“Won’t somebody please think of the children???”

- The preacher’s wife on the Simpsons

I recently made the mistake of engaging in a business transaction with a Christian who believes that, because s/he is a Christian everything s/he does is unquestionably the Lord’s work, s/he cannot possibly have done me wrong. It’s not the first time this has happened to me, and sadly, it caused me to revisit my tolerance policy and decide that, until things in the US change, I will not engage in business with Christians if I can avoid it. It’s unfortunate since some of them are genuinely good people, and Christians are certainly not the only ones operating with that sense of entitlement. But as it happens, Christianity is a great disguise in the current US climate for people who want to screw folks right over with impunity.

Here’s the mechanism I perceive to be at work with these individuals. They have a powerful streak of entitlement they’re not comfortable expressing overtly, so they subvert it into the service of a cause they perceive as so noble no one would ever take issue with their actions, then they go forth and fight for their cause in exactly the way someone who thinks himself God’s gift goes forth and fights with anyone who won’t bow down to him.

Some of these people get in your face with their cause, relying on your desire not to “make a scene” to trap you into listening to their spiel, maybe giving them some money to go away. Others lie, cheat and steal, and justify it all with “But it’s for the children/God/the poor/the hungry.” In the worst case, they start crusades and holy wars. All with a perfectly clean conscience, because they believe they’re being unselfish.

But they’re not; they’re just transferring their “self” onto a cause, and then behaving in a privileged, entitled manner on behalf of of the cause rather than on behalf of their own ego. But the cause is their ego-extension, so they’re really no better than someone with a hugely swollen ego feeling entitled to take whatever he wants from lesser beings.

What happens in your mind when you’re a small child and you notice that Santa brought the rich kids much nicer stuff than he brought the poor kids? I’ve always wondered about this. (I don’t know because I was never taught to believe in Santa.)

It seems to me there’s a potential for the whole Santa myth to reaffirm for kids the idea that rich people deserve better at such a young age the kids are mentally defenseless against it. Because here’s an outsider who’s not supposed to be an asshole bigot, who’s not constrained by financial limitations, and even he thinks the poor kids should be content with much-needed new underwear while the big kids get giant, flashy, expensive stuff that flaunts wealth through impracticality.

But I don’t know. Maybe for those of you raised to believe in Santa, there are enough suspicions and rumors abounding for you not to take it so seriously?

Apparently my spam filter got hold of some steroids a couple of weeks ago and proceeded to filter every comment. I believe I’ve recovered everything. Sorry about that! I’m not sure why it did that, but I’ll monitor it every day until it’s straightened out.

Purtek’s recent post at Feminism @ The Hathor Legacy got me thinking about something I’ve wanted to say for a while, but wasn’t sure how.

I’m about to talk about a particularly hurtful privilege many Christians in my culture choose to engage in. Let me be clear: many Christians do not engage in this privilege (and instead do a very nice job following the example of a man who tried to think past privilege). And I’m sure many people other than Christians engage in something like this. I’m just sticking to what I know.

The privilege of which I’m speaking is telling others that if something bad happens to them, it’s because their faith is inadequate (or non-existent, as the case may be). This rationale gets applied to fellow Christians as well as people outside that religion. It is nothing short of victim-blaming. Got hit by a lunatic driver? You must’ve forgotten to pray. Tornado ripped your house’s roof off? God’s trying to tell you something about your wicked ways.

And then it gets extended to: is someone cheating you, abusing you, abusing your loved ones? Clearly, you need to pray much, much harder.

Like all victim blaming, it’s denial. It can’t be the system of privilege (which benefits me) that’s hurting you; it must be something you’re doing wrong.

But when you put this common privilege argument into a religious context, something especially ugly happens: it no longer needs to make sense, because it’s about faith. It’s the ultimate excuse for privileged people to rationalize away anything. And I do mean anything: wives have been advised to “pray harder” when domestic abuse lands them in the hospital, for one example. Because if the church acknowledges how often men abuse the power it gives them over their wives, it has to admit it’s time to go back to the Bible and see if we misinterpreted something, ’cause that dog don’t hunt.

There’s another added wrinkle religion brings to this privilege: when the religious people are the privileged abusers, it’s insane what they get away with. Ministers tearfully admit on TV, that yes, they had affairs/embezzled all the funds/etc., but Jesus has forgiven them, and so should you. And collectively, my society does forgive them because they’re a member of the right club. Meanwhile, the rest of us are responsible not only for our own actions, but for those committed against us.

Anytime I hear someone saying that some event or disaster is God’s way of punishing folks, I like to agree with them and add that yes, God really must share bin Laden’s disgust with the US because the way they hit the twin towers just right with nothing but a well-researched theory - that’s got miracle written all over it. (Yes, I’m being facetious to make a point.)

Being nice should mean being genuinely kind, caring and empathetic. But in reality, the standard’s much lower. Just saying “please” and “thank you”, tucking your shirt in and failing to commit violent crimes can win you the “nice” label.

And yet we put huge amounts of value on that label. “Nice” young men can avoid rape convictions even when the jury admits they think they forced sex - because the jury can’t see that forcing sex makes a person not nice, even if he dresses preppy, has a great smile and helps old ladies across the street. Conversely, “nice” young women don’t get raped, and if a woman is raped, it’s instantly taken as proof by these very same people that she wasn’t nice after all. (Of course, many people are not that dense; I’m just illustrating a point with what I hope are examples familiar to us all.)

And then the jurors in this situation are also “nice”. They clean their teeth, are good neighbors, maybe go to church. Juries who flat-out state that they believe there was forced sex but that’s what the slut deserved somehow do not get disqualified from “nice”. They don’t go home to find their neighbors turning a cold shoulder… because the neighbors are also “nice”.

Throughout history, “nice” people have had slaves when it was the trend. “Nice” people have decided to believe other “nice” people incapable of abuse when accused (usually by women, children, or people of lesser race, class, orientation or other privilege). “Nice” people think it’s rude when, after they’ve nosed into someone’s personal business with the question “Why don’t you love Christmas like nice people do?” and the person tells the all-too-common truth: “Because my family always had knock-down drag-out fights on Christmas”.

Gosh, “civilization is supposed to shield “nice” people from unpleasant truths! How dare someone violate the sanctity of ignorance! Never mind that something like 1 in 5 children are sexually molested before they reach 16, and the vast majority of “nice” people are deluded into thinking they know no one who either was molested or committed molestation. Thus perpetuating the cycle.

“Nice” in this context means “privileged” - nothing more, nothing less. It’s the mechanism that allows raging maniacs to declare that they’re super-nice guys and women are stupid, filthy hos for not begging to suck them off and get all sorts of sympathy. Being “nice” alleviates your responsibility to fix a system which benefits you at the expense of others.

“Nice” allows that minority of truly evil people - the ones who actively create situations of slavery, abuse, discrimination, etc. - to go much further than they would have without the enabling of nice folks who “see no evil”, and imagine they can “do no evil” just because they never forget birthdays.

I hate “nice” people. I know that’s not very nice of me, but I prefer someone whose motto is “see all evil, hear all evil, fight all evil.”

Over on the Hathor Feminism site, I wrote an article called If anything makes women hate men, it’s not feminism: it’s patriarchy. In a nutshell, I argued that patriarchy puts out a lot of ugly messages about what cheating, abusive assholes men are in hopes of convincing women to put up with crap from men. Women who refuse to take the crap but don’t encounter a more egalitarian viewpoint like feminism can continue to believe men are beasts by nature.

Here’s a response I got today on that post:

I don’t see feminism fighting for real gender equality. It is still common ideology that men are supposed to always defend and die for women. Or that a man is supposed to always be the bread winner and must always have a job or he isn’t a “real” man. After all men are expected to suffer social abuse on the job and outside in order to bring home profit for the family.

Maybe when feminism grows up and focuses on gender issues on both sides of which it aggravates through cultural change then maybe people would embody it more. But so far, it is a one sided blind argument. And yes, many women that call themselves feminist hate men or at least constantly bash men in general in order to simply leverage leadership roles for themselves.

Until feminism starts focusing on gender issues on both sides and including men it will always be seen as attacking and hostile to men, nor inclusive to their suffering or needs.

The irony here, thick as pancake batter, is that he blames feminism for several ideologies that were created centuries ago by patriarchs and neglects to recognize that feminism has actually campaigned against those ideologies. Dead white men decided men should defend women, be the sole breadwinners and suffer abuse to earn a living. Feminists worked hard to open the military and the job force to women, partly because they believed it unfair to put the burdens wholly on men.

There’s no way this guy just kind of missed that chunk of recent history, which means he’ll rationalize a way to blame feminism for the fact that we need oxygen to survive, if it suits him.

It’s easy to dismiss him as just not knowing what he’s talking about. But the problem is he does, and he feels entitled to spout lies. There are tons of forums where men sit around blaming feminists for everything the patriarchy set up (a very popular one is the “man must ask for date” rule which, you know, predates feminism by how many centuries?).

Except when they quote my articles and say how good they are, apparently with no awareness they’re quoting a feminist.

I’m at a loss for words here.

I recently recognized a layer of privilege I didn’t know I had.

As some of you probably know, I also administer The Hathor Legacy, which looks at how film and TV portray women. It’s a feminist media site. I founded it in 2005, and I’ve been proud of it. But here’s where a subtle shift in perception can uncover a glaring bit of privilege.

Hathor was always intended to be about women and how they are marginalized. It wasn’t that I didn’t care how other people - people of color, queer people, etc. - were treated by the media. I’m very interested in those issues, too. I was just sticking to the issue of women because it’s where my expertise lies.

A few months ago, it hit me: some women are queer. Some women are of color. If you don’t cover them, it’s not a feminist media site. It’s just a site about white heterosexual women, and how we get marginalized.

Privilege enabled me to start a site about white straight women, written primarily by white straight women, about things that affect white straight women, and think I was doing something for women in general. Because white and straight are the default, and I fell right into that thinking.

Eh. I got over the cringe effect with realizing I have inherited privileged views and prejudices a few years ago. I tell myself it’s self-centered to worry about how embarrassingly dense I’ve been, when surely there’s something I could to to make up for it. And in that vain, I took action and posted a shoutout requesting women bloggers who are not white and/or not heterosexual to come and write columns on the site.

Maybe it’s not so much how enlightened we are as how enlightened we’re willing to become.

One of the most annoying privilege memes I’ve ever dealt with is “Anyone can get rich in this great country; if they don’t, it means they’re just not working hard enough.” I encountered this meme almost daily as a kid growing up in a highly conservative “red state” in the US, but I imagine there are variations of it all over the world. The basic idea: “This society is working out great for me; if it’s not for you, that might mean we need to make changes, and that could mean I would lose something, and I don’t want to, so I’m going to blame you. If this society isn’t working for you, it’s your fault.”

If my needs have been easily met my whole life - not just for food and shelter but for things like dignity and fair chances - I may be less likely to notice that you, in my very same society, are not getting yours met. It never occurs to me that other you could be making the same efforts in life but getting a different result, right in my backyard.

I don’t realize how privileged I am.

And my privilege to be in the favored group creates another privilege: my philosophy of life need not account for the lives of Others, i.e., people not in my favored group. What about all the people working 2 jobs - more if they can get them - and never getting ahead? Are they not “anyone” and are they not “working hard enough”?

“Well, they’ve made bad choices,” I say, pictuing unattractive middle aged women and people of color slaving away in restuarants or factories or as maids and janitors. I don’t even think of potentially lethal jobs in coal mines and oil rigs because I don’t see those places. I picture these Others getting themselves criminal records or unexpected baby mouths to feed, because they made bad choices. I don’t think about the time Daddy got my arrest record expunged so I wouldn’t get kicked out of college. I don’t think about how my sister handled her unexpected high school pregnancy so it wouldn’t affect her future. No, the choices made by people Like Me are justified by the end result. The choices made by Others are condemned by the end result.

But they’re frequently the same damn choices.

The fact is, some poor people do make bad choices. But some of the most powerful, rich and successful people in my country have made the very same choices - drug abuse, running over pedestrians while driving drunk, gambling, wasting money like crazy, unplanned pregnancies. If these choices don’t have a consistent result in the life of everyone who makes them, they can’t be the cause of the effect that is poverty.

But I don’t have to consider any of that. I can just dismiss you as argumentative and go watch some mainstream news channel which reaffirms my view that all is right in the world. There is no mainstream channel that reaffirms the viewpoint of Others: and that’s their own damn fault because they haven’t created those channels or proven themselves a valuable consumer group to market to. All is right in my little world.

Here in sunny California, there are families of Mexican descent who’ve been here longer than my white ancestors. There are also people who arrive here everyday from Mexico, often without much in the way of resources.

I have a friend who’s Mexican-American by descent but her family’s been in the US for several generations. She has brown skin. Her English is as native as mine. She works in IT and can get more performance out of cheap-ass computers than anyone I’ve known. But on a recent trip to the eye doctor, he leaned in as if speaking to someone hard of hearing and asked her in a tone of Great White Concern: “Do you have insurance to cover this prescription?”

Because we white people have heard Mexican-Americans are frequently uninsured or something (sorry, one of the kids yelled over part of the soundbyte, but we’re sure it was that you’re all downtrodden and stuff). We worry about you, you know. Our way of showing that we care is to single you out for special assumptions attention and make ourselves feel good about a total non-deed let you know we’re here for you. Isn’t that nice of us?

Sarcasm aside, I’ve never had a doctor ask me if I was insured. I have had them ask which insurance company I’m with. It’s a slight shift in meaning, but oh so telling.

If you blog about white privilege, you’re probably sick to death of people playing the “white trash” card in your comments. Their argument usually goes something like this:

• “Being white didn’t give me all these privileges you’re talking about.”
• “I know plenty of [minority] people who are better off than I am.”
• And the advanced version, which I’m guilty of using myself: “It’s really more about class than it’s about race.”

I am “poor white trash”. I can relate to all of the statements above. I grew up looking the part of Average White Girl, but middle class white people always pegged me as “different”. This left me vulnerable to losing opportunities and even jobs to white people who “fit in” better. Also, after my family made its great escape from White Trash Hell into Middle Class Purgatory, I learned to my surprise that there were black kids in the world who’d grown up with more money than I ever had. And so on, and so forth.

Here’s where the confusion comes in. Yes, I have a legitimate grievance against the system. Yes, I’ve lost out on things because I didn’t have the $20 to invest or know the magic social password that would have marked me “normal” (read: “middle class, preferably white”). And yes, it hurts when you don’t fit in with your own race because of your class, and you don’t fit in with your class because of your race. It’s hard to see privilege around that stuff, but the examples are out there.

Wealth gets you a ticket, but it doesn’t guarantee you a seat

One of the black kids I went to school with whose family was richer than mine? We discovered we’d given identical answers on a test, and she’d gotten some of them marked wrong while I got 100%. When we examined her other papers, we realized the teacher had been doing this for some time: “giving” the black girl a lesser grade. And one of the Jewish girls I knew whose family was richer than mine? When she was absent for a Jewish holiday and missed a test, one of her teachers decided to teach her a lesson by refusing to let her make up that test anytime but on a Saturday - the Jewish sabbath. The teacher offered truly pathetic excuses why after school, during lunch and during the girl’s study period wouldn’t work. Sunday wouldn’t work because it was the teacher’s Christian sabbath! The girl’s mother had to call the principal and threaten to bring the ACLU into it before she got a proper time slot to retake the test.

I’ve never been pulled over for “looking like you’re out of your neighborhood” (unless you count the time I was lost in a snotty part of Beverly Hills in an American car, gasp!). I’m not nearly as likely to get pulled over for traffic violations as black or Latino people, even if they grew up with more money than I did. Taking things a step further, I’ve never felt pressured to join a gang just to survive. I’ve never worried I’m going to get shot in my own neighborhood (and I’ve lived in some neighborhoods the white middle class considers “bad”).

That white skin would get you a seat, if only you had a ticket

My approach is to look at all the types of privilege that affect an individual. Take me, for example. I have white privilege and heterosexual privilege and able-bodied privilege working for me; I have class privilege and male privilege working against me. In the case of poor whites, the class privilege often takes more from them than the white privilege gives them (i.e., the college admissions board prefer my skin color, but if I can’t somehow pay tuition, I’m not getting in). In my personal experience, white privilege may be a total bust, and I have the right to feel that way: I do not have the right to muddy a discussion of white privilege with all my anti-privileges. But before I learned to separate the types of privilege, I’m afraid I probably did that once or twice. Not in the “minorities have it so easy” tone that marks one type of troll; I just couldn’t figure out which part of this stuff I wasn’t getting.

Not a credit to our race

I will probably write a whole post on this someday, but I’ll leave you with one last point to consider. In my experience, poor whites are one group of people that even PC folks think it’s okay to take potshots at. Make a “dumb blonde” joke, and someone sooner or later will call you on your sexism; make a “you know you’re a redneck when…” joke, and chances are everyone will take it as good clean fun. This is something that makes me generally distrustful of the supposedly “progressive” thinkers out there, and I assume it affects other poor whites simiarly. See, we’re an embarrassment to the white race. We’re proof that whites are not invulnerable to the repressions they’ve visited on other races. So we’re taught to keep quiet. On one level, we know we shouldn’t take that crap. On the other hand, experience has taught us if we take a stand, we’ll stand alone. I don’t know how many times I’ve endured jokes about my homestate when a potential new friend asks me where I’m from. And if you know me, you know I’d never let an insult to my gender go by without comment.

And if we have an accent of any sort - many of us do, since by definition it’s the higher classes who get the privilege of their accent being declared “no accent” - we’re supposed to put up with being made fun of and/or being fetishized. Or being expected to change it, if we’re “serious” about getting certain jobs or promotions. We’re vulnerable to class assumptions that we’re ill-educated, lazy, immoral or even criminally perverse (only in redneck jokes is incest somehow a topic for humor!).

While these points still aren’t germaine to a topic about white privilege, I’ve seen them get dismissed in discussions about privilege and bigotry in general, and in those cases they are relevant. Hopefully, something in this post will help someone weed out trolls and/or communicate more effectively with sincere poor whites who mistake a lack of class privilege for a lack of white privilege.