May 15, 2012 By
I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.
So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?
Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it:
Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
1 comment:
I've been trying to figure out how to explain to guys like John Scalzi why only an idiot would think that being told how your own life is by someone who clearly isn't living it is going to be persuasive.
There are countless heterosexual white men who do not live a life that could reasonably called "privileged". They work hard for very little pay, pretty much like other folks in their educational and economic class. And by hard, I mean they do backbreaking, ass-busting work that would put some of these clowns who yammer on about "white privilege" in the hospital. I grew up around people who worked in factories and on other tough, dangerous jobs, most of whom were white men. Then I worked most of my career with people who spent careers in the military, the majority of whom were white men. I can just imagine those men, or their families, listening to someone who is trying to figure out how to tell them how their lives are so privileged, like they've got it made.
Anyone with the least modicum of sense knows that being white, male, heterosexual, and Christian are all advantages most of the time, other things being equal. Having "the least modicum of sense" might not be a phrase that describes all those white folks I grew up with, but I think among those whom it does describe you'll get a lot farther telling them about what your life is like, rather than trying to tell them how theirs are.
Reading things like this, I sometimes think progressives really do love not being taken seriously.
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