i'm here.

bell hooks, “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” (via mansnatcher)

Lol that’s what women on the feminist club at my school say too how lovely

I’m getting increasingly suspicious of how the media focuses its sj discourse around privilege and microaggressions (which suck, don’t get me wrong, but they’re symptoms of centuries of historical violence.. they aren’t the sources of the real problems)

I see this, I see places like buzzfeed and other avenues of pop culture fixating on “privilege” as a sort of luck system where society rewards people for being born a certain way, but in the explanations, the means by which this happens are always mysterious and vague. There’s a refusal to name anyone as active agents within a system, or to admit that these systems materially benefit some at the expense of others… its always treated as some weird rpg stat system where being white gives you +5 ability to find a job, rather than an actual hierarchy of supremacy where people subjugate others for power and resources.

It’s always compressed, made into easy problems with easy solutions. Here are 12 things you shouldn’t say to a black person. Make sure to not say Racist Things. You may have been born into privilege but it’s okay, just accompany yourself with POC of color™ and don’t say the Racist Things and by being nice, you can somehow(?) help weaken institutional racism… or something. 

So it focuses on these small, specific manifestations of oppression instead of more direct forms of violence that would require a huge change to fix… stuff like, for example, the entire prison system. That’s not something that anyone could individually change by Saying The Right Things. It would require collective, organized action of a radical (or possibly even revolutionary) nature.