Monday, January 26, 2009

Thinkpiece #1

I have to say I really enjoyed this article because I think it did me justice both as a member of oppressed groups and a member of privileged groups, and didn’t just complain about the way things are but made a solid effort to explain how to fix them. One major point that caught my interest is that Mr. Johnson says we need to not only talk about the problems of heterosexism, racism, and privilege, but we need to name them and own them. He says “Our collective house is burning down and we’re tiptoeing around afraid to say fire.” I couldn’t agree more, hoping to fix these problems by leaving them in their closets and not mentioning them will not do. We need to talk about them- directly- and not feel embarrassed to say what our weaknesses are and how we need to improve. I know that coming from a rural town where I was the only out queer I knew for two years, with literally five people of color in my high school, I haven’t had the most diverse history, but I own that.

I like when he said “I don’t mean something as minimal as mere tolerance or refraining from overt violence”, because “working with” is so much different then “working alongside.” Being a member of Rainbow I preach all day about tolerance and acceptance, when in actuality I want so much more then for you to hate me silently, or grudgingly accept the fact that I am sharing a neighborhood with you. I want to live in a world where I can go out, as a woman, and not have to check over my shoulder as I fumble to get out my keys, where I can, as a queer, hold hands with my girlfriend and not have “dyke” coughed at us as people pass us on the quad. We need to shoot for higher then the bare minimum, because if we settle for less, we are letting the privileged keep us oppressed.

He talks about feeling the oppression, and not. And its absolutely true, that I don’t feel the color of my skin. I may be one fourth Native American, but my skin is white as the paper I write this on, and I have never felt the prejudice of being something other then white. I do know that its very hard to have to explain to my best friend why I can’t just “Not tell people I’m queer if it scares me so much to come out.” That, as a third grader I would refuse to recite “One Nation, under God,” because there is no God, and my peers looked at me like I had three heads. The ways we fit in we don’t notice at all, but the ways we stand out are blatantly obvious.

It is so powerful to me in his section where he has a “privilege checklist” so-to-speak, that so many of the key points resonate through all three lists. For example, that “white, hetero, males can pretty safely assume that their models for success, national heroes, and other key figures, will be of the same gender, race, and sexual orientation as them.” And it’s so true- you look through history and even if a woman came to a significant scientific conclusion first, she is discredited because she is female. When we know someone in history who is queer, people are afraid to just come out and say that they were a raging homosexual as if they might be less of a person if they claimed it. What we see here, though, is that in any underrepresented group, our struggles are the same. We can still feel invisible and in the spotlight all day, everyday, we share each other’s pain, so we need to work together to fix the inequality.

All I can think about as I read this paper is how that as a straight, white, middle class, male he can sit there and say these things about oppression and privilege, and I give him props for having the balls to do so, but that, if he were anything other, he wouldn’t be taken seriously. If I, for example, had written the same article it wouldn’t be published because I would be just another angry feminist. If my friend James had wrote it he would be just another ranting black man. Johnson is using his privilege to get the word out that we need to overcome the constraints put on us in out society, that we choose to follow. It makes me think about how important Allies are, and that, if we are to overcome oppression of groups, all underrepresented groups have to come together, but also join up with the group in power, and only then can we effect change. It won’t begin to be solved unless “those with privilege see this problem as their own, and feel obligated to do something about it.”

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