Among many problems

I was planning on closing out my Black History month posts with a rant in response to some anger at a reparations happy hour that took place in Portland recently.

The idea was to list all of the various obstacles that have been placed and are still placed in the paths of African Americans, concluding by saying something like "if this is what bothers you, you are the problem!"

That feels right as an expression of exasperation at how badly wrong people can be. It is still false.

That there are all of the obstacles in place - many the result of structural racism, but some that go beyond that - is a bigger problem than that some people get really pissy any time the existence of bigotry is hinted at. Still, that reaction is a real obstacle to getting over any of the others.

I still intend for the rant to happen. I may even use that concluding sentence despite debunking it right now. (Also, today was supposed to be a related thing on journalism, but I think that will go up Wednesday instead.)

For now, though, I want to write a little about the obstacles to people seeing the way things work. It looks like that will focus on privilege, just because that's what's been floating around lately.

That is Matt Stoller's fault. He didn't start it, but he bloviated the most about it. He bloviated without understanding how people use the word, either, therefore various people were having discussions on it. Here are two that I appreciated:

https://twitter.com/TGTalker/status/1041361374776123393

https://twitter.com/NoTotally/status/1041551963345715200

(I do not believe that it is a coincidence that these smarter and more nuanced takes come from people with more marginalized statuses. There are no guarantees, but sometimes patterns appear.)

Now, here's another place where I am going to amend the words that are easy to say and feel right.

By complete coincidence, I had recently read an essay where a man - Richard S. Orton - refers to his "blank spaces" in the way that we would normally use "privilege". I don't know when he wrote it, but the original edition of the book it was in was 1993. While the use of "privilege" does go back further than that, it was not common, and I doubt he was specifically avoid it. Instead, he was probably just trying to find a way to express something that was new to him, and he found a reasonable way.

(The essay was "Learning to Listen", which I found in Transforming a Rape Culture, and it was really good.)

I remember thinking at the time that because so many people get offended by the word "privilege", maybe "blank spaces" would be more palatable. Then I got irritated that it needs to be more palatable.

There is more to write there that I am going to postpone for now, because it goes along with different things. I do want to debunk the coincidence though.

I try really hard to learn. It means listening to people with different backgrounds and different areas of expertise. It means taking book recommendations from a lot of sources. It means periodically reviewing intended reading, and what I have on the backlog. It also means being sensitive to impressions on things that I need to be looking into now.

So it was not a complete coincidence that I was reading Transforming a Rape Culture. It was not a coincidence that I felt the need to delve into gendered violence.

It certainly could have been avoided. I am still finishing up one reading list while bringing up two others (that I will write about eventually). It's not that I don't have other things to do.

It could feel like a coincidence that reading something that had me thinking about the very term "privilege" came up so close to online discussions of the terminology, but the truth is those discussions are always happening.

The gendered violence list has ten books on it and I have completed four; do you want to guess how relevant they are right now? But if I had read them all right at the time I marked them as "to-read" - going back a few years for some - they would have been relevant then too. That's not even a partial coincidence, let alone a complete one.

It would be nice to think that if someone were to replicate that reading list a few years from now, that it would only be relevant as history. That doesn't seem likely.

That is a combination and culmination of many problems. You could possibly combine them all into a single broad problem of misogyny, or even bigotry (evil?), but that could also result in losing various key points. It is helpful to spend time on the individual aspects of the big problem, and even divide it into many problems.

(I'm not particularly in the heuristics of it all at this point, but that could change.)

Still, without it being the only problem, the people who get angry that they even have to think about misogyny and the harm it does, and who are more concerned with #notallmen or the possibility of false accusations, or worry about the path to redemption for harassers and rapists before worrying about the path to wholeness for their victims...

YOU ARE A PROBLEM!

Even if you've never raped anyone. Even if no one in your family ever owned slaves.

You are a problem.