“I can’t pretend I don’t have some rotting branches; we can’t pretend our privileges don’t exist just because we do not like them. To relinquish the power they hold, we have to constantly expose them for what they are,” Grandma Willow concluded, and gave John a pat on the back with one of her drooping branches.
I felt like it was a good time to reblog this again, it’s been a while
Male privilege is working a history research job that involves reading thousands of pages of primary sources, and seeing your gender represented on every page.
Male privilege is wondering why your female coworker needs to take a break and talk to her one other female coworker every hour or so…
White Privilege is after a tragedy like Aurora occurred its not going to change how the nation views young white males.
Despite the fact that this act of terrorism has happened more than once.
White privilege is whenever a white man does something like this there is no tighten up on security by closely watching and profiling white males.
There is no “oh we need to start looking after those white males 16-40, they could be terrorists.”
Because only brown people are considered terrorists.
Oh! I had completely forgotten about this. This is a link to a site showing a kind of wallet-holster.
There’s many kinds. Here’s another. A gadet holster.
I was looking up something to do with male fashion and clothes and gadets and extra pockets. And up it came. Now this isn’t the first time I’ve seen these things. But in light of this entire YEAR. 2012.
This is the first time, (and for this I am ashamed) it’s hit me solidly in the fact, that MoC (PoC all through, yes, but specifically MoC) could never. ever. wear something like this.
Because if keys, soda, candy, a regular billfold wallet and empty hands can be claimed to be a weapon (an excuse to shoot us all I know) and lead to innocent unarmed people getting shot. dead.
The excuses that would come up if someone was minding their own business walking down the street with something like this? Or worse? Having a jacket over it, so there’s a woosh of air, and someone thinks they see something?
It would be non stop: “Why would anyone wear that if they didn’t want other people to think they had a gun.” — “The dead person has no one to blame but themselves, playing at wearing a gun.”
There’s hip side wallet holsters too. I believe I saw something on Tumblr recently about someone having rigged themselves something similar.
But it’s just hitting me hard right now, the privilege of this. Wearing something that looks like a gun-holster. Perhaps even for the FASHION TEASE that it IS a gun holster, and then you pull out your iphone or whatever. And NEVER. NEVER having to think it’s an item of clothing/accessories that will end you dead.
NEVER.
My little brother can’t put a liter soda in his jean or jacket pocket while walking down the street in NYC, in the boroughs. Because it could look like something. But this can be invented and sold and white people, white men can just wear it and never think twice. It’s cool for them. It’s NOTHING.
White privilege is when fashion doesn’t mean getting shot.
This Strode dude’s arc is interesting. When we meet him, he says Frankie was involved in the robbery at the bank where she worked and she’s fired immediately because of that. Racial profiling, guilt by association — it’s bullshit, but once he says it it’s treated like it’s real. Frankie herself becomes a bank robber in part because, if she’s going to be treated like a criminal and punished no matter how hard she’s working and following the law, why not commit crime?
Throughout the story, the point is made that because Strode’s a white man and because he’s a cop, he’s not just “investigating” the facts, his words/assumptions are given so much weight that the things he says don’t have to be true at all. They’re given the weight of truth automatically. Frankie can tell the truth, but no one listens if its in conflict with what he said. His words trump the truth. Later on, he says “gun!” and it doesn’t matter that Stony’s brother only had a champagne bottle in his hand: he’s shot down as if it really was a gun.
Frankie isn’t listened to, no matter what she says, even the plain truth gets cut down and treated like nothing; Strode is listened to too much. He thinks he’s just doing his job and looking for the facts, but privilege warps reality around him. So… this is a film that gets privilege, I think. And, imo, it works so well that the final choice this guy makes is to close his mouth and not say anything. For once. Stony is silent and he’s silent too. They look at each other. This one time, after we’ve see again and again how destructive the privileging of certain peoples’ voices/words can be, he’s silent. And it doesn’t make up for anything and it’s not… a fix. It’s nothing near a fix. It’s just the only remotely decent choice available in that moment.
Seriously, though. In a world full of “white savior” films, this is a film about four women of color that critiques white privilege by writing a well done minor character’s arc and the message of that arc is: you can’t fix anything, your “justice” job is not making things better, the presumption that the power to make things better is in your hands is hurting people, the more you try to impose your sense of justice on the world the more you hurt people, so stop talking. Live with the fact that you can’t fix it or impose justice and just stop talking for once. Respect that the world is massively fucked up and opening your mouth will only make it worse.
Um. White privilege is… something I have and have to work on checking and, you know, idk how much that’s warping the way I saw this. But I thought… there was something knotty and painful and good in how this scene happens and where it falls within the story arc.
White savior narratives have this toxic implication that white privilege can be a force for good. Teju Cole, in his article in The Atlantic, said white savior narratives are not about justice they’re “about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” It’s another way to play into white people feeling superior and all good about themselves. But this film is, like,… no. Dude, your privilege is toxic and the entire system that brutalizes people of color and makes even your most ignorant words law is not something you can use for good. And so, even though he’s allowed to do this key “good” thing by watching Stony escape without saying anything, it’s not at all about how being nice makes privilege good or something.
And I think it’s important that Frankie’s last words are playing in his head. She repeated back to him the accusations he’d thrown at her at the beginning of the film, the untrue words that everybody believed. One of the things cumulative tragedies that set things in motion. It’s Frankie’s use of those words that makes it possible for Stony to escape, imo. She gets across a lot about words, culpability, and the role Strode as played as her accuser and that shapes the choice he makes about Stony’s escape.
If you are a white girl, a black girl or a black boy, exposure to today’s electronic media in the long run tends to make you feel worse about yourself. If you’re a white boy, you’ll feel better, according to a new study led by an Indiana University professor. “Regardless of what show you’re watching, if you’re a white male, things in life are pretty good for you,” Martins said of characters on TV. “You tend to be in positions of power, you have prestigious occupations, high education, glamorous houses, a beautiful wife, with very little portrayals of how hard you worked to get there.”
Not People of Color.
Not “the gays”.
Not “the Blacks”.
Not “the Mexeecans” and the “Injuns”.
White women.
Care to provide any sources? Or is your opinion enough to make this true?
http://www.theroot.com/views/real-affirmative-action-babies
http://www.timwise.org/1998/09/is-sisterhood-conditional-white-women-and-the-rollback-of-affirmative-action/
http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/affirmative_action99.pdf
Anything else I can do for you?Owned.
“Honestly, I don’t understand this at all and I will never understand this. The amount of hurt I feel just by looking at this photo just phantoms me, because what is this girl really thinking when she put on these shorts? That’s my deity, the One I take refugee when I’m experiencing sorrow in my life. He is my all, my everything and you have put him on your body? Not only that, you’re probably unclean, and very dirty and probably were even before you put the shorts onto your body. You do not wear Him, you do not eat meat when you’re wearing Him. You do not touch Him when you’re dirty. The person who’s even wearing the shorts is not Hindu, and I know this for a fact. No Hindu would ever wear this, ever. We don’t even wear Him when we worship at His alter. If Hindu’s, the followers, the believers of the faith, reject what you’re doing, why is an unbeliever doing this? Because it’s ‘trendy’? Because it’s ‘different’? That is my God. That is my religion. That is my faith. You’re not ‘cool’ or fucking ‘unique’ , you’re a fucking ignorant asshole.”
White privilege at its finest. You can appropriate pieces of a culture to look “unique” without learning the cultural significance of these elements and then you get pissed off when people call you a racist.
Taken from fuckyeahhardfemme
Submission by theriotgrrrlrevolution
Mod note: Oh my god…
White privilege is being listened to by other white people when you call them out on their racism, when they wouldn’t listen to PoC.
