Race, Oppression AND Privilege

Recently there has been a lot of talk about race,   privilege, and oppression. Last month AEL’s munch was on unlearning racism that started with an opening exercise. The idea was that the moderator announces a group, and if you were a part of that group you moved across the room, and if you weren’t a part of that group you stayed put, with the option of being part of that group but remaining in the closet about it. 

The concept was that those that moved to the other side of the room were the oppressed, and those that stayed put were the oppressors.  If a person did not want to participate then they were asked to leave the room.

It was an interesting exercise that required a lot of vulnerability from the players and at first I didn’t really have an issue with the game or how it played out. For me the game was about me being honest with myself and honest with the other players. The qualifiers included everything from race, class, abuse, ability and so on. 

About a week  later I was talking about the exercise with a friend who  said that the issue for them was not that the oppressed people went to the other side of the room, but that those who were left over where automatically oppressors because they did not belong to the oppressed group.

When the moderator said “has a visible disability” those that moved to the other side of the room were the oppressed and those that stayed put where the oppressors of that group, or someone who remained in the closet. 

So- I have a visible disability, I need glasses. But I didn’t move to the other side of the room because I don’t feel that bad eyesight is a disability. That made me either in the closet regarding my visible disability, or an oppressor of those that had visible disabilities.

 I thought about that for a while, and I thought, just because I was borne a certain way or have achieved certain things, does not automatically make me an oppressor. It does make me a person with privilege, I have white privilege, women privilege, dyke privilege, middle class privilege and to a certain extent leather privilege. But that does not automatically mean that I oppress those of color, men, straight people, upper class people or vanilla people. 

I am not egotistical enough to believe that I am not a racist or unbiased, that I don’t see color, religion, or gender. I see all of those things and being married to black witch women does not absolve me from being a racist either.

I am biased; I believe that we all are that is what makes oppressor vs. oppressed such a complicated issue. Just because I am  a lesbian does not mean  that I cannot  be oppressed by other lesbians, and just because I am  a lesbian  and considered  oppressed doesn’t mean that I don’t have the power to  oppress straight people.

What all of this does mean is that we all have choices to make every day, choices in what we say, what we do, what we get angry over, what we are vulnerable to, and what we choose to remain silent about.

Will  I still sweat  next  time I am  out at 3 AM  after a play party and  I have stop for gas- and need to cross through that group  of men to go pay for it. Yes I will. I will have a heightened alert for my safety and the safety of my slave -absolutely; can that mean that I could be considered being gender biased. You bet.  Do I care?  Nope.

I will go one further- I may not even get out of the car, and look for another gas station. Does that make me biased and perhaps even classist? Yep. Do I care? Nope.

I think my point here is that we can discuss all of the things that make up racism, biases, oppression and privilege, but unless we really focus on the things that matter we will never get anywhere.  So what matters?

I know what matters to me, civil and federal rights, personal safety and equality in the workplace. For me,  protecting my personal  safety and that of my slave by finding another gas station  is completely different then refusing to  medically treat a  male  and his friends.

They just aren’t the same thing. Right? Right?

Can it be argued that what starts as avoiding the gas station can end up as refusing to medically treat? Yes. It happened to gays in the beginning of the Aids crisis, and still occurs. It happened to Muslims and Arabs after 911 and still occurs, and it happens to the homeless every day. 

So what is my point here? I think my point here is racism; biases, oppression and privilege are complex issues that belong to all of us. Whether we want them to or not, and not one single thing gets us absolution from having to deal with those issues.

Just to be clear here, there is no real answer. There is no final right answer that makes any one of us that perfectly unbiased person.  And for the love of god stop having the" I am less racist then you" conversation- it’s embarrassing.