βmen canβt be oppressedβ -> men of colour
βwhite men canβt be oppressedβ -> gay men
βheterosexual men canβt be oppressedβ -> trans men
βcis-het men canβt be oppressedβ -> intersex men
βperisex men canβt be oppressedβ -> disabled men
βable-bodied men canβt be oppressedβ -> neurodivergent men
βcis-het perisex white able-bodied neurotypical men canβt be oppressedβ -> buddy let me tell you about wealth and class and homelessness and immigrants and minority languages and cultures and being a child and being an elderly person and and and
we can keep doing this all day but the reality of the world is that very few people donβt face any kind of oppression at all and everyone exists in a complicated, intersecting web where they have privileges over some people in some contexts and some others are have privilege over them in other contexts. no one individual is incapable of enacting oppression and if you think that about yourself you need to go away and interrogate that belief.
Privilege exists. It affects our experiences, opportunities, and world views.
Privilege is also fluid and dependent on context. Most if not all people have ways in which they are privileged and ways in which they are not. Hold privilege over others in some contexts and not in others.
For fuck's sake, even Joe Biden, arguably the most powerful person on Earth, was run out of the Presidency mid-election by his own party because he was old and had a stutter.
His whiteness, maleness, cisness, heterosexuality, Christianity, Americanness, and relative wealthiness did not protect him from ageism and ableism (there was also a lot of indirect racism and misogyny in there, as a lot of the "OMG Biden's OLD!" stuff was actually just blatant code for "What if he dies in office and a woman of colour replaces him?")
Some people have more privilege. Some have less. Nobody is immune to having privilege. Nobody is immune to being discriminated against. It is context-dependent.
Trying to use "Does this person have privilege" as a shortcut to determine whether they are good or evil, or whether it's okay to persecute them, is a surefire way to end up on the side of the oppressors without realizing it.
To coin a phrase, it's not the privilege that matters*, it's how you use it.
(* As much. The existence of the privilege matters in the social and economic structures that maintain it, but that's on a much broader scale than the individual level. But try fitting all that into a concise phrase without becoming one of those memes about leftist jokes being entire wordy manifestos like I just did.)
Bravo! Here I'm right with you all.
This, exactly this, is why I have absolutely no time for the Oppressor v Oppressed world view.
No. It doesn't mean that I ignore the terrible things that people do to each other. Those things are real and to be fought against.
But they're not simple black and white to fit into neat boxes for judging purposes.
It's a landscape of infinite shades of grey, stemming from the fact that whatever differences are between us, common humanity will always unite us, for good and for bad.
We can use politics all we like but it won't prove that mere race, sexual preference, nationality, religion/culture, sex etc makes any difference to how much one person can mistreat and abuse another.
