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.
