IBARW

Jul. 29th, 2009 10:58 am
truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
[personal profile] truepenny
This is International Blog Against Racism Week. The community is [livejournal.com profile] ibarw, and is collecting links.

Racism, like all kinds of bigotry, is a blight on our species. It makes me angry and impatient that we haven't fixed it yet (yeah, like it's that simple, I know, I know)--and I'm someone privileged by the status quo. I don't want to be privileged, and I think it's important to understand that the opposite of privilege is not oppression. This is a frequently made and frequently unarticulated mistake that I think fuels a lot of the fear that keeps systemic, institutionalized racism operational, the belief that this is a zero-sum game. Which it isn't. The opposite of privilege--and the opposite of oppression--is equality.

ETA: I realized, thinking about it, that the above conceptualization is slightly wrong. Privilege and oppression are opposites, because they're a binary, and binary thinking--in this, as in a bunch of other kinds of bigotry: sexism, homophobia, religious jingoism, etc. etc.--is one of the underlying, ingrained fallacies that keeps the Us vs. Them mentality alive.

Equality is the third term, the term that explodes the false binary.
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truepenny: artist's rendering of Sidneyia inexpectans (Default)
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