femme fantôme

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. 

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Janet Liebman Jacobs, Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Female Self

I get wary and uncomfortable about anything that uses the term ‘screen memories’ unquestioningly, but I am trying to countenance this, trying to work through something about metaphor and memory and how we can hold all these conflicting truths at once:

- this happens, this use of the imagination, this metaphor-as-making-meaning-out-of, and we must honor it, as this text somewhat does, as creative, as productive, as resilience and strength

- but sometimes, as the use of ‘screen memory’ implies, it becomes necessary to somehow move past the metaphor and acknowledge…the concealed reality?

- yet there is no way to divide metaphor from reality as if they had independent existence, the metaphor is the reality, there is no pure, untouched memory which can be peeled away

- and what you remember is your reality, if you remember magic, if you remember demons, that is what you experienced in that moment, you must contend with it as such

- and none of this makes room for perpetrator intent or belief, if they meant you to think it was magic, if they believed it to be magic themselves

- and there’s a basic assumption of atheism here, in the narrative of the religious interpretation as something that’s layered on after the fact, when, if these events are part of your network of belief, then that may be simply what happened, there may be not conflict between it and what we call fact

- often, this kind of rhetoric is a kind, convenient way to deny RA without seeming to deny other kinds of abuse; hence, skepticism, hence caution

suppose

by e.e cummings