<p>“And why is the non-malicious question “why do you wear that turban?” to a Sikh more of a problem that the equally non-malicious question, to a twin, “do you two ever switch places,” which is also an inquiry that becomes annoying when asked repeatedly?”</p>
<p>Ha! I should have started this movement when I was a mother of young twins and snidely reminded every mother of singletons to “check their privilege” when they talked about having to change one diaper, deal with one crying baby, and so forth. </p>
<p>Or maybe my twins should complain of the “microaggressions” they’ve encountered over the years. They’ve been asked countless times “Are you identical?” when they are clearly not, as they are boy/girl. I think that represents an injustice and a lack of understanding of twin culture which everyone is obligated to have. The chick who was offended by being asked if she spoke Nigerian has nothing on them. </p>
<p>You know, annoying and / or dumb comments are not microaggressions. And it’s belittling to insert the word aggression in there. </p>
<p>I present as white and male, yet I am often asked, due to my non-normative accent, where I come from. Now I see it could be a microaggression against my right to adopt any accent I want.</p>
<p>What I find extremely ironic, Cobrat, is that, as you accuse everyone else of belittling to the extent of the challenges faced by minority groups, your first response when someone raises the challenges faced by a member of minority group other than the ones you are choosing to champion is to turn around and belittle them.</p>
<p>Uh oh. The first thing my lovely mother-in-law says when she meets someone is, “Where are y’all from?” It’s a conversation starter. She is an incredibly sweet woman.</p>
<p>I’m sure she’d be mortified to realize how offensive she’s been, for all of these years.</p>
<p>Is your argument that anyone who has an opinion about the government debt is not allowed to express it if they, or their fore-fathers have ever been a beneficiary of a government program? That is just bizarre. You don’t even know what his argument was. Does the rule apply also, if you ever attended a public grade school or drove on a taxpayer-funded road? No one gets to speak about the debt in that case. At what point does your micro-analysis of this guy’s life end? Not to mention the fact that Fortgang’s background is completely irrelevant to the issue of whether the phrase “check your privilege” is appropriate to use.</p>
<p>The controversy about this article is hot news in and around NYC. My area is no exception.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Bay,</p>
<p>It’s not that they’re not allowed to express it as they have every right to do so. </p>
<p>However, in turn, others have the same right to point out hypocritical inconsistencies if the holder’s personal history/behavior is at odds with his positions, including the author’s own and family history. Especially if he uses them as part of arguing in favor of that political position as he does in that very article.</p>
<p>For instance, it’s similar to situations where politicians who stumped strongly for their version of “Family Values” and berates others for immorality for not conforming to them like Henry Hyde, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford were later found to have violated their own “Family Values” standards themselves by their own personal conduct and in so doing, show themselves up as being politically inconsistent hypocrites when it comes to their own lives.</p>
<p>“For instance, it’s similar to situations where politicians who stumped strongly for their version of “Family Values” and berates others for immorality for not conforming to them like Henry Hyde, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford were later found to have violated their own “Family Values” standards themselves by their own personal conduct and in so doing, show themselves up as being politically inconsistent hypocrites when it comes to their own lives.”</p>
<p>So true. Anyone (including their distant and long dead relatives) who has every been a beneficiary of government programs, has no right to criticize government overspending that is getting us into massive debt. Anyone whose relatives have ever used a public road, park or school should just shut up. If they’ve drunk water from a state reservoir, or breathed air that government regulations have helped clean—be quiet, you hypocrite. What right do you have to say the government is spending too much money on anything, and the debt will consume our children’s and grandchildren’s future? The government provides everything, the money we earn is all theirs anyways, and we should be happy to give them anything they ever want, no matter what it is…because government is GOD (only, of course, if the right people are running it). </p>
<p>Should you criticize anything our Lord the Government does, you are purely a hypocrite, just like those nasty politicians (of course only one side of the aisle are hypocrites, the others are pure and only sacrifice for the people). Check your privilege!</p>
even if you think this is “hot news” the rest is as unbelievable as the story about the person who travels to Paris every weekend and spends and then discards $10K worth of stuff.</p>
<p>But cobrat, don’t you see that you are starting with the assumption that any opinion that the “privileged” person has that the non-privileged person disagrees with is pretty much by definition incorrect - and not only incorrect, but probably proof of that person’s ill-will? That the privileged person’s opinion is biased, but that the non-privileged person is just speaking the simple and self-evident truth?</p>
<p>Isn’t it possible that someone could be fully aware of the problems of the underprivileged, but still come to a different conclusion about what is a feasible and just solution to those problems? Or that maybe not every proposal with the immediate effect of helping the traditionally underprivileged is necessarily fair to others, or even better, in the long run, for society as a whole?</p>
<p>Your entire outlook on this seems to be based on a straw-man scenario in which Preston Carlton Weatherby IV, while sipping cocktails between rounds of cricket, announces “Isn’t it wonderful how everyone has equal opportunity?” In reality, the issues involved are often far more complex.</p>
<p>I don’t see any hypocrisy in having an opinion about the national debt today, that might be 180 degrees different from an opinion one might have had about it 40 years ago. </p>
<p>And I don’t see any hypocrisy in saying that your dad worked hard and made it through college in tough circumstances, regardless of who paid for it, as an example of a white male whose life wasn’t easy but he persevered and ended up doing well. </p>
<p>In applicable situational contexts, it’s more an acknowledgement the less privileged group have much more “experience on the ground” than the more privileged member by virtue of their actual lived experience in that context and one criterion from being privileged is that by virtue of having it one’s voice/words are often taken much more seriously at face value by default than the less privileged. </p>
<p>To make an analogy, if there was a discussion about evolution, whose statements on that topic are you likely to take more seriously, a bona-fide biologist who has studied it to the MS/PhD level and applied in his/her research or taught it for 20+ years or a ID/creationist whose background is mostly in fundamentalist Christian theology? </p>
<p>While this may seem a tenuous link to the discussion of privilege…especially to those with decent science education, it isn’t if we consider that not very long ago in US history, the latter perspective was actually the more privileged one and the former perspective was widely derided and sometimes…its proponents were even persecuted. In some areas of the US, this may still be the case judging by the local education boards/school board fights over mandating “equal time” to ID/creationism in biology classes. </p>
<p>" In applicable situational contexts, it’s more an acknowledgement the less privileged group have much more “experience on the ground” than the more privileged member by virtue of their actual lived experience in that context and one criterion from being privileged is that by virtue of having it one’s voice/words are often taken much more seriously at face value by default than the less privileged."</p>
<p>Then who gives you the right to talk for the unprivileged? You are a man, aren’t you? Or perhaps you’re gay, transgendered, or another group you consider to be unprivileged? If you are a man, particularly if you are or look white, you’re privileged. You have no right to talk for anyone else, according to yourself.</p>
<p>“entire outlook on this seems to be based on a straw-man scenario in which Preston Carlton Weatherby IV, while sipping cocktails between rounds of cricket, announces”</p>
<p>Moreover, cobrat, the totality of your posts suggests that you wouldn’t listen to Preston Carlton Weatherby IV’s opinion or point of view of anything because he’s automatically a figure to poke fun at or dismiss even before he opens his mouth. For no reason other than his SES/background. Who’s the prejudiced one now? </p>
<p>Wow, this thread really has taken off. That it seems to have devolved into a cascade of argumentative tedium reminds me of why I no longer check in to CC on a consistent basis. Reading the last 12 pages has actually given me somewhat of a headache. One observation, though, has left me feeling wryly amused: It’s much worse (apparently) to be dismissed as “privileged” than to allow racist statements to stand. Understand that I AM NOT saying anyone in this thread has made racist statements. NO ONE HAS to my knowledge. I’m merely thinking back on some past threads in which posters charged blacks with genetically predisposed inferior intelligence, criminality, hyper-sexuality, and a general moral paucity, and remembering how such porters went largely unchallenged by the majority of participants in the thread. Certainly, there wasn’t the level of outrage expressed in this one over the admonition to “check your privilege”, leading me to the reinforced perception that it’s much worse to be accused of being racist (sexist, other-ist) than to actually be any of those things. :-< Carry on.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, a fracas similar to the one you described, occurred at Bryn Mawr when my D was a student there. In the course of one of our daily cell phone conversations, she described a dust-up during an exhaustively long Plenary. Early on during the proceedings, a number of black students suddenly walked out in protest following the reading of a confusingly worded statement that charging the college with a systemic atmosphere of racial insensitivity, and other affronts. She didn’t understand where the outrage came from, given that her own experience as a bi-racial student there hadn’t presented her with any such feelings of alienation. I later read of the incident in the student newspaper, which didn’t clarify or distill the grievances of the protestors any better. This is NOT to assume that the protestors didn’t themselves experience incidents that validated their grievances. I wasn’t there, and was never made to understand the particulars of their charges.</p>
<p>I told my D that the event might be seen as part and parcel with a common phenomenon of Liberal Arts Education since the 1960s: that of a heightened awareness of political and social issues, a desire to feel relevant within one’s time and intellectual milieu (perhaps influenced by a romanticized notion of college protest tradition), and a kind of intellectual narcissism that is tempered with age and the very real adult obligations that come with it. Women’s colleges are invaluable in empowering women to own their individual agency as human beings, but they can also harbor microcosms of political and feminist intensity. The confrontational atmosphere engendered by that can sometimes, I’m sure, be quite irksome. It can also be extremely amusing at times. It’s all in how you approach it.</p>
<p>I tried to edit that last sentence, but ran out of time before the window for editing closed. I meant to say, "The confrontational atmosphere engendered by that can sometimes, I’m sure, be quite irksome—but also enlightening, and even amusing. It’s all in how you approach it.</p>
<p>I’m waiting for links to those posts. The mind works in mysterious ways, apparently. Most threads that I’ve seen have nothing of the sort, challenged or not. Maybe my memory is failing, as I reflected about on an unrelated thread. :)</p>
<p>Can you name names of those of us in the “guilty” majority and remind us which threads those were so we can address your point in a helpful manner? Your statement is like lindz’s earlier, when she said that <em>most</em> of the posters on this thread don’t think discrimination still exists, but didn’t respond to my request that she be more specific about who she was talking about, and I don’t remember anyone at all on this thread intimating that point. I think the accused ought to be given a chance to address her accusation. Otherwise it is just a mean comment.</p>
<p>Perhaps things are said that fly by some of us because we don’t <em>hear</em> them as offensive, like “check your privilege” and “where are you from,” when those phrases are in fact, offensive to certain people. Those offended are the ones who need to speak up about it and let us know. </p>
<p>I’ve been on CC for a loong time,& I don’t recall anything like that. Of course I mainly stay in the parents forum & cafe, as bombastic & hyperbolic statements from 16 & 17 yr olds might give me the vapors!</p>
<p>But seriously, I’ve read statements on CC, not necessarily racial, that were really out there and clearly from a ■■■■■, that was not worth responding to.
( I do have a life - she said)</p>