For Healthy Social Justice, Say What You Mean
Do the privileged deserve to be treated with basic respect?
In the progressive activist community, you’ll get two different answers. On the one hand, most activists are lovely people — the type to give up their seat on the bus to a senior citizen, even if the senior in question is white, straight, and cisgender.
But if you ignore their actions and focus on their words, you’ll find something different. If you belong to a historically-oppressive group, you do not deserve the benefit of the doubt — period. You’re liable to get chewed out for the most insignificant, meaningless misstep (woe betide if you say “transgendered” instead of “transgender!”). Every statement you make risks getting interpreted in the least charitable light imaginable. If a man mentions that sexism makes some social problem worse, then he’s a self-serving, insincere fake ally. But if he fails to mention it, then he’s a woman-erasing male chauvinist.
I’ve done it myself. I’ve come down harshly on “comrades” in a way I would have been horrified to treat a stranger on the sidewalk. I’ve repeated the rhetoric that treats privilege as a spiritual disease, rotting every good intention from within and turning the individual stricken with it into a political Typhoid Mary, capable of destroying marginalized lives merely by breathing next to them.