Privilege and Resentment

Over the last year or two, the issue of privilege has become kind of omnipresent all over social media. More and more people are thinking in terms of privilege and trying to exercise compassion. At the same time, reactionaries have formed whiny counter-movements such as the MRAs, the Meninists, and the "Why Can't We Have A White Pride Movement" people who think they're the real messengers of equality. It's pretty interesting to watch.

For those who don't understand what all this "check your privilege" stuff is about, let me lay it out for you simply:

Not too terribly long ago, white men were the only people who had any sort of privilege. This was written into the laws of the land. Eventually people got sick of the obvious unfairness of this arrangement and laws were finally passed for the cause of equality. These laws granted equality on paper, but not in real life. For instance, as soon as black people got any rights whatsoever, we got the KKK, Jim Crow laws, and urban segregation/"ghettoization." Even today, we have "equality" on paper but not in real life: black men with college degrees are as likely to get jobs as white men with felony records. That's right - if you want to see how hard it is to get a job as a black man with a college degree, go kill someone and see how easy things become for you. White people are still living with the residual privilege we inherited from our ancestors.

I've seen white people roll their eyes when talking about black people: "Oh, for heaven's sake. They have so many scholarships - more than we have! They have every opportunity WE have, and MORE! They need to get off their butts and do some work and stop complaining."

This is where people say "Check your privilege." White people take lots of things for granted: living in a decent neighborhood, not fearing for your life on the way to school, having a good school to go to, etc etc etc. When we forget about all of this sort of stuff, and then turn around and tell a kid from a terrible background that he's got the same opportunities as us, we forget about all the nice things that we had that he didn't. He DOESN'T have the same opportunities: he was likely surrounded by unchecked bad influences, his school was funded by abysmally low local property taxes, the teachers weren't engaged, and his education was very poor. Even if he WAS educated enough to go to college - which he very well might not be - what would he get for it? The same likelihood of getting a job as a FELON.

So - yes. "Check your privilege," indeed. We should always remember to THINK and LISTEN, not make assumptions and expect others to behave like we do. We forget how many things we take for granted that others find completely alien. This is what compassion and enlightenment is all about.

****Having said all that, I am now going to go down a path that will anger my more liberal friends. Before I start, I should be very loud and clear and say this: I am NOT into the MRA thing, the White Pride thing, or the Meninist thing. I find these movements incredibly disgusting and whiny and I have no use for them. Please remember that if you start thinking I'm trying to jump on the "persecuted" bandwagon. That is NOT me.And also, I'm sorry for telling such a long and detailed story. Context is important here to illustrate my point.****

So: A week or two ago, I joined a discussion on a friend's page. His article had suggested that the New Atheist movement was effectively an orientalist movement of white males who flex their privilege against everyone but white males. There were some allusions to things Maher and Dawkins said that sounded insulting to women (at least on the surface). The charge is also that the atheism movement is Islamophobic.

My response to this was that it is no measure of enlightenment to tolerate intolerance; the more humanist and rational you are, the more you will seek equality and the less you will tolerate ideas that elevate inequality (such as Islam). I said that the treatment of women and girls in Islam are barbaric, and any Eurocentric/Patriarchal views really stem a lot from religion. And as such, any problem of misogyny or Eurocentrism in a Western Atheist movement is not a function of its Atheism, but rather a function of its Westernness, which is actually a residual problem of religion. As such, the rationalist viewpoint is the antidote, not the problem.

I thought it was a pretty good point. Except what happened next was a woman butted in, telling me I shouldn't break my hand patting myself on the back for everything atheism has done for women.

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Now before I continue, I should give you a parenthetical: I do not enjoy calling myself an atheist in the first place. The things people infer from that label are crazy: there are a whole lot of adjectives/baggage that goes with the term. In reality, atheism simply means "lacking the belief in God or gods." It does not mean "I believe there is no God" (although some atheists do think this) or anything else. I say this because for the purpose of this debate, I am defending atheism as a concept. This ONLY means that I do not have an active belief in "God" AS DEFINED BY THEOLOGY. I'm not an ontological naturalist; depending on your definitions, I could be an atheist, a deist, a pantheist, or an Einstein-ist/Spinoza-ist. So don't bother going there. That's not the point. ANYWAY.........
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So anyway, yeah. She said that atheists should calm down and stop congratulating themselves on the progress they've made for women. "And don't tell me it's better when compared to Islam," she added. "That's a stupid argument." She then said that, because Dawkins and Maher have both insulted women, atheism itself has a problem with women. And besides, the demographics of the atheist community: overwhelmingly white male.

I was a bit taken aback, but my response had two main points:

1. Atheism (lack of belief in God/gods) can't have a problem with misogyny any more than disbelief in aliens can have a problem with misogyny. Atheists do not have gods and have no allegience to Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins; if they say something stupid, that does not reflect on anybody but them.

2. I am a feminist because I am a humanist because I am an "atheist" because I am a rationalist. Rational thinking IS better for women (and everyone else) than the type of male-centric irrational thinking found in Islam. It's NOT a stupid argument; if you're gonna lambast atheistic feminism for its "misogyny" while defending blatantly misogynistic Islam against the Big Mean White Atheist, you need to get your life together.

This is where my actual point begins.

She responded by basically characterizing me as a stereotypical clueless white basement-dwelling Dawkins-worshipping "dudebro" with no clue how the real world works. From this point on, she had nothing to say against my arguments; she had only smack to talk.

When I took exception to the ad hominem, she told me sarcastically that she's sorry she hurt my "poor widdle feelings."

NOW.

This was not persecution. I am not crying, my widdle feelings aren't hurt, and I'm not pulling the "LOOK, WHITE GUYS GET DISCRIMINATED AGAINST TOO" BS. If that's the worst I have to deal with, I have no business even mentioning it, especially in comparison to people who ACTUALLY have issues with discrimination. So don't get it twisted... BUT...

Can you imagine if I dismissed the argument of a black Christian woman by writing her off as a "welfare queen on her way to buy some Newports and get her $200 nails done?" And then mocked her for having her "poor widdle feelings" hurt? I'd be SWARMED with indignation and shouts of racism and ad hominem and I'd be lower than troll toejam. And I SHOULD be. It made me cringe to even write that as an example.

Here's the thing. Being born into privilege does not make your opinions any less valid than being born into un-privilege. The only thing that makes your opinions invalid is IGNORANCE. Assuming that you are ignorant simply because you were born into privilege is PREJUDICE. No, it's not OPPRESSION; it's true that an unprivileged class cannot OPPRESS a privileged class. But they can still exercise PREJUDICE, and prejudice is still not okay - even if you get some sort of glee out of "giving the white man a taste of his own medicine."

This is why I've been - cautiously - saying that privilege is starting to turn into a handicap.

Privilege is real. I was born into it and I can see plain as day that others are not as advantaged as I am. The only time I have EVER experienced racism was when I was driving with my black girlfriend and got pulled over because they assumed SHE was a prostitute. She, on the other hand, dealt with racism her whole life. I went to a private school and there was one person of color in the entire school. I have no idea what it is like to have negative assumptions constantly leveled at you. I mean, look at me - I had a small whiff and here I go off on a rant about prejudice. Can you imagine what it's like for somebody for whom that is an actual issue that affects the quality of their life?

I say all this to drive home the point that I am NOT trying to play persecution. I would never cheapen legitimate complaints of real persecution that way. I am simply trying to illustrate a shift I see where privilege is becoming a demographic that people can attack with impunity. Like I illustrated, I called her out on making assumptions about me based on my inborn traits, and was only greeted with more of the same. This seems like the only demographic that people are "allowed" to do that with, the only type of person that they are allowed to ad hominem attack and get away with it laughing. I hope it doesn't get worse.

Nietzsche came up with a term in his Geneaology of Morality: Ressentiment. The gist of this idea is that underdogs tend to find value in their identity as underdogs, reinterpreting their underdog status as "inherently good," and classify the privileged classes as "inherently evil." Some examples of this would include:

-"The meek shall inherit the earth."
-"Mainstream bands are just sellouts. Nobody listens to REAL music anymore."
-"I hate the Yankees. Somebody needs to take them down a peg."

I think this is kind of what is going on here. White men have held privilege for so long that it is becoming fashionable to reject white men, rather than to reject white PRIVILEGE. I am all about rejecting my special privilege. But the solution isn't to diminish ME as a white man; it's to raise everybody to the same level. I'll be damned if I'm walked all over by anyone trying to get ahead of me. No. We should all be in this together, walking forward hand in hand. I actually care about these issues, and it's VERY dangerous (and disappointing) to be tossed aside as a privileged blind dudebro when I'm in fact trying to HELP.I'm done now. You may now tell unleash your fury and tell me why I'm an insensitive prick.