Privilege And Low Expectations

December 10th, 2012 by Guest Contributor

We will expect you to be a decent human being. This is the minimal expectation, and we will not praise you for it. We will expect you not to be a bigot, and we will not praise or reward you for it any more than you’d reward a 12-year-old for going a day without attacking their siblings or swearing at Grandma. This is expected behaviour–you don’t get sweeties for it.

We will expect you to treat us as full human beings in all respects–no ifs, buts, or maybes. No exceptions. No provisos.

We will expect you not to protect bigots, not to support bigots, and not to look away from bigotry. We will expect you not to deny bigotry happens, deny a force is bigoted, or defend bigotry.

We will expect you to accept that not everything has to be about you. We will expect you not to whine when we have more than a token presence; we will expect you not to complain when you aren’t the overwhelming majority. We will expect you not to expect you and yours to always come first.

We will expect you to be able to identify with, root for, and otherwise enjoy media that has protagonists that are not entirely like you. We manage every day in a thousand ways; if we can, you can.

We will expect you to look at your world and see the privilege and recognise that is it injustice that made things this way–not chance, not the natural order, not a deity (or several).

These are still low expectations, though much higher than we often receive. But so many of these are so basic: these are the same expectations parents have of small children. It speaks volumes of how little we expect of people that so many can act like spoiled children and it have become normalised.

It’s time to grow up, folks. We expect better.

Image Credit: Dr. Stephen Dan

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Posted in Uncategorized, activism, race, racism | 3 comments

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  • Elton

    Thank you. Privileged people become spoiled by their privilege and think everything is about them. We need more articles like this one.

  • http://twitter.com/Rmjonesc13 R.M. Jones

    As someone with one check-mark on the privilege square (White Western, but a queer woman), I think the sad thing is most of the time you can’t. My own privilege was tough to tear down and something I’m still working on- but I was first in ignorance of it, then in denial of it for the longest time. It took brushing up against people who were blunt, who were rude, who gave well-reasoned arguments and impassioned speeches and all that good stuff to make me sit up and take notice after a time.

    The thing is, some people are very comfortable in their privilege and don’t feel like they have enough of a carrot to bring ‘em out of it. I have always been a word nerd and treasured facts > social rules, so all it took for me was some mind-breaking statistics to take away the final bit of denial. But I have quoted the same statistics at people, and have had them just use round-a-bout logic so twisted that it’s nearly impossible to follow in order so that they don’t have to realize they just might be the villain in this series.

    Although sometimes, these arguments sink in over time. I saw recently this one guy I used to argue with overtime on the forums about things like Rape Culture and how he has gotta stop derailing with arguments about Misandry. This recent time? He actually was calling out someone on using the “She wouldn’t have dressed that way if she didn’t want it” horrid cliche. I was shocked! Here I was, gone for three months, and a bit of his privilege had been chipped away during that time.

    Erm, TL’DR? Basically, people can be knuckleheaded and stupid and horrid about their privilege. All you can do is react how you feel is right, and hope something sinks in overtime.

  • http://twitter.com/pauraque pauraque

    I think real change comes from a person hearing things over and over again from different sources and explained in different ways, and after a while it begins to chip away at your certainty that you know how things work. Changing your perspective on the world is not something that can happen in one conversation, one argument, one incident you observe, one book you read, or one blog you follow. But many of these things taken together over a long time can gradually shift your perceptions, if you are open to it.