feminist blogs

Carol Costello, speaking to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (segment: Why Clinton’s Losing Women) just now:

You know, one analyst told me, Wolf, that Hillary Clinton has been unable to transcend her sex as effectively as Barack Obama has been able to transcend his race… I guess we’ll just have to see what happens in Ohio and Texas.

Personally, I’d like to hear something about how John McCain plans to “transcend” his implicitly problematic whiteness and maleness in the general election.

Via Amy

Bold all those that apply to you.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children’s books by a parent my mom tried as much as she could.
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like you are portrayed positively.
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single family house we moved a lot so this wasn't always the case, but a few times we did.
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child my mom and i shared a a couple of times but for the most part i had my own. (hooray for no siblings!)
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in High School
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

Some of those questions are so weird to me. Are there really lots of kids with an IRA?

Anyway, I didn't have a lot of class privilege growing up, but I did have A LOT of white-privilege. Now I have a lot of both. And it's good to be reminded every now and then lest I get too big for my britches. Some of my successes have had absolutely nothing to do with my skill or merit. Just as some people's lack of success has nothing to do with a deficiency of skill or merit.

There's still a lot of work to be done.

*UPDATE 11:45 AM 8/14/06*

Okay, this is hilarious. This post is getting a lot of hits (but, interestingly, zero comments thus far) from this blog’s feed at RVAblogs.com, a lovely site that aggregates various Richmond, Virginia-based blogs. Recently, the site’s editor set up a neat tagging system enabling readers (rather than the bloggers themselves) to add descriptive tags to the posts. When I looked earlier today, I saw, for example, that the tag ‘race’ had been added to my post. Okay, that’s fine… but then later I looked again and a brand-new tag had been added: “only white people are racist“.

Um… Sorry, but I never said that. Or even remotely implied that! I’m writing here about racist shit white people feel perfectly happy with sharing with other white people. That was all. Of course people of all ethnicities can be racist! (See, for example, see this post on the Asian feminist blog Reappropriate about an Asian woman’s racism against a black man in making hiring decisions.) I won’t go so far as to assume that the person who tagged my post in this manner is some embarrassingly defensive (and racist) white person, but damn, it sure looks that way.

Okay, I now return you to the original blog post…

This evening we went to visit some friends, Chip and Lisa, who’d recently bought a house in a neighborhood near ours. There are quite a few homes for sale in that area so we poked around a bit, peering in the windows of those places that had For Sale signs (and which weren’t presently lived in… we’re not out to invade anybody’s privacy). Later we were talking with Lisa (who, like Chip, is white) about the neighborhood, who she’d met and what her impressions were. She said their neighbor next door, an elderly white woman, had seemed friendly at first. When Lisa asked what the woman knew about her neighbor on the opposite side of their house (whom Lisa had only briefly met before), the woman’s first response was, “Well, he’s colored.” As if, perhaps, Lisa had somehow not observed the fact that this neighbor was black, and needed to be informed - no, warned - of this fact! (How Lisa reacted to this startling observation, I neglected to ask.) Next, the woman said about the man, “Well, he’s been here for a few years.”

Later, Lisa met the man again and it turns out he’d been living there for, oh, twenty-seven years. Whereas the racist white lady had been there for only a few years longer than that. Yet, her perception was that this man was some recently invading (”colored”) interloper. Time to get over it, lady. Particularly since the neighborhood on the whole seemed about evenly white and black. Her racist nostalgia for a day when, presumably, it was much more exclusively white is just plain embarrassing.

I’m reminded of the time when, a few years back, a white waitress at a local Shoney’s, after we’d paid and were getting ready to leave, making friendly conversation, decided for some reason to share how annoyed she was about The Blacks (a phrase she uttered with significant venom) who kept using the Shoney’s parking lot, while they were apparently patronizing the business next door. What was most obnoxious about this was the way in which she said it, leaning over the counter and speaking in hushed, conspirational tones suggestive of some kind of racist shared reality between us. Of course I told her off on the spot (”In front of God and everybody” as we sometimes say in the South), explaining to her and then to her manager why the fact that she’d made this racist comment meant we would never again set foot in that business establishment (we had been, at that point, regulars, eating there at least once per week). I don’t know which of them looked more confounded, the waitress or the manager.

Later, in speaking to the same manager and subsequently his regional manager over the phone (at my initiation, not theirs), I failed to get through to them about why the woman’s comment had been racist, and moreover, why it had been so offensive to me. The regional manager actually asked me if I was white. Had I been thinking more clearly, I’d have hollered why in the hell does that matter here? But instead I just said, well, yeah, following which he seemed even more baffled as to why I’d been offended. Why would I challenge (even in this truly infinitesimal way) the very system of racism from which I derive privilege? I can’t imagine that the waitress would have said what she said to us in front of non-white customers. (While I can easily imagine her treating such customers differently, perhaps with racism of the less overt variety.)

A bit more than a decade ago, as a struggling young mom on welfare in Minnesota, I had another interesting experience with this sort of “whitey-to-whitey” conspirational racism, this time at a grocery store. Can’t remember the chain, but it was sort of like Ukrops here in Virginia… think it began with a B, which is to say it was somewhat high-end. (At the time, my girlfriend, my daughter and I were actually homeless, temporarily crashing out in the basement of someone we vaguely knew who lived in that area, hence shopping at the improbably high-end grocery store, because that’s all there really was.) The cashier smiled widely at me, saying, so pretty much everyone in the checkout line could hear, “Oh, you’re on food stamps?” As if that weren’t humiliating and irritating enough, she went further, asking, “So how do you like being on welfare?” To which I responded with something bright like, um, it’s okay, since, even if I’d been able to come up with some lucid, on-the-spot analysis of the particular intersection of class and disability politics* that had led to me being on public assistance (my girlfriend was disabled, her SSI was forever pending, and I had to take care of both her and my daughter full-time), A) it was none of her damned business and B) it would have been over her head anyway.

But wait, there’s more! Then the cashier launched into a rant about how she could totally understand someone like me needing to be on welfare and that was cool, but what she just couldn’t stand was These Black People who were forever coming in and buying steaks! Yes, steaks with their food stamps, when you could plainly tell they had plenty of money from all those gold chains They wear! In response to which I could, at that time, do nothing except stare at her in horror, grabbing my groceries as quickly as possible and heading for the door. Later, I called the store and told the manager what had happened. That time, at least, I didn’t have to explain why I was so offended; the manager profusely apologized and promised to take immediate action in addressing the problem with the cashier. (Of course, I don’t know what actually happened after that point; for all I know he may have done nothing.)

But what continued to haunt and gall me after the fact was how this woman had spoken to me in this conspirational way, from that place of presumed shared racism, and, what was more, as if she had any idea whatsoever what my life circumstances were. Plenty of people, of every possible ethnicity, scam welfare systems in one way or another (and there are lots of reasons why this is so, which I won’t get into here, but suffice it to say I would never automatically condemn someone who did that, because survival itself frequently requires such activity). Why did she automatically assume I was deserving of these benefits, based on our few moments of acquaintance in the (okay, now I remember the name) Byerly’s checkout lane? Only, of course, because I was white. Ugh.

*Actually, there’s an intersection with queer politics here, too, in that if Lee and I had been able to marry, I could have gotten a job and Lee could have subsequently qualified for the medical insurance she desperately needed while we were waiting for her SSI to be approved, a process which ultimately took four unbelievably anguishing, poverty-afflicted years. So even if she could not have been contributing economically to the household, I could have cared of all of us on one income; insurance could have paid for a personal assistant to help her with things I was staying home (or, as the case sometimes was, at other peoples’ homes) to take care of for her.

So much reading and so much to process but I wanted to share a few things that have come to me so far:

1) I am not Kos nor do I want to be anything like him.

That was a perfect "click" moment for me as I've been reading through all of the amazing writing this week. So much of it totally made sense and rang true to me, but when a few people threw down the "Where are all the women bloggers" and "You best be nice to the menz or the menz won't help you silly little women" bombs I was like, OMG, Becky! I think I get it now!

Coz ya know, just because I don't use "The N Word" or "ching-chong" jargon does not make me a "good" ally to WOC anymore than not raping women makes someone a "good" feminist. It's actually just the most basic level of common-deceny. Literally, the very least I can do. I should be doing more. Much more.

2) WOC issues are not "special interest" issues anymore than reproductive rights are a "special interest" issue. If it effects any woman, it effects all women.

3) WOC owe white feminists nothing. They do not have to reward us, acknowledge us, be nice to us, or even pay attention to us when we do anti-racist work. As I said before, it is just the most basic level of human decency and common courtesy and we don't deserve medals for not being selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed assholes (for once).

4a) It's not always about me. I don't have to take every comment or criticism about white feminists personally. If I feel hurt, threatened, or offended by something a WOC has said or written, I need to STFU, listen, and learn. I may not necessarily agree with what they're saying or feel that it doesn't apply to me, but I don't need to defend any white woman from a woman of color anymore than any woman needs to defend men in any feminist discussion. Like Magniloquence said:

You are not saying anything the people of color you’re talking to haven’t heard a thousand times before. You are not saying anything the people of color you’re talking to haven’t told themselves a thousand times before. If you would actually stop your reflexive know-it-all yammering and pay attention to what people of color actually SAY about the offenses they suffer on the prejudice - racism continuum, you will note that almost to a person they second-guess their own gut feelings about the putative offender far beyond the point where almost any white person would.

4b) It's not always me. I've said it a million times myself, to other feminists who get all bent out of shape about shit: If the shoe doesn't fit, then don't wear it!

If a WOC says, "[White feminists] did/do such-and-such and it's some fucked up bullshit!" I don't need to run in and say, "Well, I'm a white feminist and I don't do that." or "Not all white feminists do that!" I might as well preface every conversation about rape with "Not all men rape!" and then shoot myself in the face for being such a fucking moron.

It's true, not all white feminists do such-and-such, but that's a given so instead of disrupting a fruitful conversation to state the obvious, it might serve me well to STFU and learn something new.

I'm sure I'll have items 5 through 29 billion at some point and I'll share them along the way but I just wanted to say one more thing before I go: Tuesday I was basically all, "Where are all the Feminist Women of Color Bloggers?!?!" and since being directed to a handful of them, I've found more and more and more. I've read zillions of brilliant thoughts, ideas, and words and haven't had time to read any of the blogs I usually read and you know what? (Yes, I know I've been a total jackass. What did I say about stating the obvious?!) I've actually learned a shitload more reading blogs in the past two days than I have in the past two months. Go figure.

Also: I was reading this and I thought to myself, Huh. So that's how intelligent, civilized human beings have a discussion and disagree with one another.

I hardly ever read or leave comments anywhere because whether the topic is soft, fluffy kittens or an illegal, deadly war, there's bound to be some fucked up, racist, sexist, bullshit flying and it stresses me out. Apparently though, that doesn't happen everywhere, mostly just in the White Progressive Blogosphere That I've Been Frequenting Too Much.

I am tired of reading reports about Imus' racist comments that are couched in this language of "black people are angry."

Seriously...what the fuck is up with THIS:

"[Howard Kurtz was quoted on NPR as saying] he thinks Imus is NOT bigoted, and he thinks most listeners understand that, but several major groups of black and women journalists have called on the networks to fire Imus..."

Relegating the offense Imus' racist bullshit inspires to the realm of "women and minorities" is just the same bullshit racism that makes it ok for someone to make the fucking comments in the first place. And what the fuck is up with this "Oh, he's an ass to everyone, therefore it's ok." bullshit? I am going to start walking around and kicking everyone in the shins, and no one better arrest me, because I'm not kicking any one racial/political/cultural/orwhathaveyou group any more than I am another!

Shit fucking A. It is all OVER the media, too, this "Well, what do you have to say to these black leaders" line.

I guess I am just glad I am a woman, and am therefore justified in my anger. Oh, thank you, holy media...for giving me something to be justifiably pissed about!

frickin' frackin' fuckin' a!

I hereby interrupt my own half-assed hiatus to clarify something. Belledammit Belledame has deviously generously tagged me for the Thinking Blogger Awards, and while my response in turn is nowhere close to being ready, her characterization of me in her post gave me pause:

Victoria is a thoughtful, empathic*, and eloquent radical feminist, with much to say both personal and political. We challenge each other, I do believe; and yet there’s enough common ground to make a connection, which pleases me, as she’s good people.

Now I’m going to have to add to my paradoxical working list of things Belledame has in common with Twisty Faster. (Thing #1: She routinely sends me running to the dictionary, as I have bitched previously. Thing #2: she’s frightfully prolific; there’s no damn way for me to keep up with the volume of her posts and commentaries.)

But my third item for this queer** little list is that I wind up spilling shit in comments on her blog that are mini-blog posts in their own right. As with a recent post of Twisty’s, which prompted my recent declaration of Oh no, I’ve said (perhaps) too much.

Which brings me to my point (yes, I have one!). Namely, that I dunno if I really qualify for the “radical feminist” moniker at this point.

Yet to offer, whether at Belledame’s blog or right here, an apparent public refutation of my “radical feminism” per se is problematic in all sorts of ways. For one thing, it might be (incorrectly) assumed that I think radical feminism is a bad or somehow undesireable thing. Nay, this is hardly the case.

Fact is, radfems kick ass, and I loves ‘em.

Rather, I no longer label myself as a radical feminist because, given an objectively unknowable ratio of “freely chosen to compelled-by-life-circumstances” decisions I have made in my life, both in the psychic aftermath of leaving Minnesota, and in the verifiably post-emergency years following, when I might have made a very different set of choices, with a different partner in a different part of the world, I believe I’ve lost the right to call myself that. (Like I lost the right to call myself a lesbian when I married Jeff. Yeah I know, there are self-declared lesbians who have freely chosen sex with and/or marriages to men, but I just don’t get that, and I’m not going to insult the lesbian separatist I used to be with any such bizarre assertions, no matter how authentically woman-identified I will always be.)

Nor do I mean to imply, with the above assertions, that radical feminists have themselves (as individuals or en masse) somehow kicked me out of any radical feminism “club.” Sure, I’ve taken some of the expected snark about being a “hasbian” and whatnot, but those are really uncontestable charges, and as such, it doesn’t personally hurt me.

Bah. What I mean, in any event, is just what I said over at her place, so I’ll go ahead and do the ol’ copy-n-paste (full text here):

…For the record, I don’t necessarily describe myself as a radical feminist, as much as I identify with radical feminism and with radfems much more often than not.

Yes, I have recently described myself as “radical” (in the sense of getting to the roots of things… ironically, you’re the one who offered that characterization in your comment here), and I’m certainly a feminist and I’ve posted a great deal of meandering autobiography about my lifelong adventures in radical feminism as such. (For that matter, I’ve written about my adventures in lesbian separatism, too, yet the bona fide Big Hairy Man I live with rather disproves the premise that I can still be credibly called that.)

Maybe what I mean is something like this: if radical feminism were a country, then I would be one if its most curiously nostalgic exiles ever.

(More on this and related themes in my damned near complete manuscript which, nonetheless, I keep managing to not send out: How the Exile Came to Love the Foreign Land.)

And now, the postscript:

Certainly, I’m not the only soul on earth grappling with the matter of one’s identification (or, as the case may be, former identification) with radical feminism, in ways that aren’t hatefully distorting and dismissive of radical feminism and/or of radfems personally… certainly, there’s no shortage of that available on the internets, which I’m not going to link to here.

Most notably, AradhanaD does an awesome, deeply thoughtful job of discussing her own struggles with this moniker in this brilliant comment at Witchy Woo’s . Her struggles, of course, are distinct from mine, but I find much in her comments to relate to; had I been aware of that discussion at the time it was in active percolation mode, I would have tossed in a comment or two, but as a latecomer I’ll just have to post this linkage instead, and hope it means something.

*Dunno if she meant to say I was empathetic, or if, indeed, she meant to infer that I have awesomely spooky psychic powers. Damn, I’d hate to have to choose between the two.

** In various senses of the word.

Tags: blogosphere, hybridity, Identity, Minnesota, privilege, radical feminism

"Why We Banned Legos" is an article in a magazine I subscribe to called Rethinking Schools. I wish the article was accessible online without fee, but unfortunately it is not, so I will attempt to summarize it here.

Basically, a group of teachers in an after school program at a school in Washington State were struck by the social dynamics surrounding the construction of a Lego town. They found that kids were excluding other kids and hording "cool pieces" in an insidious way that wasn't always vocally objected to (in fact, many of the excluded kids seemed resigned to exclusion, in spite of the fact that they later proved that they wished to participate and did not know how to break through the invisible wall). So, the teachers banned the Legos and created a unit study to examine the issues of wealth, power, privilege, and inclusion with their students (ages 5-9).

The original article goes on to describe a fascinating and well-organized exploration of this concept designed by the teachers. Students were asked to voice their opinions about property rights, ownership, and power...and they examined those opinions by taking field trips and playing games that were geared towards helping the children question the notion that power can somehow be benign and that really brought the idea of meritocracy into sharp focus for these children.

However, the reinterpretation of this article is somewhat staggering and reveals much about how strongly we want to protect the idea that the capitalist system of meritocracy. An article was sent to a homeschooling list I subscribe to that basically completely misinterprets the lesson in such a way that it could only have been intentional. I responded to the article thusly:

I suggest you read the actual article on which this editorial is based before leaping to the conclusion that the crafters of this lesson were in any way advocating that landowners be stripped of their property rights so big businesses can have them. I have this issue, and I have only skimmed the article, but I find the article below to be grossly slanted and inaccurate.

[...]

In fact, now that I think about it...it would be a really good homeschooling lesson on media to read this editorial and then go back and read the actual article about the lesson to note the evident slant of the editorialist.

Of course, the response to this was to skip right to communism. One of my fellow listmates said, basically, that while he believed the article wasn't supporting the usurpation of property by big business, he did feel that the lesson was promoting communism, to which I replied:

I imagine the responses on this list will also be useful in a study of media, as well as individual responses to the media. It is interesting to me that Brad has immediately decided that the only possible system of shared wealth is communism, and therefore declared any questioning of how property rights are handled in our society to be answered before they are even asked.

I think critical thinking would encouage children to experiment with several alternative methods of creating equity, and from what I have read in the original article, it looks like that is exactly what the children were encouraged to do.

Of course, all of that was before I actually read the article. hahaha. I had skimmed it, but had not had time to sit down and read it. Later that night, I did so, and found the lesson to be quite well-planned and executed, and nothing at all like it had been described by the author of the editorial linked above. So, this morning when I found another response that insisted the lesson was an insidious method of brainwashing our children to accept the tenets of communism (evil, evil communism!) I responded:

If you read the article, you would find that property rights were a very minute portion of the lesson. The main objective of the lesson was to encourage egalitarian and inclusive behavior among the children, while at the same time exploring the larger issues of power and privilege. Also, there was a lot of discussion and insight in the article about how we tend to assume that power is benign if it is not misused in such a way that would spark verbal protest. There was a really interesting portion of the lesson where arbitrary point values were applied to legos (to mirror how privilege based on skin color, family of origin, and other factors give some of us an unearned advantage over others), and those who "won" were allowed to make rules for the next round of the game.

Additionally, there is a huge leap from discussing equitable sharing of resources by a community and stripping individuals of rights to give them to corporations. The point of the experiment, and I think the objective of a communal social order (of which communisim is ONE example), is to distribute wealth and power in such a way that all members of society have an opportunity to participate. Perhaps we haven't seen such a social order yet in our lifetimes, but I am not sure why anyone would object to exploring how power and privilege operate in our society to give unearned advantage to some and undeserved disadvantage to others.

Later, someone equated the lesson with that urban legend that has a child skipping to school with all of her wonderful school supplies, only to get there and find that she is FORCED to dump her supplies in a communal bucket and comes away with *gasp* INFERIOR CRAYONS! Evidently, those individuals who send their children to public school to mix with the masses are very indignant about this concept of forced sharing. I gotta say, if you hate it so much, keep yr kids home. You won't hear me complaining about the taxes I am forced to share with the school district in spite of the fact that I have chosen to not participate. We LIVE in a society. We all benefit from its resources, and those resources include the other people in our communities. If you can't bear the thought of your child going to school and sharing his or her crayons, honey, I dunno what to tell you! At any rate, my response to the idea that "social engineering" was overtaking our schools was this:

That would be an interesting thing to discuss, but it does not have anything to do with the redistribution of legos that were already assumed to be a shared resource. I am curious how you think this experiment, and the exploration into how power and resources are shared, is equivalent to social engineering, and yet the very world we live in and are shaped by is not.

In fact, I think that's an interesting thing to think about. Do we all just assume that the way we live and the society we are shaped by is natural? And therefore any attempt to question and/or reorganize the order of things is somehow unnatural, or "engineered?"

And then I decided to explore further, and read a discussion about a reaction to the article (there is very little actual reading of the article in any of this. Mostly, people were just responding to the slanted reactions to the article, which led many to believe that the teachers noted that students were not behaving appropriately and therefore they simply yanked the legos away in a reactive manner, rather than the actual reality that the teachers got together and planned a very sophisticated lesson surrounding the removal and subsequent reestablishment of lego privileges, which encouraged the children to examine the issues of ownership, power, inclusion, and equity.

Boy, do I ever NOT have my finger on the pulse of America. What I read on this board shocked me. People are actually decrying the lesson these teachers were attempting to teach, and basically saying "children will be children" and therefore should not be encouraged to examine the power dynamics that come into play when groups of children exclude other children. In fact, I imagine that many of the people on that board believe that it's probably preferable that children learn to grab what is theres without considering how their unearned privilege influences their "rights" of ownership.

While I realize there are many within the public school system who are trying desperately to counteract this idea that the distribution of wealth and resources in this country is somehow equitable and meritocratic, I am frankly somewhat appalled by the response to this article by people who are allegedly parents of children. Are there really that many people who are so opposed to their children learning that perhaps our system is less equitable than those in positions of privilege would lead you to believe that they need to demonize an earnest attempt to point out the inherent inequities of our system and work with children to combat those inequities in the classroom?

Obviously I am in total support of any curriculum which moves our children towards examining "rights" that are essentially extensions of unearned privilege. I am concerned, however, that this is such a controversial thing to stand for. If we can't even address these issues with something so benign as Legos without a firestorm of opposition, how on earth do we address global poverty, hunger, and health care crises?

I have always really admired Dawn for speaking up about the inherent inequity of even just the concept of adoption. Like many institutions that we take for granted, it depends upon gross disparity for its mere existence. It's something that seems so obvious now after reading Dawn's blog for so long, but I don't think I ever would have thought about it if Dawn did not work so hard to keep putting the issue on the table.

Today, she linked up this post by another mama who is also tireless in her efforts to keep raising the important issues about adoption and inequality, who says:

The question is, how did I end up in a position to adopt and how did Rose and so many women like her, end up in a position not to be able to keep their babies (or to be able to prevent having them in the first place if they choose)? I do think that in a considerably more "perfect world" there might very well still sometimes be women who become pregnant and yet just simply don't want to be parents. There might be orphans whose parents have died. There might be women who want to parent with people not genetically kin to their children. So sure, there would be adoption in that world. But there would not be such disparity of privilege--race, class, cultural and national privilege--that render some women adopters and some women first mothers automatically, almost as if stamped on their heads at birth.

I am thankful that she did.

don't matter to me coz i never get tired of saying it. i loooovvve amy! see?

What privilege isn't

Wow, doesn’t pointing out privilege make people squirm. Whenever I try to approach it with people who have it—including myself—there’s an awful lot of wriggling. "But...but...but..."

So for starters, let’s talk about what having privilege isn’t.

1. Having privilege isn’t some great big cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card.
2. It doesn’t mean your life is perfect.
3. It doesn’t mean you are a bad person.
4. It doesn’t mean you haven’t worked hard.
5. It doesn’t mean you don’t deserve what you have.
6. It doesn’t mean nothing bad has ever happened to you.

Okay? Can we move on? If you start squirming as you’re reading this, come back and read that list again.

How to deal with accusations of privilege
The thing that’s least useful when someone tries to talk to you about privilege is to get defensive and start trotting out all kinds of inane, poorly-thought-out excuses and reasons why you don’t really have privilege, why it doesn’t work the way they’re telling you it does, why they should feel sorry for you instead of being so mean, look at all you’ve suffered and how hard you’ve worked, etc. etc.

read the whole dang thing!

update: found this video via feminist law profs via girlistic and thought it appropriate here. the end part with the little kids and the dolls broke my fucking heart.

In a recent post, I included the following tangent: Have you ever gone underground for years at a time, specifically for the purposes of hiding a young battered woman from white supremacist, organized-crime affiliated pimps? And in the process, getting raped in a downtown Minneapolis homeless shelter, thus becoming involuntarily pregnant? And through it all, actually [...]