![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This is International Blog Against Racism Week. The community is
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.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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.