on being colourblind
Aug. 11th, 2008 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pensnestBack in the dark ages when I was a poor student, I somehow ended up going out for dinner in London with a bunch of other students and some people who worked in a casino. At the end of the dinner, the guy who was somehow in charge divvied up the bill and told us how much everybody owed. It was scary, because I'd ordered what I could afford and didn't have much in my purse at the time. (Student behaviour would have been that eveyone paid for what they'd had.)
I was reminded of this by a year-old comment I found while following a bunch of links this morning.
...your ability (and mine) to say "it shouldn't be that way, so I'll behave as if it isn't" is the *definition* of privilege. Deciding that we'll just treat everyone as if they had privileges *that they don't get* doesn't end in equality, it never does no matter how much we try it. It leads to racism. Foolishly, I didn't note who said this, but she said it very well.
When you have a healthy income, treating income-free students as your exact equals isn't exactly the right way to go. When you have the advantages of being white (and in my case, middle class and well educated and well off too), treating not-white people as exact equals isn't exactly the right way to go. It's an assumption with far too many flaws.
My apologies to any PoCs reading this - the analogy isn't very good, but it makes sense in my head.
I was reminded of this by a year-old comment I found while following a bunch of links this morning.
...your ability (and mine) to say "it shouldn't be that way, so I'll behave as if it isn't" is the *definition* of privilege. Deciding that we'll just treat everyone as if they had privileges *that they don't get* doesn't end in equality, it never does no matter how much we try it. It leads to racism. Foolishly, I didn't note who said this, but she said it very well.
When you have a healthy income, treating income-free students as your exact equals isn't exactly the right way to go. When you have the advantages of being white (and in my case, middle class and well educated and well off too), treating not-white people as exact equals isn't exactly the right way to go. It's an assumption with far too many flaws.
My apologies to any PoCs reading this - the analogy isn't very good, but it makes sense in my head.