Check Your Privilege: When Privilege Conversations Participate in Oppression

“If you’re right-handed, how often do you benefit from a right-handed world?” The speaker looked around the room as a few half-hearted answers trickled up from the crowd.

“If you’re left-handed,” she continued, “how often do you tweak to fit into a right-handed world?”

The illustration, though simple, was obvious. Right-handers are privileged; left-handers struggle with a world designed without them in mind. And even though there wasn’t a particular disadvantage I could identify within this illustration, I sat there fuming.

Once again, dichotomy erased diversity.

It may not matter on a practical level that ambidextrous people were completely overlooked, but it did matter on a philosophical level. The speaker was attempting to highlight privilege with a relatively innocuous illustration, and she inadvertently succeeded in highlighting what I think is the biggest issue surrounding the conversation of privilege currently.

Time and time again, invisible minorities don’t even make it onto the table.

Someone I know recently remarked, “If diversity were the Olympics, invisible minorities wouldn’t even be a team.”

So often it seems that oppression and privilege are approached like a competition. Whoever has the most visible disadvantage wins.

Visible

What happens to the invisible? The ones who don’t fit neatly into the accepted, clearly drawn lines between dichotomies of white/black, gay/straight, male/female, rich/poor, disabled/abled, or…as with the silly example above, right-hand/left-hand?

They get lost, ignored, erased, and denied.

It comes from “both” sides.

This year I’ve heard more about privilege than ever before. Initially I was ecstatic because it’s a conversation we desperately need to have as a nation.

But now I’m just burnt out.

I’m so tired of responding to a privilege question with “but what about…” I’m tired of being told I benefit by being erased or that my version of oppression doesn’t matter because I didn’t experience it within the accepted categories.

Some will preface their privilege conversations with statements about how identity is complicated and no one is entirely privileged or entirely oppressed. Someone can be privileged in one area of their life and not be privileged in another.

Someone can also pass without necessarily belonging to the privileged.

But when it comes down to the carry-out, awareness of multiple facets of identity rarely remains, much less awareness of the multiple expressions that a single facet can take.

More often than not, I watch privilege discussions degenerate into people vying for perspective king-of-the-mountain, and if that requires pretending that only two opponents exist, all the better. It’s easier to categorically deny someone’s experience if your world is black and white.

However, I don’t believe it’s possible to make progress in the conversation about privilege and oppression while we are ignoring the experiences and realities of anyone. That just creates new oppressions, one in which “both sides” participate together. If we truly want to fight oppression, prejudice, and discrimination, we need to address the co-oppression of the invisible minorities. We have to stop erasing those who don’t fit into our dichotomies of identity.

I know it’s threatening to think that the lines of identity aren’t as clearly drawn as we would like to think. I know it’s terrifying to realize that we might have something in common with the “other”/”not you” or that our experiences might be shared on various levels. I even know it’s confusing to consider how identity works if there are so many people that fit in the middle.

It’s uncomfortable to think about trying to navigate a world in which we can’t visually pigeonhole someone and know whether we trust them or like them or belong with them.

But then again, isn’t that what we’re supposed to be breaking away from anyway?

 

The Different Shades of Rebellion

Who is more rebellious? The girl wearing makeup, a skirt, and high heels? Or the girl with baggy pants, a shaved head, and a dozen piercings?

Stereotype would say the latter is far more rebellious, and not too long ago, I would have agreed.

Not anymore.

I’ve been reading Shiri Eisner’s Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, and it’s completely shaken my assumptions of what makes up a rebel. (Yes, it’s the same book that I was reading when I wrote this post, and yes, it’s my first reading still. I’m slow with nonfiction books. Don’t judge me!)

I never considered my sexual orientation as an asset to rebellion. As a bisexual female married to a guy, I often feel like I’m the most benign version of “queer” out there. There’s no way to avoid passing as straight unless I stand up and wave a flag in people’s faces (which I’ve enjoyed doing at Pride parades). However, Eisner has helped me see that it’s that very facet of my identity that makes it so much more subversive because it challenges what people think about relationships, sexuality, and identity in general.

Whether I fit into or challenge the stereotypes about bisexuality, either way I challenge stereotypes about what it means to be straight or queer. My very existence undermines the invisible certainty of monosexuality.

In other words, me being a bisexual woman can be seen as an act of rebellion. Yay me!

It was a subtle shift in perspective that had enormous consequences on the way I viewed the rest of the world and my place in the world. Suddenly even mundane activities seemed potentially radical. With the example given at the beginning of the post, both girls could potentially be making a radical feminist statement . . . or a statement about gender . . . or a statement about freedom . . . or a statement about sexual orientation.

I guess it really comes down to two basic ways of rebelling. The first is by abstaining from certain looks, behaviors, or associations. The second is by embracing them.

I’d been taught to view the abstemious method as rebellion, but only because I saw embracing such behavior or associations the same as embracing the norms that society attached to them. How could that be rebellious?

I was faced with that question when I found out about Abercrombie and Fitch’s ridiculous status obsession, from not wanting the homeless to wear their brand to refusing to supply clothes to women larger than they deemed attractive.

I never actually purchased anything from Abercrombie, but I did have a shirt with their brand on it that my partner had found in a thrift store. Normally I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about brands, but I did get a small thrill whenever I wore Abercrombie. It was the only brand that was outright forbidden in the IFB because, as the Bob Jones University student handbook from 2011 states, “Abercrombie & Fitch and its subsidiary Hollister have shown an unusual degree of antagonism to biblical morality (page 32).”

I was more than a little miffed when the CEO turned into the king of snobs. Most of the people I knew wanted to boycott the company (abstinence rebellion). For a while, I felt pressured to stop wearing my thrift-store purchased shirt in solidarity.

Then this guy starts a movement of giving Abercrombie shirts to the homeless to “taint” the brand’s “pristine” reputation. An exploitative move on the part of privilege by using the homeless in status wars? Perhaps. Charitable activist choosing to make a political statement while helping those in need? Perhaps.

Regardless of whether his move was particularly wise or not, the larger idea—claiming something “forbidden”—is a valid though often overlooked form of rebellion. He wasn’t the only one doing the whole “you can’t stop me” act with Abercrombie, but he was the only one I saw that actually got attention. Such a form of rebellion raises a valid question. Would a rebellion be more successful by people boycotting Abercrombie (fiscal punishment) or by “unacceptable” people wearing their brand (reclamation of the forbidden)?

Several years ago, I saw rebellion as an action against an authority or a system of rule. It was a choice akin to standing up when you’ve already been sitting down. It was the radical, in-your-face moments of movies and books. And I’ve had my fair share of those and am proud of them.

But that’s not where rebellion has to end.

Now I’m starting to see that rebellion can be more “passive” than that. It can be as simple as refusing to submit to a false dilemma—refusing to box in your identity.

In this way, my agnostic spiritual life becomes a form of rebellion against fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist atheists alike who want the world to be a choice between each other. My nudity-affirming feminism becomes a form of rebellion against both modesty culture and objectification culture that wants women’s bodies to be all about male arousal.

There is a time and place for marches, protests, petitions, and attention-grabbing speech. By all means we should be making use of those to effect change in society. But in the times when those are not appropriate or simply not feasible, it’s the quiet rebellion, the passive rebellion, that erodes the lines of societal norms. It’s the every-day, mundane kind of rebellion that shifts paradigms.

So, join me this week by going out there and living a rebellious life—a life that says that you can challenge or embrace stereotypes and still be kicking ass and taking names.