(a) privilege (white, cis-gender, able bodied, class, gender etc.)

(b) trigger warnings

(c) criticism =/= hate for an entire system

(d) or, sometimes criticism = hate for an entire system

(e) don’t fucking tone police people

or

(f) gas-lighting and how you’re being an abusive dick.

Your angry op-ed has been been going around my Facebook for a few days now, and since I'm tired of unfriending those who have approvingly posted it, I'd like to address you directly...

Privilege is not personal. Privilege is institutional and cultural. It is macro. You have privilege because you are part of a group that has privilege.

A question came up in another group regarding my and madgastronomer's response to the Daisy "I'm Fat and I'm Not Okay With It" article on xoJane, namely, that pointing out privilege seems mostly about trying to erase someone's valid experience -- in other words, pointing out privilege is telling someone to 'sit down and shut up.'

I've had more than one question on this blog about whether pointing out thin privilege has the unintended consequence of marginalizing thin people who are subject to discrimination (mostly in the form of thin-envious snark borne of society's hypervaluation of thin bodies as a result of fat stigma). This would apply to Daisy's situation: by pointing out her thin privilege, aren't I erasing the very real sense of shame she feels being 12 - 17 lbs 'overweight,' such an unacceptable size that she has written a self-flagellating article in a feminist mag?

Here's my response: people who point out privilege (for the most part) aren't trying to tell someone to sit down and shut up. We're trying to tell them that their words don't exist in a vacuum and are invisibly hurting others by dismissing or marginalizing them. We're trying to tell the privileged person that their privilege means they don't have to think about how their experiences might be read by those in marginalized groups.

There's always going to be privilege and privileged people. Societies are unequal creatures wary of difference, moreso when we try to equalize groups through campaigns of conformity. Sometimes all a compassionate member of that nebulous thing called society can do is work to become aware of her privileges. This goes for members of any political or ideological group: information about privilege is not naturally framed by any particular belief system, it exists regardless of who's making the observation.

That being said, the reason it's important to point out privilege is because it's not something most people think about, by definition, yet it's crucial to living as a self-aware, compassionate person in a group that includes pretty much any other people (privilege dynamics exist in groups as small as two). It's not about changing the privilege dynamic, that is, attempting to quash the experience of the privilege and raise up the experience of the underprivileged. It's about saying, "Listen, you live in a society at least as big as your readership, and what you said can be interpreted in a way you perhaps did not intend by these particular marginalized groups. We're telling you this because we hope that maybe you'll think harder before generalizing or saying whatever offensive thing you said in your very-public article. I mean, we're guessing you don't want to look like a petty douche; so, here's how you can avoid that."