actually: you know what, yeah. i mean, i get what “examine your privilege” means; but i think i’d like to start maybe reframing that, turning the focus away from “yourself” in this context, -period.-

because ime it’s way too easy for it to devolve into “oh i’m such a bad person, mea culpa;” and the thing is: that’s not helpful. To anyone. first of all because making yourself feel like crap for something that you -are- and can’t really fundamentally change (i.e. the skin/gender/even class privilege you were born with) is bound to lead to depression and fester and explode back out one way or another eventually. Take responsibility on the individual level for individual behavior, sure; but while it’s important to become -aware- of, again, your place in the system (“oh, i have nothing to do with that, leave me alone” isn’t so useful either, obviously), there’s no point in sackcloth and ashes, i don’t think. Because, actually that’s still making it all about you, really; this does not actually tend to lend itself to actual empathy, much less useful action, as i am seeing it.

i mean i guess part of what i’m saying here is: it shouldn’t have to be an exercise in misery, this “consciousness-raising;” there’s enough crap already, you know? There’s joy in learning for its own sake, even if that knowledge is also painful. but that’s where the real growth happens, istm.

and if you’re going to live for others, as Orwell once observed, astutely, then live -for others,- not as a roundabout way of meeting obscure needs of your own. (“Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool,” a terrific essay). and, or, but, you can acknowledge your own “belly to earth” selfishness and just accept that this, too, is part (but not all) of being human, and of this little adventure.

anyway, back to class: Black Amazon’s latest piece is timely here. “Cover the basics.”

http://guyaneseterror.blogspot.com/2006/11/cover-basics.html

i was told once by someone that since i was white and middle-class (and that was all they knew about me) that the only thing i could do to help any progressive movement was to kill myself, because at least that way there’d be one less oppressor.

This is clearly an extreme (and unrepresentative) view; I don’t know of anyone genuinely committed to positive social change who would subscribe to idea that people should commit suicide for the greater good, which is a pretty quixotic notion anyway.

I think the broader point has been pretty well articulated by previous posters. It’s not about whether or not you’re a “good” or “bad” person, but whether or not you’re willing to examine your own privilege and its implications.

It works because the policing is just a “useful” side effect of the main activity there: maneuvering for rank over other men, which is its own reward.

This seems a wonderfully important point. If I had any problem with the original post, it was in the implicit functionalism of “men routinely check each other in order to preserve male power”; I think it’s important to disentangle the effects of the behavior from the motivations for it. I think Cranefly is right that most of this kind of cultural reinforcement isn’t driven by patriarchy-loving as such, but rather more immediate goals and motives. I think recognizing this is important, because it means that change is more possible: if patriarchal norms were reinforced *for the sake* of the patriarchy, there really would be much less hope for changing them.

it sounds absurd, but i suppose i should explain that i spent some time ashamed of myself because i didn’t have the nerve to kill myself and felt that i ought not to live, so the question isn’t as snarky as it sounds.

Men checking each other, making sure no guy gets too far outside the norms that help preserve male privilege, that whole business? It WORKS.

It works because the policing is just a “useful” side effect of the main activity there: maneuvering for rank over other men, which is its own reward.

In the hypothetical, Greg and Andy aren’t concerned that Jason is making things harder for men as a class, they’re scoring points off of him*. If Jason changes his behavior, it’s not because he’s seen the error of his ways due to their gentle correction, it’s because if he doesn’t, they’ll continue to take advantage of his weakness in this context to pump their status by pushing him down.

So, no, I don’t see that an emphasis on checking each other’s transgressions has anything in common with developing an egalitarian movement. Even if checking doesn’t start out as a hierarchichal battle, it can’t not have that effect.

*this is why I don’t think that coming back with retorts about manhood is a good idea in those situations: even if you come out ahead against the asshole, it’s playing the same game, and the patriarchy still takes its cut.

Men do enforce gender roles on each other, and it does work. I spent a long time getting to the point where I was basically surrounded by sympathetic men and women. But through most of my teens and twenties I was ridiculed often enough for admitting I like to bake, keep a clean house, play with babies, etc. One way this has profoundly changed my life is in career choice. I don’t play the old-boys network and my earnings reflect that. I bounced around for a decade before I found a niche good for me at the ripe age of 30. My shoes were bought new; I’m doing OK, just not as well as many of my classmates have done.

Lucky for me I have several cool, accomplished sisters, so part of me never thought being a woman was such a bad thing. It took a long time for that self-confidence to grow though.

Some of the lines I use when I occassionally have to deal with the misogynists:

{blank} hasn’t made my dick any smaller.
I’m so much of a man that {blank} just brings me down in line with the rest of you. Otherwise you’d be overwhelmed with my manliness.
I’m comfortable with my female side. Got a fucking problem with that?
Why should I care if I ruin it for you? (These people are not my friends.)

He doesn’t have any problem admitting he spent the weekend helping clean BECAUSE everyone already knows that his wife can’t move the furniture on her own. But if we spend his day off at the art museum, he won’t mention it at work because he’ll get an absolutely uncomprehending, “Dude, why would you want to go there?!” from his coworkers. He’s processed this now, and doesn’t care what the hell they think about it, if he likes looking at art, he should go to the art museum, but it was a source of great tension at first. He lost some friends who weren’t flexible enough to deal with him enjoying bookstores and art museums with me and riding a motorcycle with them.

And, of course, all this doesn’t get into where the male bonding between the guys at the shop happens…after work they all go to the strip bar together. (No, I don’t mind him going.) And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there aren’t any women working there.

I’ve got to take a poke at kate at #29: so if you’re white and middle-class or more, you can’t really be part of the movement?

Jill outlined what I meant, but I’ll also respond.

If ‘the movement’ involves taking down existing power structures which rely on a heirarchical system of class and capital, then yes, being middle class or better most definately puts you at a disadvantage.

I spent four years dating a man who was ashamed of his middle-class background, and tried to convince me to join him in his idolization of the blue-collar man.

Man, see that word? Man. Blue collar means tradesman, blue collar has no place for me, or many other people who haven’t had the opportunity to get a cush job with the telephone worker’s union or the city maintenance worker’s union. Mostly run by and dominated by men, I have not been convinced that whatever is left of the ‘blue collar man’ has any interest in the struggles of the wal-mart worker, the grocery store clerk or the single mother. In fact, I’ve had plenty of experience first hand to confirm that they don’t.

In my experience, union workers have their interests narrowly focused on their own welfare, the rest be damned. And opening up the ranks to new workers just isn’t in the cards since around here at least, they can hardly keep their own core of good ole boys working steady.

Also popular culture has done nothing but solidify stereotypes that mean nothing and work against the interests of working class people, the Cable Guy comes to mind, who straight from his upper middle private school and ivy league upbringing, dons his ‘working class’ attire and makes millions appealing to the most banal stereotypes of working class people.

I speak of upper and middle class persons such as large funders for organizers who, in their quest to be seen as ‘part of’ the ‘movement’ don the garb and attempt the speech in order to assuage their class guilt. Working off the priviledge of their status as owning capital, they gain an automatic authority and an automatic audience.

Their capital drives the organizing community. Don’t offend, or you won’t get any money. Find a cause that appeals to them, that will open their wallets. Because they must approve first.

I remember distinctly sitting in one of these funding groups during which a panel was invited to explain how welfare reform will hurt poor women and also how hard it is to live in poverty. A woman stood up, white and upper middle and asked, “But how does all this have anything to do with what we’re trying to do?”

No one spoke. Not even myself. I wanted to rip into the woman, but how could I? She had already established by that very question that my concerns were nothing, that she had no empathy whatsoever for what women like myself were going through or how the lies in the media were just that — lies. Why did this woman not care?

Because she didn’t live it. Because she had internalized so deeply her class hatred of and blaming of poor people and had effectively distanced herself so much from the struggles of people like me that if I died or my children ended up in a life of crime, she saw no connection to it at all, even to the point of dismissing my experience altogether as a diversion on the course toward a just society.

I saw the same experience in racism training seminars, where white people who’ve never seen the gore and the horror of racism firsthand, who’ve been so distanced from people of color all their lives, that they could not free themselves of their singular perspective for one friggin’ minute. “I still don’t get it, why don’t they just stop being so damn angry?” or “I don’t have to know black people to get it, I understand, how dare she[the trainer] say I don’t get it, I’m poor, I know what discrimination is! Why are they so angry all the time anyway, I don’t have to listen when they are angry!” and on and on.

I’m white, I have skin priviledge. I have been raised in white priviledge and acculturated to adjust to assume that white priviledge. No one will call me ‘n____r’ to my face, I will never have to fear where I go, how I stand or what neighborhood I’m in. Hell, even being poor, I still can don the middle class costume and talk and fake it. Being a POC, I wouldn’t be able to slip so easily in and out would I? I’ll never know, no matter how I try, what that is. I have white ignorance and white priviledge. So it is my obligation and duty as someone who claims to want social justice, to shut up and let those who have the power of that knowledge, let them have the podium and design what needs to change to end racism. Give up the power that I naturally assume is mine, to those from whom I traditionally, by social construct, take it without asking.

Likewise, those who’ve never stood in line at the grocery store and had to hand the clerk foodstamps or had a teacher tell you your kids aren’t worth all the trouble because they aren’t going to go to college anyway, or have people ask you (once they know your income source) where you got the money for this or that, then you don’t know. IF you’ve never had anyone call you a welfare whore, then you don’t know. If you’ve never had to wipe the tears from your child’s eyes because they were told to go home from what they thought was a friend’s house because they don’t want ‘your types’ there, then you don’t know.

Its priviledge of which I speak and its priviledge that holds the current system of injustice in its place.