Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

returning to the sean bell nuttiness, which i happened to blunder across again because i was reading yet another blowout in bloglandia. this time it was over the wrong-just-wrong-wrong-wrong statements made about women of color, specifically blackamazon, brownfemipower, and sylvia, who were called drama queens on the womanist musings blog.

i clicked on a link to a blog by someone named octogalore in which i read amber say this:

as you’ve noted many times, there is a difference between “a feminist issue” and “an issue feminists should care about.”

notice how the phrasing is normative with regard to the latter: there are issues “feminists should care about”. (emphasis added). it’s a normative statement, an injunction, a moral ought or should because it isn’t something that is simply done without debate. it’s not something that goes unquestioned, and is considered simply the way it is. therefore, it needs to be bolstered by a normative should.

this implies that the former, “feminist issue,” is naturally a concern. the feminist issue is normalized. normal. ordinary. of course. that’s the way it is. it just springs forth from its very being. obviously there are certain things that are feminist issues.

the latter is something that, as feminists, we need to a moral rejoinder to get us to care about. we need a normative request of demand in order our concern and awareness about an issue. it’s not a normal part of feminism, but we will make it so because good and right thinking people care about these issues in general. or, rather, they should.

but saying all this is an expression of white privilege.

one can only think that caring about sean bell’s death ought to be your concern, that it is a moral obligation, because you aren’t black. it is speaking from a point of view in which it is assumed that sean bell’s death isn’t related to your being / body.

“i should do this because, to be a good feminist, i should care about certain issues — like racism aginst people of color, even if it’s man. there are certain issues, over here, on one side, and these are things i know i ought to care about. but then there are things over there, on the other side, are issues that just come naturally to my consciousness as things that feminists care about because to care about them is natural, ordinary, taken-for-granted, obvious, common sense. they are normal, ordinary expressions of feminism: feminist issues.”

who would question that, of course, body issues or sexuality or representations of womahood in the media are feminist issues? no debate there. they are intrinsic to feminist political projects.

but racism, police state violence, etc. these are things that are not intrinsic to feminist political projects. instead, they appear external to, adjuncts to, feminist political projects, even though we know we should care about them if we want to be good people who care about issues that we all know are intrinsice to feminism: racism, police state violence, etc.

you can only think like that when you’re thinking through the lens of white privilege. you can only think that sean bell’s violent death is external to, extrinsic to, separate from your being / body and is something that require a moral rejoinder to care about, if you aren’t a black person (or often, though not always, a person of color more generally).

but this has it exactly backwards.

the majority of women on this planet do not think through the lens of white privilege — because they are not white.

the majority of women on this planet cannot separate out feminist issues from racial issues because they experience them both, together, at the same time. they can’t sit there and think, “well this over here is clearly a feminist issue and that over there is another kind of issue and, well, i should care about it in order to express my concern about racial injustice. because, otherwise, you know, i wouldn’t really concern myself with racial injustice. it’s just because i’m a feminist that i realize that i *ought* to care about racial injustice because all people who are ‘social justice advocates would do well to consider it in the larger scope of how oppression and violence against marginalized groups plays out. (amber’s words)’

the speaker here is speaking from a particular position, that of white privilege and extrapolating what her relationship to sean bell’s death means to her and, thus, what it means to all women. sean bell’s death is not related to her on any level that affects her being and body. it’s an issue she feels she ought to support because it just so happens that she knows that, as a feminist, she should care about social justice issues that affect other people.

that may be a view that “centers women” but it is only centering the point of view of women from the perspective of *white privilege.* it is really only centering white women. and why does that make sense for a feminism that is supposed to represent women — and not just white women, especially since white women are a numerical minority of all women?

that’s what *white privilege* is. it is fundamentally about the ability to position yourself as the voice of all people: as if being white isn’t a *particular* perspective. white privilege is speaking from a position in whites do not have race, but others do.

it is speaking from a position where whiteness is the normal, natural, default, common sense, just-the-way-it-is perspective. the privilege here is the ability to assume everyone else experiences the world from the same perspective and if they don’t they will adjust and do the translation work necessary to accommodate whiteness as the default, normal, natural way things are.

speaking from a perspective of white privilege forces people who are not white to take positions on the margin. on the margin their experience is understood as an exception to the rule, as an adjunct to it, as something distinct from what is considered normal, natural, and just the way it is. their experience is not something that simply is, that is natural, that is normal, that is the way things are. their experience is, instead, an exception: it becomes an issue feminists *should* care about, rather than simply a taken-for-granted, natural, normal issue that IS a feminist issue without much having to think about it.

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note: this is why discussions of white privilege (and privilege more generally) seemed so fucked up to me whenever i read online disputes. what seems to be lost from the discussion is that oppression, if you want to see how it operates, is always going to be found in the tacit, taken-for-granted, ordinary, normal, default. if it is taken-for-granted and unquestioned, oppression is probably operating right there, in the open, with no one really noticing it.

it is just the way things are.

but the thing is, when theorists of injustice started thinking through how power works in modern society, they located it in oppression — and not in the more obvious forms of power we often think of: force, repression and violence. they were looking at a different way in which to understand how power works *as a system* and not as part of a personal, individual set of abilities and characteristics.

as iris marion young pointed out (Oppression), when summarizing this literature on what theorists of various social injustices had said: an oppressed group can be understood as oppressed without there necessarily being a corollary oppressing group:

oppression involves relations among groups. as a consequence, she says, it’s a mistake to only ever think about oppression in terms of the “paradigm of conscious and intentional” action.

as young writes:

new left social movements of the 1960s and 1970s shifted the meaning of the concept of oppression. in its new usage, oppression designates the disadvantage and injustice some people suffer not because a tyrannical power coerces them, but because of the everyday practices of a well-intentioned liberal-society. in this new left usage, the tyranny of a ruling group over another, as in south africa, must certainly b e called oppressive. but oppression also refers to systemic constraints on groups that are not necessarily the result of the intentions of a tyrant. oppression in this sense is structural, rather than the result of a few people’s choices or policies. its causes are embedded in unquestioned norms, habits and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of following those rules. it names, as marilyn frye puts it, “an enclosing structure of forces and barriers which tends to the immobilization and reduction of a group or category of people” (frye, 1983a, p. 11).

in this extended structural sense oppression refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms — in short, the normal processes of everyday life. we cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in major economic, political, and cultural institutions.

the systemic character of oppression implies that an oppressed group need not have a correlate oppressing group. while structural oppression involves relations among groups, these relations do not always fit the paradigm of conscious and intentional oppression of one group by another. foucault (1977) suggests that to understand the meaning and operation power in modern society we must look beyond the model of power “sovereignty,” a dyadic relation of ruler and subject, and instead analyze the exercise of power as the effect of often liberal and “humane” practices of education, bureaucratic administration, production and distribution of consumer goods, medicine, and so on. the conscious actions of many individuals daily contribute to maintaining and reproducing oppression, but those people are usually simply doing their jobs or living their lives and do not understand themselves as agents of oppression.

i do not mean to suggest that within a system of oppression individual persons do not intentionally harm others in oppressed groups. the raped woman, the beaten black youth, the locked-out worker, the gay man harassed on the street are victims of intentional actions by identifiable agents. i also do not mean to deny that specific groups are beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups, and thus have an interest in their continued oppression. indeed, for every oppressed group there is a group that is privileged in relation to that group.

from, iris marion young’s chapter, ‘the five faces of oppression.’