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The Face of Privilege
Aug. 10th, 2010 03:20 pmA quote from a comment over at Obsidian Wings
"This came from a friend of a friend who was down in the trenches of the very early attempts to get sexual orientation added to the civil rights law in Maine. After the legislature voted and the bill was defeated, a group of proponents were sitting in a pizza joint licking their wounds. The leader of the opposition came over all hail fellow well met, slapped one of them on the back, and said, "Nothing personal folks, just politics.""
That, boys and girls, is the face of straight white male privilege, the kind that's unconscious and habitual. The kind that can justify making people second class citizens, and denying rights to others that they takes for granted, because they won't affect them. The privilege to wave all of that away as "just politics", when it impacts other people's lives in major ways.
"This came from a friend of a friend who was down in the trenches of the very early attempts to get sexual orientation added to the civil rights law in Maine. After the legislature voted and the bill was defeated, a group of proponents were sitting in a pizza joint licking their wounds. The leader of the opposition came over all hail fellow well met, slapped one of them on the back, and said, "Nothing personal folks, just politics.""
That, boys and girls, is the face of straight white male privilege, the kind that's unconscious and habitual. The kind that can justify making people second class citizens, and denying rights to others that they takes for granted, because they won't affect them. The privilege to wave all of that away as "just politics", when it impacts other people's lives in major ways.
