I’ve historically kept to safe, although sometimes deeply personal topics here on my blog. But lately I’ve been much more political in my thinking than ever before. And although politics is not a safe topic, it suddenly became much more personal these past few months.
The nature of push and push pack, the nature of opposites, the nature of everything round led to the severe ideological division between the last two presidential candidates. Their polar opposition on almost every topic both socially and fiscally was unprecedented. In the past, I’ll admit, I’ve felt a little apathetic about who won a presidential election because I didn’t really believe things would be much different based on that. I thought that the president was little more than a puppet, a mascot, a spokesperson. To a degree, I still think that. But when a potential puppet unabashedly aligned himself with an agenda for legislation that will deny people civil rights and widen the already abysmal gap between the rich and the poor, I became worried. I started paying attention to what the potential puppets were saying.
But that’s beside the point. The point is, what creates such deep ignorance in such a large number of people? Much of the thinking I’ve done and many of the conversations I’ve had over the past month or so have led me to a theory. There is a clear base to a deterministic nonlinear system that continually results in colossal breakdown.
In this country, in order, we have:
- Wealth privilege (Stuff’s easier if you have mad cash)
- Male privilege (Stuff’s easier if you’re a dude)
- White privilege (Stuff’s easier if you’re Caucasian)
- Beauty privilege (Stuff’s easier if you’re hot)
- Mainstream privilege (Stuff’s easier if you conform to a mainstream paradigm — heterosexual, patriarchal, Judeo-Christian, nuclear family, etc.)
- Able-bodied privilege (Stuff’s easier if you don’t have any disabilities)
(I was going to add intelligence to the list, but no. There are many very stupid people in positions of great power and prestige.)
‘Easier’ in this case means that the more of these things you are not, the more barriers to entry you’ll encounter when you try to accomplish anything. And if you can identify with every one of those privileged groups, your life’s cake. Your biggest problem is the bad haircut you just got for $200. Or the fact that you just lost the presidential election by a few hairs.
I’ve always known that this series of biases obtained. I’ve felt it viscerally and been subjected to it directly. But surprisingly, I had never delineated it like this until today. Once I did, my instinct was to think, dang! Pres. O’s got lots of work to do! But that’s silly as he’s one person. And, he’s a mascot. The truth is that everyone has a lot of work to do. I have a lot of work to do.
About wealth — a dear friend of mine told me last night that she thinks poverty is violence. It hurts people, it cripples people, it kills people. She said that the worst part about it is that it’s not necessary — nobody need be impoverished in this country. And yet. There are so many contributing factors and nuances among cases. So I don’t know. What I do know is that I was born into a middle class family in a suburban community with quality public education available. That automatically afforded me a set of opportunities that do not exist for someone born in poverty. I didn’t even realize that until I moved from that suburb to downtown Cleveland to live in a dorm my first year of college. For the first time, up close, I saw homelessness and poverty. My reaction to it was guilt. Why did I get to have a warm bed to sleep in and food to eat and clothes to wear and an education to achieve?
One night, I gathered up a bunch of my clothes and shoes, wrapped them in a blanket, and took them outside to someone in the alley. The guy took the stuff in his arms and thanked me. He asked if he could have some money for bus fare to get to a shelter. I gave him some money. He thanked me and walked away. I hid behind a car and watched him. He walked into a liquor store and came out with a brown bag, which he put in the bundle of clothes. He then walked up to some people coming out of a bar with the blanketed heap cradled in his arms and said, “Can you guys help me out with some cash so I can get my baby to a shelter tonight?”
There were kids I went to college with that first year who had never worked a day in their lives and whose tuitions were paid for by their parents. I remember resenting them because I’d been working since I was 12 and had to work two jobs and take out loans to afford college.
About male privilege — I know some people who don’t believe it exists. They think feminists are women who hate men. They think that even though society might appear patriarchal because women take their husband’s last names, it’s really the women who run households and quietly control the men. I don’t know about that. What I do know is that 95 percent of all the bosses I’ve had in my life in all my myriad jobs have been men. In my state of residence, Elizabeth Warren was just elected to the senate and is the first woman ever to serve Massachusetts in that role. President Obama had to create a law that would allow women to make the same amount of money that a man would make doing the same job. And that only just happened. There has never been a female president in the United States.
Because of patriarchy, and because within it, women can’t perpetuate a family name, my father values me far less than he values my brother, his son, who gave him grandsons. He told me once that he didn’t mind so much that I turned out to be gay, but that he wouldn’t have been able to handle it if his son had been gay. He also told me that he thinks alternative insemination and adoption are bad because you can’t trace the resulting child’s genealogy.
This is a global problem. Look at China. Under the one child policy and China’s patriarchal society, it became common for parents to abandon their female children so they could try again for a boy. Since the early 90’s, hundreds of thousands of female Chinese children have been adopted by families in other countries. (If you haven’t seen Somewhere Between, please do, it’s amazing.)
White privilege is obvious and can’t be refuted. I hope, albeit perhaps naively, that it’s nearing the end of its era, as white births are no longer the majority in this country. Still, some argue that white privilege is likely to perpetuate beyond the end of white majority. I’m forever baffled by the importance some people place on skin tones. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s like saying a gray pebble is more valuable than a brown pebble. They’re both pebbles.
I’ve long been ambivalent about whether I think objective beauty exists. Still, there’s a clear convention for beauty created by the media. Any person possessing certain aesthetic features and a skin tone that aligns with that convention gets special treatment in most domains.
Mainstream privilege is tricky. Mostly because people can appear to be mainstream when they actually aren’t. For example, anyone in a heterosexual relationship who does not identify as heterosexual (bisexual, queer, etc.) can still appear to be part of the mainstream paradigm and can still take advantages of privileges afforded therein. And what really is the mainstream paradigm? Is it just a product of patriarchy? Or is it more than that? Does it include a system of morality and a set of values and ideas of success or failure? If yes, where did those come from? Judeo-Christianity?
People with disabilities are clearly marginalized and, depending on their disability, often denied access to the majority of public information and resources.
Maybe most people reading this are thinking, duh.
But I don’t know. It seems like myriad complex problems affecting millions of lives have a sensitive dependence on these simple initial conditions, where a small change at one place among them can result in large differences at later states. And that seems like a big deal to me. One that should be focused on and made widely, widely known.
If this series of preferential treatment criteria is really the fundamental problem causing all other problems in America, then how can it be fixed? Unfortunately, I don’t think it can be completely. But it can be improved, or its impact could be lessened with progressive education, open communication, and thoughtfulness. If people learn from an early age that we are all just animals first, humans second, and the rest doesn’t matter — the rest is nothing more than minor variations among features and skin tones — most of the huge problems would disappear with that generation. If the older generations can gain more individuals who think (really think) for themselves instead of just blindly following the people who came before them, that would improve things. Conversations can create more people who start to think and then, little by little, a new consciousness will take hold.
That may come across as trite and kumbaya and it probably is.
This country has a massive amount of people in it. As a democracy, even among elected officials, there are way too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen. Nothing can get done quickly. But it can get done. Try not to be a part of the problem. Start recognizing when and how you’re complicit and be willing to change. All it takes is using your brain and talking about it. I’m no Pollyanna, but I do think some good will come of that simple practice.
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