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I’m seeing a lot of privilege discourse: “If you are X person with privilege, you should stay and fight,” coupled with “If you are Y person without privilege, it’s okay to flee.” These diatribes, popping up everywhere on blogs and social media sites, will often detail exactly who is in each group, and the lists are predictable. The first: white citizens, cis men and women, highly educated, perhaps metropolitan people. The second: perhaps undocumented, brown of a certain variety, perhaps not as educated, poor, probably women.
This is privilege discourse at its shoddiest, and the people who relish this discourse are, unsurprisingly, often (but not always) white and comfortable in their own situations. Yelling at other white people as they beat their chests in righteous indignation helps them build up social cachet and establishes that they just know shit and are better than all those other white people. (And sometimes, I suspect, all this performative public shaming of others is a way to distract attention from their massive privilege.) When they are not white, they’re activists of a certain ilk, the kind who spend many column spaces talking about privilege and how awful it is and how everyone should be mindful of theirs, and that they are among those to be pitied and valorised as the Truth Tellers.
Privilege is complicated, and in an influencer-influenced age when everyone feels compelled to act like someone they are not, it can be hard to tell, with any degree of precision, exactly who has privilege and who does not. A black woman may have economic privilege, and still have to fight for even something as basic as housing in a neighbourhood she would like to move to. A white man may be struggling with crippling college debt and facing eviction next week. Privilege discourse requires such people to constantly perform their identities and tell their stories to a curious world suffering from a pornographic thirst for narratives about un-privilege and even trauma. Should a person of colour not disclose their traumas and all their lack of privilege, they are automatically shunned as undeserving of our care. The demands for accounting of one’s privilege or lack thereof is also immensely racist and essentialist, relying on particular markers to point to people as the ones most deserving of our kindness and sympathy. But no one is required to perform their lack of privilege to gain sympathy from everyone else.
Are some people currently fleeing to various parts of the globe that make them feel safer occasionally obnoxious? Yes, of course. Ellen DeGeneres claims that she left the United States because of Donald Trump, as if no will remember that she had to leave because of the revelations that she led an abusive workplace. And, yes, expatriate communities tend to be the most insular and, yes, racist, and they are often drivers of gentrification. But we have no way of knowing why people leave, and economic migration might well be tied to deep-seated emotional reasons: sexual or other forms of abuse in one’s home country might well prompt a well-off white woman to finally leave. Does she have to reveal her entire past to gain sympathy?
Who gets to fight or flee, and who gets to even make that choice?
Privilege discourse prevents us from following through on the real project of leftism: ending the misery and exploitation of everyone, regardless of whether or not we can access their political histories or emotional lives. In these hard times, people have a right to respond however they want and, frankly, if someone just wants to up and leave and spend their days looking at sunsets on a desert island, I’m okay with that. You can’t force or shame people into becoming part of your revolution.
If you’re on the left, your job — should you want and accept it — is to fight for systemic change for everyone, regardless of what you think you know about their privilege.
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For my extensive work on trauma, see, for example, “Trauma and Capitalism or, Your Trauma Story Will Kill You.”
And see this link for more.
Image: A Hotel Room, by John Singer Sargent, c. 1906.
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