some thoughts about childhood and white privilege, gets long
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.)
re: some thoughts about childhood and white privilege, gets long
@Leucrotta Huh. /huh./
It may be convoluted but it makes perfect sense and it's /really fucking interesting!/
re: some thoughts about childhood and white privilege, gets long
(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...)