"How Can I Cure My White Guilt?"
facepalm
The sneaky/confusing/dangerous thing about concepts like sin and privilege is that, if you squint at them from just the right angles, they can almost seem to make sense.
The sneaky/confusing/dangerous thing about concepts like sin and privilege is that, if you squint at them from just the right angles, they can almost seem to make sense.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:58 AM
3 Comments:
I've never understood how I, as an individual am supposed to feel guilty about the structure of the society I live in. I neither caused the situation, nor have the ability or power to meaningfully change it in any way. So what is there to feel guilty about?
1. I *used* to feel somewhat guilty, though recognizing the things you point to. The more often and the louder the crazy left shrieks YOU ARE MORE GUILTY THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE at me, the less guilty I feel.
2. That's the beauty of "privilege" theory--it presupposes that you are personally gaining something from the injustice every second of your life. Thus it's an attempt to *give* you a reason to feel guilty--on account of your ill-gotten gains. Fiendishly clever, really, when you think about it.
Maybe it is an artifact of growing up in Minnesota, where this is a popular past time, but I developed an immunity to the "guilt trip" in early adolescence from constant exposure.
I just don't feel guilty about structural shittiness. I can acknowledge that a situation isn't optimal and will often try to do what I can to make things better, but the shit is baked into the cake. We all might like a non-shit cake better, but that requires a new cake and it turns out that there isn't *that* much shit, and almost everybody is more invested in the cake we have than the theoretical cake we could have. Not to mention there remains a separate discussion about just what kind of cake the new cake would be, and it turns out that we only have a half cup of sugar left.
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