White Privilege and Male Privilege | Hacker News Reader

White Privilege and Male Privilege

odec.umd.edu

6 pointsseanccox5 comments

This is one of the reasons the left is always losing.

Just make students sit in a class and listen to a "tenured radical" and they will vote Republican for a lifetime.

I grew up in New England where it didn't matter if you were black or white but more what kind of black or white.

If you were French Canadian you were a dog but if you were a wasp you were on top. There were old respectable black families on Beacon Hill but if you came from the 'down home' South you were a nobody.

If you have any contact with elementary schools you see it is a girl centric boys and in fact the modern diagnosis for maleness is ADHD. If you ran a crappy clothing store and wrote a book called #BOYBOSS you just look like an ass and would never get on TV.

The paper is a bit dated, but Peggy McIntosh recently gave an interview where she discussed some of the concerns you seem to be speaking to:

The key thing is to let people testify to their own experience. Then they’ll stop fighting with each other... “Unless you let the students testify to what they know, which schools usually don’t let them do, they will continue to do just what the dominant society wants them to do, which is to tear each other apart.” The students who are sitting there fighting with one another aren’t allowed to have their lives become the source for their own growth and development. Adrienne Rich wrote, at the beginning of women’s studies, “Nobody told us we have to study our lives, make of our lives a study.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/the-woma...

Reported speech get's a downvote?

Single tear...

> "Through work to bring materials and perspectives from Women's Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men's unwillingness to grant that they are overprivileged in the curriculum, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. Denials that amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages that men gain from women's disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully recognized, acknowledged, lessened, or ended."

Ok I read this then stopped. The word "overprivileged" is shockingly biased and ridiculous, and most of all deceptive.

It's a personal account and you, of course, are under no compunction to consider it. So why comment? I mean, you didn't even read the article far enough to comprehend its context or understand what the author meant by using that word, or how it extends, by analogy, to her experience as a white woman.

It is your privilege that you can reject the article in its entirety after the first sentence, because you are not living any of the oppressive experiences described therein. I just don't see how doing so is less "shockingly biased" than the word itself. It seems like a sort of tu quoque fallacy to avoid engaging either the text or the arguments it might contain.

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