Ranthropologist

Tag: privilege

  • Race and Privilege: Embracing Discomfort

    Race and Privilege: Embracing Discomfort

    I’ve written before about race. I focused on how race, as biology, is not real. But the events of the past few days [minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia…] make it painfully clear that race has tremendous relevance as a cultural, social, political, and economic construct. In that sense, in the sense of how we use it to treat each other differently, whether we think we do so or not, it is real in a way that is much more powerful than biology.

    I could go into a long history lesson here, but others have done it before me, and done it better. There are discussions about how racism and inequality are a result of centuries of White colonial powers justifying the theft of indigenous lands, the pillaging and raping of Native cultures, and the brutal enslavement of Native peoples. These crimes required defining indigenous peoples as inferior, savage, and less than fully human. Skin color became the proxy marker for subhuman status, and thus a justification for dominance, subjugation, and ultimately, the inequalities that we still wrestle with, centuries removed from the origins of colonial capitalism. These are truths that I now accept without a second thought. Still, I was talking with a friend today, trying to ease the physical weight I was feeling in my head and chest, and I realized that I am one of the lucky ones. I have been exposed to ideas, critical theory, discussion, literature, and debate on structural inequality, systemic racism, political economy, identity, intersectionality, hegemony, ideology, and more. Even if I am not a specialist in all these areas, I know more than most; maybe that’s why I bear the weight of my privilege so heavily. I know all these things, and yet my privilege is still something I take for granted until something happens to make me take it out, gaze at it, grapple with it, and try to find ways to use it for good.

    “We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.” – Peggy McIntosh

    I don’t want to make this post about me; my struggle with these ideas is nothing compared to the struggle of those who live without the privilege I so often take for granted. This post is about how, maybe, others can recognize their privilege. This is a very difficult thing for a lot of White people to do. We naturally become defensive. We want to believe that we aren’t complicit in the structures that allow us to move through life taking things for granted that others can’t. We don’t like the word privilege; it smacks of something unearned and undeserved, the indulgence given to a spoiled child. But in the context of White privilege, that’s not what the word means. It means something that we are lucky to have, and we are privileged because not everybody has it. If you want a full account of the idea of White privilege, read this classic paper by Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh discusses the concept, then lists several examples. If you are White, it’s illuminating to go through the list and feel recognition slowly dawning. If you are a person of color, I suspect you feel the same recognition, but from the other side of the coin. Not all of these examples will apply to everybody, but here are a few directly from McIntosh’s piece:

    1. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
    2. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
    3. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
    4. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
    5. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.
    6. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more less match my skin.

    And one of my own: I can get stopped for a traffic violation and not fear for my life.

    “[White people] move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g. white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves). Challenges to this identity become highly stressful and even intolerable.” – Robin DiAngelo, Huffington Post

    Maybe you read these and think, yeah, ok; that’s true for me, but that doesn’t make me a racist. Maybe not; but racism doesn’t just mean individual discrimination and stereotyping. And that leads us to another subject just as tricky as privilege, if not more. White people don’t want to acknowledge the privilege of their race, and they definitely don’t want to acknowledge complicity in structural racism. And I agree! It’s incredibly uncomfortable to feel like you have to defend yourself just because you happen to belong to a particular race… but there, again, is another example of White privilege; generally, White people don’t have to defend themselves based on race. I’m talking about structural racism – the kind of racist ideology that is ingrained in us from birth. It’s the hegemony that we internalize as the natural order of things: some people are just better than others because they work harder, they try harder, they want it more. It’s the dismissal of the idea that maybe the system itself is structured so that we don’t all start from the same place, and as White people, we don’t want to have to acknowledge that. It takes away from the narrative that the hard worker is the one who wins; if people of other races really wanted to, they could work harder and get a better education and a better job and get off the welfare treadmill. We make it a defect of personality or upbringing or, yes, biology, because it allows us to keep on ignoring the reality that the playing field is not level. Again, these notions are deeply ingrained and not explicit in our thoughts, so we can go about our lives feeling secure that we aren’t perpetuating a racist system. But that is the very epitome of racist hegemony – it makes implicit co-conspirators of us all. You don’t have to be classically racist to be part of a racist system.

    In case you are having a defensive reaction reading this and thinking but I’m not a racist! (and I wouldn’t blame you), try to honestly answer these questions to see if just maybe you’ve internalized some structural racist hegemony (and bear in mind that your reaction might be deeply buried and not explicit, so think hard about your unconscious gut reactions and assumptions before assuming your answer to these questions is no):

    1. Have you ever crossed the street when a person of color is approaching from the other direction? If you didn’t cross the street, did you consider it? Were you nervous as you passed the person?
    2. Do you assume that Black mothers are raising their children alone and are on public assistance?
    3. Have you ever laughed over Black names, or said things like “It’s like they name their kids by grabbing a handful of Scrabble tiles!”?
    4. When you read about a random shooting or hear about it on the news, do you automatically picture a person of color?
    5. When someone talks about their doctor or their lawyer, do you automatically picture a White person?
    6. Have you ever seen a woman in a hijab or a man in a turban, and had the word “terrorist” pop into your head, even involuntarily?
    7. Do you get annoyed when a phone system asks you, “para Espanol, oprima numero dos”?
    8. Are you interested or concerned when you hear about the murder of a white person in  your community, but when you hear about the death of a person of color, you aren’t surprised? If you aren’t surprised, do you assume that the death involved gang violence or criminal activity by the dead person?
    9. Do you dismiss the ideas of Black people who use Black Vernacular English (what some people call Ebonics) and assume they speak that way because they aren’t educated?
    10. Do you feel relieved or justified when a Black person speaks out about trouble in their own community, because it makes you feel like you were right all along?

    Again, let me be clear: answering yes to any of the above does not make you a racist in the KKK fashion, or even in the fashion of your bigoted great uncle. And you may well have that initial reaction but then catch it and feel uneasy or bad about having it in the first place. And it’s not your fault. This is what hegemonic structural racism does to us – it implants these ideas and naturalizes them. Stopping those reactions is hard, and sometimes they come from a place so deep within that we barely register them. But recognizing and grappling with them is the only way to dismantle them.

    “…saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.” – Kevin Roose, Fusion

    I am writing this because I think it’s important for White people to do the difficult work of recognizing the system we are a part of, recognizing that we occupy a privileged position within it, and recognizing that we have implicit racial biases that make us complicit in the system. One more example of White privilege and structural racism: responding to #blacklivesmatter with #alllivesmatter. OF COURSE ALL LIVES MATTER. Black Lives Matter is not trying to say they don’t – they are saying Black lives matter ALSO. And until Black lives matter, it won’t be true that all lives matter. It’s the same as saying “But I’m not a racist!” Maybe so, but that doesn’t solve the problem of racism, does it? It’s a defensive reaction of privilege to push back at a community by saying “But what about MY life” when you don’t have to live in a world where your life seems to matter less.

    If you are White and this post makes you uncomfortable… I’m sorry for that, but I’m also glad. Since the horrific events of the past few days in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas, I’ve seen more pieces than I ever have before about how White people, if they really want to help, need to feel uncomfortable. As some of these articles point out, it is not the responsibility of people or communities of color to tell White people how to help or be allies. It’s up to us to do the hard work. I’m just as uncomfortable as anybody else, even with my years of exposure to ideas that are going to be new, foreign, and even frightening to others. That discomfort – it’s growing pains. It’s the necessary strain of working to be a better person who is helping to build a better world.

  • #YesAllWomen, #StillSomeMen

    #YesAllWomen, #StillSomeMen

    When I was 13 and in 8th grade, I went to a sleepover at a friend’s house. Her parents were not home, and she invited some boys over. While she and the other girl present went into separate bedrooms with their boyfriends, I was left alone with three other boys. I didn’t feel any fear, and I flirted innocently with the boys, thinking perhaps one of them would like me and ask me to “go” with them – our youthful term for being a couple. It never occurred to me that what I was doing might be seen as an invitation to sexual activity; although my two friends were more worldly, I was still naive, and I thought that the most that might happen would be one of the boys trying to put an arm around me or even kiss me. So I was shocked and alarmed when the boy with whom I had been doing most of the flirting suddenly lunged at me, grabbing at my nightgown and growling “I’m going to fucking rape you!” I pulled away from him and raced to the bathroom, where I managed to slam and lock the door just as the boy caught up with me. He pounded on the door, shouting at me to “fucking open” it. Then I heard him move away from the door, and with horror I realized he was heading for the balcony. The bathroom window overlooked the balcony, and I ran to make sure it was locked as well as the boy slammed into it and howled at me to let him in.

    After a little while, the house was silent again. I slumped against the bathroom door and held my breath, wondering if I could sneak down the stairs and out the door to my own house, which was just a few houses away. My heart pounded in my throat – I can still feel it – as I cautiously opened the door to peek, then scrambled down the stairs and out the front door. I made it to my own house and fell on the living room sofa, still feeling the terror, confusion, and shame coursing through me. I fell asleep crying on the couch and was awakened in the morning by my mother. I didn’t tell her exactly what had happened, only that I had decided to come home. I thought about the boy who had threatened me – he was a year younger than me, in 7th grade – and wondered what would happen when I saw him at school. Fortunately, he pretended he didn’t even know me.

    I don’t often think about that night, and I don’t feel as if it has had a lasting impact on me – but in retelling it here I feel the ghost of that night’s terrible fear. I was so young, and the boy was so young, yet neither of us was so young that we hadn’t absorbed some of the more egregious lessons in gender relations that are taught by our culture. He felt he had the right to sexual activity with me. I felt ashamed that I had somehow sent the wrong message. I should have been angry but instead I was humiliated and frightened. I lost track of the boy – he was not a member of my regular group of friends – but I wonder now if he ever tried to take what he felt was his from any other girls.

    This all comes up in response to the #YesAllWomen hashtag that has trended on Twitter in the days since a disturbed man took out his frustrations against women and men he perceived to be sexually successful in a shooting rampage in the community of Isla Vista, California. Elliot Rodger believed that he deserved the attention and sexual availability of women, and because his needs were not fulfilled he wrote a terrifying 141-page manifesto and then set about killing the objects of his rage. This tragedy is a mix of cultural hot potatoes: mental illness, gun control, victimhood, and misogyny. I do not believe for a minute that any one of these things alone is responsible for the killer’s rampage, any more than I believe that violent video games automatically turn players into killers. What I do find most interesting about this event is the light it is throwing on male privilege in our society.

    I can already sense some of you rolling your eyes and scoffing. “Male privilege? Come on, give me a break! It’s tough to be a man! Every woman automatically thinks you are an asshole who is just waiting to assault someone!” Calm down – that’s not what I mean by male privilege. What I mean is that men have the privilege of not having to deal with things that women deal with on a regular basis (and yes, men probably have to deal with things on the regular that women don’t, but that’s not the subject of this post nor is it the point – just because men deal with their own issues doesn’t make women’s issues any less valid). I mean the privilege of not feeling uneasy about walking alone at night, or being afraid to open the door when someone knocks, or lying to a man about having a boyfriend because past experience has taught you that if you just say you aren’t interested, some men will keep bothering you anyway. This is not the same thing as being spoiled, which is how some people tend to interpret privilege. In fact, I would rather call it something like “things men get to take for granted” but that’s cumbersome. So again, I’m not saying male privilege makes men spoiled or unaware – it just means there are things they can take for granted about their safety and how society will treat them that women can’t.

    This idea comes to a head with the #YesAllWomen hashtag. Some men have responded with a hashtag of their own: #NotAllMen. That is absolutely correct. Not all men harass or assault or demean or attack or condescend or otherwise make women feel unsafe and disrespected. But the point is, SOME MEN STILL DO. If you are not one of them, that is wonderful, and I understand if you feel defensive, but instead of reacting defensively, stop for a moment and think about why women feel this way. It is not meant to be a blanket indictment of all men. Instead, I read it as an indictment of a culture in which a person like Elliot Rodger can find a community of men who truly, horrifyingly believe they are owed the sexual attention of women. And it is an indictment of a culture in which YES, ALL WOMEN have stories about being harassed or bothered or afraid. We are so fast to blame the victim or say she should toughen up, pull up her big girl panties, and put a stop to the harassment. Why aren’t we asking instead that the men who still treat women in this way pull on their big boy panties and act like civilized human beings who treat others, no matter what their gender, with dignity and respect? Why aren’t we asking our culture to grow up and start teaching boys as young as the 12 year old who attempted to assault me all those years ago that men and women are equals with autonomy, individuality, and the right to feel safe? This is not about not being a victim – this is about not being a perpetrator.

    So this is my response to the #NotAllMen hashtag: #StillSomeMen. I know many warm, wonderful, caring, loving men. I am lucky to always have had good, close friendships with men. I am incredibly blessed in my relationship with my father. I do not blame all men for the actions of some. But it is still important to fight against the men and the culture that still gives #YesAllWomen stories to tell about their experiences with misogyny and fear.

    In closing, I want to recommend two of the several articles that have commented eloquently on this phenomenon. There are many, many more, but these two particularly resonated with me.

    Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds, Arthur Chu. This article is a stunner. And I was surprised and gratified to see Chu describe two movie scenes that have always bothered me. They both feature what can only be called rape, but both scenes are played as victories for the nerdy guys who finally get to sleep with the hot girl because the girls are either tricked or too drunk to know the difference.

    I Am Not An Angry Feminist. I Am A Furious One., Madeleine Davies. This one inspired me to start using the #StillSomeMen hashtag on my own Twitter account. Davies is more eloquent than I am about why the #NotAllMen response is upsetting.

  • Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege

    Shifting Perspective: The Economics of Privilege

    Just over a year ago, I decided to start indulging my creative side by crafting objects like lamps, clocks, and even furniture out of vintage, found, and second-hand objects. I even turned my little projects into a business of sorts, and started a website to showcase and write about my creations. As I learned how easy it is to make things that I thought would be difficult – like wiring lamp sockets, cutting, sanding, and finishing wood, and drilling through glass and metal – I started experimenting with other things I realized might be easier than they seem. This led to experiments with making food from scratch. As it turns out, ice cream, fruit jams and preserves, soda, and nut butters are easy to make and generally taste better than what you can buy at the store.

    At first, I felt smug about my new-found insights into the relative ease of the DIY lifestyle. It made me wonder how consumers got so easily fooled into believing that paying full price at the store was better than making their own bread and jam and peanut butter and ice cream and soda. But then, when I was sifting flour into my bread machine one evening, I suddenly thought about my Grandma G. Grandma G. made bread for her six kids and her husband every day. She did it by hand, and though by my father’s account Grandma’s cooking wasn’t great, it was serviceable. I pondered the innovation of the bread machine that allowed me to spend five minutes measuring ingredients into a pan so the machine could spend three hours mixing, kneading, and raising the dough which I would then transfer to the oven. I didn’t have three hours to spend mixing my own dough on a regular basis, which is why I had the bread machine. Bread making from scratch has become a luxury, and as such, it has also become a marker of status. In other words, it is a privilege. That is, if you are making your own bread, that probably means you have the luxury of time and resources – ironically, resources Grandma G., who was raising a large family on Grandpa G.’s meager salary, didn’t have. Her bread making was a necessity, not a luxury. She didn’t have a bread machine and access to hundreds of fancy bread recipes; she just had flour, yeast, salt, water, and her own efforts.

    This line of thinking shouldn’t have startled me, but it did. I had to admit that I am privileged to indulge in DIY cooking of the staples most people buy at the store. I have the resources to buy organic produce, free-range chicken, hormone-free milk from pasture-raised cows, and the myriad tools that make it easy to bake your own bread and make your own nut butters and jam. I own a fancy, high-powered food processor that whirs nuts into butter in just a few minutes. I have giant stock pots that I can use to boil fruit and sugar into jam, and tools for canning it. I have a fancy ice cream attachment for my expensive countertop mixer. I spent hundreds of dollars on bottles, caps, strainers, and funnels, and roots, herbs, and special yeast for making soda. Somehow in all that frenzy of DIY activity, I lost sight of the fact that what people used to have to do has become what most people can’t afford to do.

    How did we come to this state of affairs? Why is it now a privilege to get back to the basics that my Grandma G. practiced in her daily life? These are not rhetorical questions, but as of yet I’m not ready to dig too deep into some of the possible answers. At their core, these are questions related to the stratification that is inherent in the structure of capitalism, but they also have a lot to do with our individual pursuits of a better, faster, easier way to get things done. Our pursuit of ease in the interests of freeing up time to do more things has ironically led to us having less time than we used to. Grandma G. made bread for her family every day because she had to, but she undoubtedly would have loved to buy loaves at the store instead. Now, the daily treadmill of making ends meet, especially for those in the lower economic strata, makes buying loaves at the store the necessity, and having the time to make bread from scratch becomes the privilege.

  • Additive Outrage

    Additive Outrage

    Rat poison saved my life. I know how strange that sounds, but it’s true. In July 2003 I was hospitalized with a pulmonary embolism – a blood clot in my lung. The treatment is blood thinners – IV heparin while in the hospital for a week, then oral warfarin – brand name Coumadin – for six months afterwards to keep dissolving the clot and to prevent a recurrence. Warfarin is an anti-coagulant, and it happens to be very effective as a rodenticide by causing fatal internal bleeding in rats that ingest it in the form of poison baits. So what’s the takeaway? It’s really quite simple: the dose makes the poison.

    I bring this up because I have noticed that it doesn’t take much to frighten people by telling them about “disgusting” or “scary” or “poisonous” stuff that shows up in food. This absolutely, positively requires a great deal of skepticism and critical thinking. Case in point: I ran across an article in the Huffington Post that capitalizes directly on this sort of fear-mongering. Titled “9 Disgusting Things You Didn’t Know You’ve Been Eating Your Whole Life,” the article runs through a list of food additives that are apparently supposed to make us feel like the food industry is bent on poisoning its customers. Now, I’m not stupid; I’m well aware that there is all sorts of stuff in our food that is not exactly healthy, and even some stuff that could be dangerous. I am concerned about modern eating habits (my own included!) and think it’s rather frightening how removed we are from the process of providing food for millions of people. In fact, when I teach the section on subsistence in my cultural anthropology classes, I ask my students to think about what they would eat if the world as we know it came to an end. Do they have the remotest inkling of what they would eat if there were no grocery stores or restaurants? And even if they talk about hunting, I ask them, when the bullets run out, how will you kill animals? Do you know how to prepare them? How will you keep that food from spoiling? What plant foods will you eat? I have no doubt that when the shit hits the fan for humanity, those few cultural groups that still forage or practice horticulture and pastoralism will be the only survivors, with a few exceptions for those who have learned skills for living off the land in nations like the United States (although even these few won’t survive as long-term populations unless they meet other people and are able to form larger groups that can sustain population growth).

    So what does any of this have to do with the HuffPo article? My real point is that people get unreasonably frightened or disgusted by things without thinking through why they are frightened or disgusted. The first thing on the list in the article is castoreum. This is a substance that is produced in the anal sacs of beavers, and even I have to admit that it sounds pretty disgusting. It is used as a flavoring similar to vanilla, although according to Wikipedia the food industry in the US only uses about 300 pounds of it a year. My problem with this is the automatic reaction that some parts of the animal are not acceptable for food use and others are. The way we use animal parts is culturally determined and completely arbitrary. Why is castoreum any more disgusting than drinking the liquid that shoots out of a cow teat? Some people eat tongue – why is that body part any worse than eating the ground up flesh from a pig’s side? What about eggs, which are essentially the menstrual flow of a chicken contained in a shell? Disgust, again, is culturally determined and therefore ultimately arbitrary from an objective standpoint.

    Other things listed in the article include L-cysteine, which is one of the amino acids that is found in human hair; sand; coal tar; anti-freeze; and a few others. The human hair bit is similar to the beaver anal secretions bit – we just knee-jerk find it disgusting, but it’s not as if there is actual human hair in your food! Every single living thing is made of amino acids, so you could make the argument that any food that contains an amino acid is part, I don’t know, semen? Bile? Blood? In other words, without the full background of the chemical all you read is that human hair has a component that is processed into a food additive and the implication is that you are directly consuming hair. As for the things like anti-freeze and coal tar, reference back to the dose making the poison. Once again, it’s not like food companies are pouring Prestone into your food. The ingredient in question is called propylene glycol, which has many of the same properties as ethylene glycol, which is what is actually used in automobile antifreeze. Propylene glycol is not only used in food but in medications that are not soluble in water – so much like warfarin, propylene glycol in the right dose and formulation has important medical applications.

    I could go through the list one by one, but I’m hoping that these examples make my point that so much information and context is left out of articles like this. I really don’t understand the desire to frighten and disgust people by only focusing on shock value rather than useful information. Again, I want to stress that I realize there are bad things in our food, and I am firmly committed to the idea that most companies are more concerned about their bottom line than they are about the health and safety of consumers; but it’s also important to remember that if companies sicken or kill their customers they won’t be in business for long! And I know that plenty of people automatically distrust government agencies like the FDA, but again, what does the FDA gain by allowing truly dangerous chemicals to be part of the food supply? It behooves us to think very carefully about this sort of thing.

    A final point: in reading the comments at the end of the HuffPo article, I was amazed at the self-righteousness and privilege of many of the contributors. So many bragged about only eating fresh food from the farmers’ market or making their own bread or only buying organically raised meat or making baby food from scratch or blah blah blah. Have these people ever been outside their privileged little bubble and considered how the real world works for so many people? Farmers’ markets are great – if there’s one in your neighborhood and you can afford to pay the premium prices. Organic meat? Only if there is a fancy grocery store nearby and you want to pay double the price. Food made from scratch? Sure, if you have the time and the tools and the money for the often pricey ingredients. It’s terrific that a lot of people are trying to get back to basics with food prep – I myself make bread from scratch – but it fails to recognize the deep inequality and lack of access to resources that so many people in the United States, and the world, have to contend with – but that’s a rant for another time.