Warning
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------This is Part 2 of what began as a quick “about me”.. a brief summary of contents
The Hippy Shit: God,: Pranks, Practical Jokes, Schadenfreude; Cultural Identity; Military Forces; Nationalism; Government; Law Enforcement Agencies; Gender; Sex; Sex Generally, Women’s Orgasms in Particular, & Sex Toys;
PART 2 (This Post)
Non or Anti-Racist? About Sets and Systems; What Does SYSTEMIC Mean? (Systemic Racism) Part 1; What Systemic Racism is Made of Part 2; More Ingredients of Systemic Racism Part 3; People Are Motivated by Needs; Needs and Australian History; Other Possible Explanations For Human Behaviour; The Me Too Movement; Trial by Media; Feminism; Intersectionality; Systemic Sexism; White Privilege; Race as a Social Construct;
PART 3 (The Next Post)
Dramatic Choices & Cultural Consequences: Choices; Compulsory Unit; Censorship and the Single Story; Cultural Appropriation; Blackface; White People With Dreads; Boomerangs, Didgeridoos and Indigenous Australian Art; The W word and the N word; The Hip Hop Lyric Thing; White Saviour Narratives; White Saviour as Inspiring Teacher; White Saviour Adopts Poor Black Kid; White Saviour and the Grateful Slave; White Saviour as Anti-Hero; Fact or Fiction; Crossing the Line; The Other-Ness.
..--oo0oo--..
Well, I'm not from Canada, America or "Trashcanistan", I'm Australian.
Max Berry, also an Australian, recently wrote an article for CNN in which he explained:
Australia is the nicest racist country you will ever see. It is racist in a blithe, jokey kind of way, where nobody is supposed to take anything too seriously, and nobody is too aware of historical or cultural contexts.
There is racial violence in Australia's history, but not a lot of it, compared with many other countries, and it's not very recent.
I disagree about his take on history and strongly disagree about what is happening today but apart from that I'm inclined to agree with his assessment of Australia as a country - we are nicer than most.
I have a very real conviction most of us are not racists at heart, we just don't understand the whole systemic racism white privilege stuff or bother to notice that Indigenous People are dropping like flies, and why would we?
Every time some U.S.ian assumes we know blackface or Black stereotypes are offensive they are missing the point - South Africa's system of Apartheid closely resembled the Queensland system of Protection because this is the country that sort of wrote the book on planning not to mess with messy race mess. How on earth would we know about the significance of blackface or Black stereotypes unless it was part of some Cosby Show episode?
Non-Racist or Anti-Racist?
The truth is starting to filter through, though, and we are slowly learning. Slowly, because we are non-racists rather than anti-racists - the difference is clarified here by Marlon James.
Yes, there are one or two haters, but if we white folk are
basically decent, how is it bad things keep happening to black people?
The best solutions “fix the problem, not the person”. When
it comes to bad things happening to black people, the problem is
"Systemic Racism".
What IS systemic racism, and how do we fix it? It's actually
quite simple.
It's actually quite simple.
About Sets and Systems
A set is a number of things that belong together,
or are thought of as a group
All sorts of stuff belongs in groups or sets – sets of drawers, chess sets, sets of teeth and so on.
One of the significant things about a set of stuff is that it doesn’t do much except just sit around existing.
What would happen if we put more than one set of stuff together? For example, leave a chess set on top of a set of drawers for eternity? The answer is, the chess set would probably get dusty and covered in cobwebs.
The elements of a set never really change: Unless someone interferes or there is a dramatic intervention like maybe an earthquake, sets tend to remain static.
I’m not an artist and I lack the patience to search for a picture of a dusty chess set sitting on a set of drawers.
Here is a diagram of a set of Hydrogen atoms and another diagram of a set of Oxygen atoms at a party. The Hydrogen atoms are outside hanging around the barbecue. The Oxygen atoms are inside watching something on the TV in the lounge room. They are not interacting. It’s a boring party.
A system is what results when
two or more sets of stuff change
if you put them together
The chess set and the set of drawers did not become dynamic when we put them together, but if we put all the Hydrogen and Oxygen together in the same room at the party… something changes.
No, I did not consciously set this up so I could make strained jokes about atoms meeting at a party and creating puddles – I was just trying to find a simple example of a few atoms existing statically at a micro level, staying with their own set, minding their own business and not making a conscious decision to change, like the H and O in the first diagram.
At a macro level, when they were required to co-exist in the same space and interact, something bigger than themselves caused the H and the O atoms to combine in a dynamic way to create molecules of water.
Water is H2O - Hydrogen two parts, Oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and for a long time nobody knew what it was. The answer is the electrical charges of the atoms causes them to combine. There was more to the story than was first obvious.
You’ve heard someone – many someones – say “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts” or, more correctly,
the whole is OTHER than the sum of its parts
It doesn’t matter whether we are talking chemistry or economics or philosophy or psychology – or race: the principle is the same.
When we put two or more sets of certain variables together, something changes.
Ordinary, well-meaning white people go about their business not wanting to harm black people…
so how is it when white and black people are combined we can end up with negative outcomes of various kinds against black people?
The answer is "Systemic Racism". The Individuals in this story have not changed. The white people are still mostly well-meaning people.
But the whole is other than the sum of its parts. Something more than the intentions of the individual white people is influencing what happens when the white and the black people come close together.
Here are two sets: White people and Black people. Separate and apart and at a micro level they are fine. No, I am not proposing Apartheid.
Now let's put them together.
What does SYSTEMIC mean? Part 1
Just as with Hydrogen and Oxygen - when a third thing (electrical charges) – caused the two sets to change into something else altogether and become water, when we put white people and black people together in most countries of the world we get a result called
systemic racism
and the extra thing that causes this, the “electrical charge” if you will, consists mainly of
1) historical events and
2) the questionable attitudes of one or two coalholes.
With Systemic Racism, the mostly historical bits that make the whole other than the sum of its parts are numerous and go way beyond any individual conscience or any single moment in time – systemic racism is not just dependent on the number of chill people in a room. This is why it will take more than chill attitudes to fix. Hence the saying, in some Quality System Engineering circles, "Fix the Problem, not the Person".
The only way to fix Systemic Racism is to fix all of what is in the grey area: -
- The results of history, not just
- Bad attitudes.
(LIKE I ALWAYS SAY - IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE BIZARRE BEHAVIOUR OF HUMAN BEINGS, JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY...)
Here’s something that should concern any white citizen of Australia. Section 51 of your constitution is a shameful pox on your history.
Seriously. I am not just taking the piss now, I really want to know - in how many other countries on earth is there a constitutional provision giving the government the right to make laws with respect to:
"The people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws".
Every time someone tells me the government gives a free Rolls Royce and other special treatment to Indigenous Australians I wonder in what fucking sane universe they imagine everyone who is Indigenous even ticks the box on forms? I know one shire where I used to have some workmates who were Indigenous yet the Census figures said there were none in the area at all.
Yes, there have been and sometimes still are one or two schemes that did not apply to whitefellas.
The earliest of these focused on rounding the Indigenous People up and murdering or torturing them. In more recent times, some of them were kinder or even favoured Indigenous People.
There have been and sometimes still are one or two scheme that do not apply to blackfellas, such as when rich private schools get money to build things like auditoriums or pools. Just a few years ago this happened in my electorate while the local public schools - also attended mostly by whites - got a tied grant to fix their toilets. Discrimination always has been and always will be practised by politicians - it's how they buy votes or feather their own nests. Should we blame the rich non-Indigenous schoolkids? Vilify them? Assault them? Hate them for these policies?
Mostly, today, benefits paid to Indigenous people simply have different names from the same benefit paid to the rest of us - this is usually an accounting thing with some government advertising thrown in.
To our shame, there are also "non-racist" government programs aimed at "all" Australians that are only ever tested in areas where huge numbers of Indigenous people rely on benefits, like the Indue Card program. And "tested" repeatedly.
In Australia our Systemic Racism is not hidden or hard to find - it is right there in black and white in our laws as much as in the outcomes these laws deliver.
But the whole of Section 51 of our Constitution is not just about making laws with respect to Indigenous Australians - this section is so bad on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin - it certainly gives an enormous amount of power to a handful of undemocratically elected people who rarely do anything to inspire trust.
What checks and balances? "Tradition" you say? Excuse me while I go to the bathroom so you won't notice I just PMSL.
What Systemic Racism is Made Of Part 2
The grey area of the racism diagram - the systemic racism part - is chockers. It’s full of things history gave us like crappy state constitutions and bad state laws.
Systemic Racism includes the attitude of that racist coalhole sitting next to us on the bus, the one we don’t challenge because we are getting off at the next stop. Or the one we don’t know about because she/he hides his/her racism like my mother used to. Attitudes that have been deliberately shaped and crafted over time by people with a vested interest in telling us Indigenous Australians are “less than”, but never corrected.
Or it’s a politician who openly presents a motion to Parliament saying white people should be pitied, supported by a bunch of inexcusably indecent white fucknuckles who vote yes and pretend they didn’t know what they were voting for (as if that should not itself be cause for shame).
It’s the person who is sick to death of hearing that African youths are causing trouble in the suburbs but never wonders
a) why we keep hearing it
b) who keeps saying it or
c) if there is a problem is it something WE are doing wrong? Is there something we can do to help?
More Ingredients of Systemic Racism Part 3
Don’t ask me to describe everything in the grey area of the diagram, it’s a bottomless pit …
Just remember that
• one W alone is a member of a set:
• one B alone is a member of a set:
• a B and a W together in a room are part of a system.
• the whole is other than the sum of its parts
All that is necessary for Systemic Racism to flourish is that there be something more than indifference influencing the behaviour of the different elements when they get together - something they don't always have direct control over. A lack of direct control is not the same thing as no power at all.
Both Australia and the United States are Federations. In both countries we tend to think of Federal Constitutional rights but forget the ENORMOUS influence of State Constitutions or powers, and the influence of history at a Federal, State and Community level.
In Australia, different State laws have a different impact on Indigenous death in custody rates. It's a simple fact. The Federal Government has the power to fix this, but not since 1975 has there been a Federal Government with the political will to give a toss.
The system makes this possible.
This is systemic racism in action.
Sadly, only individuals acting collectively have the power to change the system. Sadly, many individuals who are otherwise good people don't seem to understand systems, don’t care enough to try to understand what is actually happening, or why, or how they might fix it.
Only the people in State X have direct power over what happens in State X unless the Federal Government intervenes. Federal Governments don't give a Flying Frack. Australian Prime Ministers sometimes only need about 40 something thousand local votes at the ballot box to get into parliament, that's all - none are elected by a national vote. In real terms, Prime Ministers are chosen in Party Room deals by a handful of faceless, gutless career coalholes, not by voters. They are rarely effective leaders because they have no real power.
Most Australians think they live in a democracy, but democracy is something people do, not a system.
People Are Motivated by Needs
Why don’t State Governments admit Indigenous People die needlessly while in their care? Why are Indigenous People taken into custody so often, anyway? What motivates people to be racist?
Forget governments, what drives the everyday decisions ordinary everyday people make?
“We got new evidence as to what motivated man to walk upright:
to free his hands for masturbation.”
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| TRUDY Lily Tomlin - The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe |
"If we want to understand the world, we need to understand economics" is a philosophy that works for me, though it's not for everyone. No, I'm not a raving Marxist who is all about redistributing the means of production, I simply believe if we want to understand the bizarre behaviour of human beings, it's usually enlightening to follow the money.
Let's start with the standard torture of all ill-designed economics courses: - “the economic problem” –:
a) what should we produce ?
b) how should we produce it ?
c) how should we distribute what is produced ?
Some people prefer to filter the world primarily through a religious framework. Without deliberately setting out to be offensive, let me offer an example of the economic problem in a Christian framework;
a) here are some loaves and fishes
b) I’m going to miraculously multiply them
c) you are going to share them equally without worrying about race, colour, nationality, political affiliation, sexual orientation, whether the person next to you has worked as hard as you etc simply because it is the right thing to do/ the world would be a nicer place if…
Many forms of religion provide the “how to distribute” portion of an answer to the economic question, but do not always focus on the first two parts. Further, the usefulness of religion in controlling behaviour is generally limited by the requirement that people have faith. We can demand that people have faith, but all we will get for our trouble is people who would have faith anyway, and other people who just pretend to have it. Like any value system, religion can give us good ideas to consider, but rarely provides a perfect blueprint for a free society.
The economic question – what sort of pie should we bake, what shall we bake it with and who should have the biggest slice? – is an assessment tool we can use for distinguishing not just between different economic systems but different political systems.
The classic folk tale of The Little Red Hen supports most political systems including both capitalism and communism because both assume (amongst other things) that anyone who doesn’t work shouldn’t eat.
As well as offering advice about how we treat each other, the Bible both reflects and encourages a culture where the accumulation of wealth is seen as a good thing, especially the Old Testament. This begins with the very first story where Adam (man) is told he shall have to work to eat.
Some of the earliest forms of writing seem to have been for accounting records kept by temples. Work, wealth and worship seem to fit together naturally.
Now allow me one simple observation: In many parts of Europe, Hell itself freezes over for several weeks or months of the year and, once upon a time, if you didn’t store up food in advance of winter you could starve. Theft became an alternative to storing food in advance. Even parts of Europe and the Middle East (not suffering severe winters but also not protected from invasion by mountain ranges or other geographical challenges) thus developed an early obsession with stored wealth, especially portable stores of wealth. Many of these notions made their way into religious rulebooks, and are at the heart of Western Culture.
Over time, cultures tend to merge religion, politics and economics into some sort of Gordian knot, like the one that prevails in Australia today.
Name an issue, any issue, and ultimately money can explain a great deal of how things happen. Even when we resort to using moral judgments as the basis of our choices, money is rarely far away.
Actually, Ms Dhu was not in prison, she was being held at a local cop shop in a holding cell. To some of the people responsible for her care she was “just an Aboriginal”.
What I cannot wrap my head around is this – not that someone calls the Police for help with domestic abuse and ends up dead -- but that the silence in this country is so deafening every time this happens.
And it happens all the time.
Not just the silence, but the death bit.
http://wtcib.blogspot.com/2016/12/coroners-report-is-perfect-its-system.html
Indigenous Australians are dying
in obscene ways
because our parliaments are mostly full of
"non-racists"
Indigenous Australians are dying
in obscene ways
because our parliaments are mostly full of
"non-racists"
Needs and Australian History
Why, of all the peoples of all of Britain’s former colonies, have Indigenous Australians been so spiritually shattered by colonisation? Yes, there was occupation, murder, disease, theft, massacre and the usual litany of horrors which I do not dismiss lightly, but the outcome seems to have been psychically worse here than in many other countries.
The single greatest lie the West ever forced on the Indigenous Peoples of Australia is this: the presumption that Western solutions to “the economic problem” were universally superior to those already operating here. Indigenous Solutions were, at the time of colonisation, part of the oldest surviving living cultures in the history of this planet.
Allow me to pose a simple question: How do you hitch a plough to a kangaroo?
It’s just one small but pertinent question, because agriculture is a big part of the Western obsession with creating and storing wealth. It's even a bit of an obsession in the Bible.
In Australia, Western style savings of the type that meant
- producing a surplus; and
- storing wealth; and
- fighting off anyone else who came near
For 50,000 years Indigenous peoples cooperated with nature and each other to maximise cycles of abundance, only taking what was available or needed as appropriate.
When my forebears arrived and started clearing the land for cultivation they did not “see” how carefully and deliberately the locals had, over time, sculpted the landscapes around them – in the example shown here, for firestick farming. Instead they saw what they wanted to see; people who often sat around doing nothing. It suited my white forebears to assume the locals were lazy and useless because the concept of efficient sufficiency was outside their cultural worldview.
Everything about Australia’s unique location, native fauna and flora and sets of ecosystems made every assumption of Western culture counter-intuitive and counter-productive for survival. Driven not just by greed but unspeakably short-sighted arrogance, my forebears arrived and systematically set out to ignore and destroy the peoples, cultures and ecosytems that were already here and, to this day, we are mostly still too stupid to see what we have done.
But my forebears and those of us who are their offspring haven’t just done the usual kill/maim/steal routine here: –
Our ongoing refusal to acknowledge
what was here before us,
and what we have done since we arrived
and what we have done since we arrived
amounts to gaslighting.
The problem is not that Indigenous Australians are struggling to adapt it’s that we still don’t honestly act like we want them to be part of our community.
So what’s the problem, are we idiots and just too fucking stupid to know it? Or is it that we just don’t give a shit?
I’m hoping there’s a third explanation: That we are actually decent people and, if only we knew how rotten “the system” is and what to do about it, things would change.
Other Possible Explanations For Human Behaviour
Some people are just plain selfish, while others try to do the right thing for no other reason than doing the right thing is the right thing to do.
There are a lots of different motivators, really, and that’s what makes people-watching such a fascinating hobby.
The Me Too Movement
We need to talk about women's issues, for a moment. Why? Because
Discrimination against women
affects people of all races and cultural groups
it affects people of all classes
it affects children regardless of gender,
because women are often carers
and sometimes the sole providers
discrimination against women helps to keep under-classes
like people of colour
struggling and compliant
discrimination against women
is a major cog in the machinery of systemic racism.
Most (tho not all) of the women I’ve talked to over the years – enough years, I think, to have formed an opinion on the matter – for the sake of transparency I should say most of the women I've talked to over the years are also white, have either the same cultural background or are of Mediterranean families.
At least half have some horrid tale of at least one instance of being raped (beyond any reasonable doubt).
I can't begin to imagine the shit Indigenous Australian Women endure but I do know for sure that some coalholes think they don't deserve the respect white women get, and that is not a very high standard to begin with.
The rules of logic tell us we should not assume anecdotes are evidence of anything. Just because we know someone who experienced something doesn't mean everyone goes through it.
The Me Too movement is not
"arguing from the particular to the general"
but saying
"excuse me, don't think you are fooling anyone
but saying
"excuse me, don't think you are fooling anyone
... we all know what's really happening here".
I was once beaten by a partner who was angry because he wanted to shoot me and I would not tell him where I’d put the parts of a gun I had dismantled. When a bystander dialled triple 0, a young policewoman followed me down a street late at night and told me it was not a safe area to be out on my own and I remember feeling awful after I laughed at her. (There were as yet no such things as refuges). I waited about an hour before returning to where we were staying (working away from home) because I thought things might be calmer – only to be raped. (Rape in Marriage legislation was passed in South Australia the next year).
Of five of my aunts by blood or marriage, two were consistently beaten by their husbands. Later, when social security was easier to obtain for women who left a marriage, I met fewer women who stayed in bad situations, but it still happened/ happens, and this includes women beaten by sons, abused by adult siblings and so on. And yes, I know it’s not all “men bad women good”.
I have been in a bad marriage, and I know how hard it was to leave, and I know if I’d had children it would have been 100 times harder. (Please don’t diss anyone who finds it hard to leave a bad situation. You can’t fix them, and you don’t have to enable them, just let them know you are waiting.)
If I was using public transport at night when I was young men of all ages would put the hard word on me at tram stops or any opportunity, as if they would be letting the side down not to “try” and that included offering me money. Because I was so small, when I was 26 years old tram conductors were still asking me if my fare should be half or full, so I wonder what were all these men who put the hard word on me... paedophiles?
What is that about? Are men really such slaves to hormones that they can't stop embarrassing themselves? Frightening women and children? Slaves to peer pressure? Just arseholes, perhaps?
Most of the time a half-joking “rack off” would sort it, but I always felt the need to be passively appeasing when I refused.
not all men, but it only takes a handful
to mean this sort of behaviour is inescapable
There is also a widespread culture of acceptance that can't be denied. And it is a culture that is not just supported or promoted by men.
The biggest impact sexual harassment had on my life was in the work force – I left a minimum of eight jobs over the years because I was being groped. If you are thinking this had anything to do with me being desirable you are missing the point – I oozed vulnerability and a very small handful of creeps are predatory. Again, I say a small handful, but it only takes a handful to ensure they are everywhere.
Because my work history was unstable, I always appeared unreliable to prospective employers. (As if dealing with mental illness wasn't challenging enough.)
I have known men who lived with as much fear of rape as I did, because they were gay, and poofter-bashing was until recently something of an Olympic sport in this country. I also knew or worked with both men and women who were not gay but were at risk of bashing because bigots are fuck-knuckles who believe stereotypes.
I have known both men and women who had, when young, been sexually violated by adult parent-figures. And many who were let down by the adults they turned to for help.
I have not personally had any male tell me he was, as a child, molested by a Priest or Brother, tho I have one cousin who went to a boarding school and says he used to lie in his bunk at night feeling bad because he felt relieved it wasn’t him.
I knew one male who often joked he went to Catholic Schools and not one of the Christian Brothers found him attractive. When he was about 20 he was arrested and after 3 nights in a remand centre (which he did not discuss) I never heard him scoff at any report of sexual assault again. I suspect people who scoff at the idea of sexual assault do so because they have never been the victims of assault. My own experience is that men are more likely to scoff at the idea of assault than women are.
Sexual assault is all about power. On dates, men who exert pressure on women to come across are not necessarily guilty of assault, but have serious issues just the same. I’m not sure they really see women as people.
So, when women put their hand up and say they have been assaulted by a celebrity or someone who abused their power, is it likely to be crap or not? Is assault something that happens to women and they mostly don’t bother talking about it, or is it something women make up to destroy the lives of innocent men?
Let me give you another quote from Chimamanda – talking about one of the important cases involving someone in a position of power.
“Large numbers of people seem to believe that many women will wake up one day and just decide to lie about having been sexually assaulted. And apparently they want to do this because they want to be famous. I know many women who would like to be famous; I don’t know one single woman who would like to be famous for having been sexually assaulted. … To believe a culture is full of women who lie about these things is to fundamentally think of women as not being fully human. (This idea) makes sense only if you think women are fundamentally stupid.”
The truth in most jurisdictions is that the people making these claims do not get massive jury payouts. The United States is the only place where a jury decides the amount of damages, and in places like the UK or Australia libel and slander laws are totally different, the burden of proof is different and more. People getting rich from something like this is an exception, not a rule. Far from getting rich, they usually end up in deep financial doo-doo trying to get validation.
Trial by Media
To be fair, I would also like to quickly mention the accusations levelled by some anonymous woman against the comedian Aziz Ansari. While my own life experience is that people can and do abuse positions of power to gain sexual favours all the time, this accusation against Ansari seem to be a different creature altogether. (I wouldn’t even mention him by name except not naming him would probably just make the accusation more interesting.)
“Grace” (not her real name) related a story to a journalist of a bad date she had with Ansari. To be honest, it reads like the date from hell.
Even I, who have been a textbook victim all my life find it extraordinary that Grace didn’t leave sooner.
Let’s be clear: I think women and men should both have the right to withdraw consent at any point and this applies no matter whose apartment they are in. I don’t for two seconds buy into the idea that men's testes will erupt and suffer permanent damage if they have to finish the job themselves. It's as popular and spurious a notion as the idea that masturbation causes blindness.
As much as I loved the series Master of None, that is not the reason I am criticising "Grace" here.
It is easy - too easy - to try someone by media, making anonymous accusations without providing any evidence or public testimony or publishing the text messages or … it just stinks. We have no way of knowing what was initially agreed. It damages the Me Too movement and demeans decent men.
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| Killjoys 02x06 |
As for conduct on dates when one person has no economic or other power over the other; no decent person should have any trouble with the concept of consent. Anything less than an enthusiastic YES is NOT consent.
Any person who is so desperate for sex they will be happy to have sex with someone who doesn’t really want them should just pay a sex worker. How is wearing someone down til they just give up in any way satisfying unless the aggressor has serious problems?
On the other hand, I’m a realist. It does not matter what the world should be like, we all have to survive in the world the way it actually is while we are trying to change it. Personally, I never went on a date with someone I could not contemplate having sex with (which means I did not go on a lot of “dates”).
Feminism
The goals of feminism are quite simple:
Social, political and economic equality of the sexes.
The thinking of many 2ND wave feminist theorists was feminism would benefit everyone:
As all women rank lower than men in all groups; and
As all marginalised groups include women
Lifting up all women will lift up all men
A rising tide lifts all boats.
We sort of got that wrong...
During the 1960s-80s women were like any other progressive lobby group and failed to acknowledge that conservatives already have what they want; it’s those who seek change that are at a disadvantage, and easily divided. Women achieved a great deal but failed to achieve and maintain a united front.
Intersectionality
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to describe the ways in which different forms of oppression intersect, for example, gender and race: To give just one U.S. example, Women of Colour were more likely than whites to be at risk of unauthorised sterilisation if they attended a clinic for a publicly funded abortion.
A rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats.
The rising tide theory only works
if we concentrate on boats stranded on the mudflats at neap tide.
Systemic Sexism
Let’s divide the world into roughly two main groups; women and men. We’ll put all the women in one area and all the men in another. There is no conflict between the two groups. Separate and apart at a micro level, they are fine.
Now let’s put them together.
I hope you knew I was going to say this: just as with Hydrogen and Oxygen – when a third thing (electrical charges) - caused the two sets to change into something else altogether and become water, when we put women and men together in most communities, we get a result called systemic sexism, and the extra thing that causes this, the electrical charge, if you will, consists mainly of
1) historical events and
2) the questionable attitudes of one or two coalholes.
Remember, systems theory does not suggest all men are coalholes or all women are coalholes – the bits that make the whole other than the sum of its parts, the bits that cause outcomes to be different at a macro level – go way beyond the chill attitudes of any individual or any single moment in time.
Systemic problems are caused by all the bits few individuals have any direct control over.
(Though a lack of direct control is NOT the same thing as no control or power or responsibility).
The only way to fix the problem of any “systemic ism” is to change the stuff in the grey area – the laws, traditions, habits and attitudes that are the system. Instead of crying "not all men", men who care could prove it better by being anti-sexist.
White Privilege
As I cannot experience what it is like to lack white privilege, I am unlikely to be aware I have it unless I gain an insight by some exceptional experience – usually an emotional experience, and (I’m guessing) that will most often be a) personal interaction with a POC or b) through drama.
It is one thing to tell me that as a white person I experience things differently from people of colour, but quite a brave thing to use a word like “privilege” to tell me so.
Remember first and above all that the word “privilege” is itself an emotive word. Do you need time to let that sink in? If you want me to change, remember that I already have what I want, and that is a collection of comfortable, automatic responses to every word you can throw at me in whatever language is my first.
As someone who can honestly say she did have what was – for a white Australian – a relatively poor childhood (not just financially but emotionally)
I was astonished by his ignorance. For all that I had a totally phuct childhood I was still aware that
a) I wasn’t the only one and
b) it could have been much worse…
Let me return to my initial point – as I cannot experience what it is like to lack white privilege, I can only gain an insight into the existence of white privilege through some emotional experience.
The sort of emotional experience that allows me insight into white privilege will most likely be through a) personal interaction with a POC or b) through drama.
But how is a white woman like me, growing up in a white suburb in a white capital of a country with a Whites Only Immigration Policy going to be aware of white privilege through a personal interaction with a Person of Colour? Okay, Australia is not exclusively white now, nor was it exclusively white when I was a child, but for many of us, it is true that we rarely encountered any people who were not white. When we did, I promise you, the last thing they would have been brave enough to do is discuss race.
https://nationalseedproject.org/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack
Race as a Social Construct
It doesn’t matter whether science supports the concept of race or not, what matters is that people like to believe perceived differences in physical appearance or abilities are significant. All people.
In historical terms, people more or less always have, and probably always will place significance on perceived physical differences. We do it because we use heuristics to simplify decision-making, and this makes it easy for groups to use perceived physical differences to create a class barrier to gain or maintain privilege over others.
The most impactful explanation I’ve encountered is offered by Dr Charles Mills. A few minutes with him on YouTube would not be a waste of anyone’s time:
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