its face value.
Me, I'm practicing my grandmother's Northeast Kingdom affectations, and hoping they'll grow to more closely resemble the distinct local patois. There can sometimes be convenience to finding oneself underestimated. But the best part is that you can fall in with an entirely better class of people that way.
Nope, no poutine, eh? I'll have some on the Fourth (snickah).
Post a Comment