Against False PrivilegeOne of the biggest blunders of modern activism is the promotion of guilt and the demand for false privilege.
Niamh Jiménez
30 Jul 2022
Prejudice is universal. Growing up a black kid in Ireland, I thought that Jehovah’s Witnesses were odd because they do not celebrate birthdays or Christmases. I looked sideways at caravan-dwelling Irish Travellers (to whom my school friends and I often referred using terms that certainly would not satisfy contemporary high standards of “verbal hygiene”). I had no idea why some Muslim women covered their bodies from head to toe, and if you had asked me to name a particular style of Islamic head covering, I would have floundered, resorting to the Western world’s catchall term of “headscarf” or “hijab.” Contrary to popular belief, the fact that I am a black woman living in a white country does not somehow inoculate me against human prejudice.
And yet, I’m given to understand that I must know what prejudice feels like more than anyone. One of my graduate teachers once told me that the most offensive thing anyone could ever say to me would be something xenophobic or racist. It did not seem to occur to her that I could be meaningfully insulted in any other way because she seemed to be incapable of seeing anything about me but my “blackness.” Were she to observe me sitting next to a white man, I would be sitting next to a person with a nationality, a particular dress style, an idiosyncratic way of wearing his hair perhaps, and a handful of other visible characteristics—all of which are likely to register before his “whiteness.” I, on the other hand, am nothing more than my skin colour. It is my fundamental descriptor; the only thing that seems to be of any relevance or importance.
“What is it like to date a black woman?” a middle-aged white woman asked my white boyfriend as we sat at a bar. She was riotously drunk and wide-eyed, her face filled not with malevolence but with wonderment. In the stunned silence, she continued, “Why did you fall in love with her? Was it because of her skin?” You might think that the questions she asked are rare nowadays—that they belong to a pre-modern and barbaric kind of thinking that has long since evaporated along with hunter-gathering and nomadic tribalism.
But this sort of thinking is by no means obsolete. What I saw in this drunk woman has always been buried in the private chambers of people’s minds. And it remains there until it’s dislodged by a stiff whiskey and tramples over the fences of social etiquette. Our bodies house the lewdest and filthiest of secrets, but do not be fooled by a quiet, polite, and politically correct exterior. Appraising that 60-year-old woman as she chugged back her Guinness and asked me if black people “bruise,” I decided she was loud, fat, and ugly. Contrary to our own self-flattering notions of refinement and progression, we were both guilty of reducing the other to the sum of her superficial features.
But I can “play the race card.” I might have justifiably called her a racist or a bigot. Had I done so, she would have been powerless to return the accusation. And yet, I also harbour my own brand of fetishes and fascinations. I recall spending an inappropriate amount of time staring at a group of Hasidic Jews in an airport once, riveted by what I thought were impeccably curled sideburns (actually pe’ot, Anglicized as “payot”—a Hebrew term meaning “corner” or “edge”). This is just one of many occasions on which I have looked at a human being as though they were an interesting object. I have lost count of the number of times I have been influenced by my false preconceptions of white people (as though they constitute some nondescript monolithic category).
However, my membership of a supposedly oppressed group licenses me to speak and act with fewer social restrictions. Not only does my race permit me to abide by certain social codes more loosely, but in some cases, it even empowers me to violate those codes with impunity. When I was eight years old, a fat white boy called me a bleep while we were being taught to plant daffodil bulbs in the school yard. In response, I grabbed an enormous fistful of wet dirt, threw it into his muddy face and shouted, “Look who’s a bleep now!” An hour later, my mother arrived to collect me from my white teacher amid a shower of apologies and special encouragement. I was given the day off as a consolation prize. The other kid was sent to the principal’s office.
It did not take me long to realize that my “blackness” was widely considered a kind of extenuating circumstance. Almost any offence can be absolved by my presumed entitlement to retributive justice. I am allowed to throw dirt at other nasty children because the world is racist. When black kids grow up, we are loath to name or challenge this exemption in each other—doing so would be seen as the worst kind of disloyalty. Whites do not publicly challenge it (although they resent it in their private circles) because they are possessed by that most potent of all spiritual poisons: white guilt.
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This exemption may look and feel like privilege, but it is a false kind of privilege. The person exonerated of criminal responsibility by “reason of insanity” is not privileged. Rather, they are judged to have the mental development of a child. When someone is given fewer limits than their peers and coddled when they misbehave, they are subject to diminished expectations which preclude equal dignity. Handling the oppressed with “kid gloves”—appeasing and pacifying them, refusing to take them seriously—pathologizes them. In this way, blackness and disability and transgenderism and gender non-conformity and queerness are reduced to impediments. The guilt and pity that these impediments evoke in those not equally impaired are not the same as compassion.
One of the biggest blunders of modern activism is the promotion of guilt and the demand for this kind of false privilege. Progress cannot occur if it is rooted in the idea that the oppressed are inherently impaired. Progress can only occur on the basis of perceived equality. And equality means treating people equally, which includes being held accountable for wrongful actions. It means being taken seriously. But if oppressed people are to be taken seriously by the rest of the world, we have a duty to speak and act in ways that demonstrate a belief in our own worthiness to be taken seriously. Rather than silencing our critics with epithets, we must engage them in rational debate. We must decline the offer of a free pass, secure in the knowledge that we are not insane or childlike and that we are capable of amounting to something equally great. We must hold ourselves to the same standards we expect of others—standards of which we know that we are capable.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/07/30/against-false-privilege/
