laceblade

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

...

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.

"Why are you surprised?"

"Did you really think that...?"

"This is old news."

"It's just business as usual."

I've been hearing and reading these lines, and others like them, a lot lately. They show up when someone--sometimes me, sometimes someone else--gets angry about the election, about FEMA, about law enforcement, about politicians, about a government agency, and says so. When they do, someone will almost always respond with a variation on one of those lines.

I'd just like to say this to the people who are responding that way:

You're seriously pissing me off. Shut the fuck up.

Because here's the implied message of those lines: "You're cute when you're naive and ill-informed. I, however, am too smart and experienced to believe that what's upsetting you can be changed. I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly ridicule you for your embarrassing lack of knowledge and world-weary sophistication."

Do you think you can consider yourself one of the good guys when you ridicule someone for speaking out against things that harm others? Does your ego need so much public propping-up that you'll scorn someone else's distress and anger, if it gives you an excuse to declare yourself smart?

Maybe you really do believe there's nothing we can do about cruelty, injustice, corruption. Maybe you really are shrugging off the world's problems. Okay, you're allowed. It's exhausting work, trying to fix the broken shit, and not everyone can do it all the time every day. I sure can't.

But when you try to make yourself feel better about it by denigrating other people's outrage, you don't get a pass. That goes beyond sitting this one out; it makes you part of the problem.

So if you're all world-weary and wiser than me, I don't want to hear about it. Because those lines up there and their little friends are just an attempt to make you feel big and me feel small. They don't do one damned thing to make the world a better place.

Internet communities coalesce around a common interest, and sometimes a secret shame. From breast cancer survivors to people who have a diaper fetish, a community of people gather to discuss whatever it is that consumes or interests them. If your community revolves around a "dorky" topic, it's difficult to admit to others what you're typing out into the broadband in your spare time.

And yet, there he was, waering Michael Jordan's game uniform. No one in The Coffee Bean blinked, or stared, or whispered. No giggles or pointing. No name-calling. Nothing unusual.
Now picture some guy dressed, as, oh, say, Gandalf the Gray from Lord of the Rings. Or Legolas, the girlie-looking elf with the heavy metal hair. ... It stops being cute at some point. However, it is acceptable for a fifty-two-year-old man to paint a bull's-eye on his giant gut and jiggle it while naked from the waist up in twenty-degree weather behind the goal post at a Packers game, while wearing a giant wedge of cheese on his head. ... Sci-fi/fantasy fans don't get Super Bowls and playoff games as an excuse to let their hair down and be obnoxious with fannish love; they have conventions and parties. It's much the same concept, but I think we drink better beer.