I was thinking earlier that my mind's clicked over to accepting that I have white privilege, because white privilege is *luck*, and over the last few years my mind's clicked over to thinking I am fortunate rather than put-upon a lot more often.

And I don't think this is accidental, my childhood had all these messages about suffering justifying getting things, about having to justify getting things/deserve having things, and then blanket assumption that if you're in power, you must be good. I figure there's an us versus them thing which can explain authorities seen as not good, or how people suffering might be punished and therefore bad. So the idea that you got somewhere because you're lucky is completely alien to that (and I guess it's the distinction handed the Bad People).

Like; it's this huge clusterfuck that *just* tackling it as a racism thing can't resolve, if that makes any sense?

(And to further detail; I don't, and will never, consider myself white. But I definitely think I pass such that white privilege has literally saved my life in the past, I can tell you exactly when. I was gonna friends lock this but ehh, I initially didn't so I'll run with it.)

(can't resolve because someone saying "hey, you know that's incredibly racist" is an outside influence and won't be internalized no matter how much a listener with a background like mine, might want to internalize it. Like right now I'm feeling that you can do fairly superficial dialogue about racism only, as a stopgap measure, but if you can connect that dialogue to a whole batch of internal processing, you're more likely to get the paradigm shift that could affect a real change.

Wow, I think I just made this *more* convoluted rather than less, I'll stop now...)

@Leucrotta This does make a lot of sense, because a lot of things that are racist often aren't thought of as racist. It isn't just bad actions that bad people do, it seeps into the very fundamental roots of how western culture is structured, and it affects the actions and thought processes of /everyone/. (We live in a society, etc)

To challenge racism isn't just to challenge racist /actions/, to challenge racism is to subvert the colonial cultural hegemony that underscores all of western society.

@FreyaManibrandr it’s like... you don’t wake up in the morning and decide you’re going to do [x terrible thing], you have probably a lot informing that, I think *especially* ideas relating to scarcity, exclusion, competition, judgments.

My attempts to become more open minded are part of my attempts to be nicer to *myself*. Unfortunately what kicked those off were illness and a mushroom trip, experiences which don’t transfer.

@FreyaManibrandr and what you said; we’re handed this idea that there are Racists, which is so externalized and easily dismissed compared to, there are people who take racist actions, and the actions not people are the issue. (As a southerner I grew up with RACISM!!1!, but my concern is I’m likely to miss the subtle, much more easy to do stuff, y’know?)

@FreyaManibrandr My DEI classes have talked about a lot of the social stuff as “white dominant culture,” and I’m not at the point where I can say yeah, of course that’s “whiteness”... but I notice a lot of the same things are “cognitive distortions” in my CBT books. And...

@FreyaManibrandr ... I also feel like if there’s negative indoctrination that slams *everybody*, which comes packaged with the assumption that everyone’s white and middle class (I suspect that part might be 50s schools bulk handling a huge influx of kids), then someone *actually* white and middle class (or passing)is going to benefit a lot more just walking into it.