I've been lurking on this list for the past few months and I have to say, it's been BY FAR the most intelligent, provocative, and interesting set of discussions I've seen in a while. Which is great for me, since I have a new book coming out soon, "Nowtopia," that has a whole chapter on "Outlaw Bicycling" and in it is a subsection on the DIY bikeshop phenomenon... and I hope to meet many of you in person as I wander around the country in the next year doing readings... The discussion here on privilege has been really smart. I really think Kyle's last post was remarkable, eloquent, and went way beyond the tired limits this conversation tends to get stuck in... In spite of that, I have a different take on the argument, and have a short-ish section of my book that addresses it. I'm taking the liberty of posting it here. It is coming out in a couple of months via AK Press, and you are invited to come and beat me up in person at any of a number of appearances that are already scheduled... I'll post that later if anyone wants, but you can get it from my website (url below) at your convenience... I only regret that the book is already going to print and I cannot rewrite it to respond to your incredibly insightful commentaries!... dang it! (sorry the footnotes are lost in this post, so ignore those numbers)...
The Privilege Trap
As the sectarian politics of the late sixties and seventies, and the identity politics of the eighties, have sadly proved, celebrating otherness may be useful as self-therapy, but it is relatively useless as political strategy.
—Steven Duncombe7
That which is oppressed and resists is not only a who but a what. It is not only particular groups of people who are oppressed (women, indigenous, peasants, factory workers, and so on), but also (and perhaps especially) particular aspects of the personality of all of us: our self-confidence, our sexuality, our playfulness, our creativity.
—John Holloway8
Everyone has many reasons to contest this world, and radical politics must start from that recognition. Given the general speedup and intensification of work, the breakdown of communities and families, we might imagine a general revolt brewing among people subjected to these dynamics. But political action has not yet emerged to protest these social processes. A great shift did occur in political organizing after the 1960s, which moved the focus from broad critiques of power, wealth, and economic injustice to focus on race, gender, and sexual preference. Plenty of grassroots efforts have continued to contest the condition of public schools, local environmental justice, food safety, etc., but the sense of a wide political opposition has largely crumbled.
This saga has been analyzed a lot, but what has been overlooked is the way the concept of "privilege" has come to dominate so much thinking among politically active people. Born from the numerous divisions fracturing society along race and gender lines, as well as the extreme stratification of wealth and poverty, the discourse on "privilege" has been an attempt to come to grips with the differences among people in political movements and to challenge the power imbalances that map those differences.
We can trace its origins to the important emergence of anti-racist organizing, especially among white activists. This was urgently needed to address the reproduction of racist and sexist behaviors in left movements from the anti-Vietnam War effort to the burgeoning environmental movements. It started out as a reasonable and important repudiation of a common-enough white and/or middle class sense of entitlement, which manifested in ignorance of people who didn't already have the same social rights or economic comforts as the white and/or middle class. The critique of privilege, usually white or male, was meant to reveal the embedded structural power that some populations hold over others. Like class analysis, such sweeping analyses tend to gloss over specific experiences that contradict the larger argument. (Obviously there are plenty of men, and plenty of white people, who do not have any real power in their lives; the relative advantage of being male or white in a predominantly racist and patriarchal society doesn't always translate into specific experiences—or advantages—for particular individuals.) By equating the uneven distribution of systemic social power with individual experiences a lot of potential political alliances have been undercut. In other words, some activists who foreground this critique have had a frustrating tendency to reject the participation of white people and/or men simply because of their status, independent of the specific conditions of their lives, their ideas, or their behaviors.
The discourse around privilege in everyday terms shifted from targeting an oblivious state of mind, to targeting a measurable standard of living and/or a discernable set of rights. Confusion about who is "privileged" and who qualifies as a legitimate political subject was sowed by this shift. Many white radicals feel pressure to be self-critical as the test of their own political legitimacy, which has served to further confuse where political agency can legitimately arise.
I have heard many stories among white activists, especially males, who have felt shut up not for their ideas but for their status. Some argue that this is just, representing an historic turning of the tables, but the moments where this table-turning is empowering are far outnumbered by those where it leads to a numbing paralysis imposed by a cloud of guilt and recrimination. Permaculture activist and anti-globalization Green Bloc organizer Erik Ohlsen tells his story:
I've been programmed as an activist [so that] when I hear "class," privilege and race come to mind… I've never been hungry or poor… I come from a middle-class family and I'm trying to be working-class…At times people get down on activists who are "privileged white males"… I got shut up because I'm a white male… There are a lot of us who come from these suburban middle-class families who have become conscious to all these issues and want to make a difference… I value the conversation about classism and racism in the activist communities—it's important to challenge people's programmed ideologies and programmed cultural behaviors, but not to say I'm better and you're worse… It's just about acknowledging it, and then saying "let's work together to make this better."9
Emphasizing "privilege" implicitly concedes scarcity as the norm. Once the political meaning of "privilege" shifts from an oblivious state of mind to material comfort or basic rights, the rightful expectation of generalized well-being is flipped over. Instead of insisting on one's missing social and economic rights, the political energy focuses instead on attacking other people who appear to enjoy them already. This unconsciously reinforces a zero-sum dynamic; if some people gain others must lose. But isn't one goal of social transformation to raise everyone to a basic standard of comfort and equality?
Instead of exploring our shared predicament and looking for commonalities, the emphasis on "privilege" tends to focus on identifying impediments to social change in ongoing racism first and foremost. The overwhelming stratification of wealth is profoundly unfair, too. But by holding responsible vast numbers of people who depend on their wages and salaries and are relatively powerless (albeit not presently poor), radicals reinforce divisions among people who will need to unite.
A politics of affinity… is not about abandoning identification as such; it is about abandoning the fantasy that fixed, stable identities are possible and desirable, that one identity is better than another, that superior identities deserve more of the good and less of the bad that a social order has to offer… In the social factory everyone becomes a worker, which deprivileges the point of material production; but at the same time, everyone becomes a worker, which reimposes an expanded, but still delimited, conception of the working class as the identity behind all identifications.
—Richard J.F. Day10
For many politically active people, the attack on racism and inequality took the form of self-examination and too often, endless self-criticism that left people demoralized and demobilized, and highly mistrustful of each other. At its worst extremes the grassroots campaign to uproot oppression in daily life led to a neo-Maoist focus on identity and heredity as the defining qualities of any individual, rather than actual behavior or thinking. Once progressives shifted their rhetoric to attacking "white privilege," the prospects for thinking cooperatively about political alliances were seriously diminished, because if you weren't inclined to make white racism the lead issue, you were branded, either directly or implicitly, racist.
Because of this confusion, leftists can overlook or even oppose worthy currents of subversion when they erupt from educated, or affluent, or even just white people. The preconception that oppositional political subjectivity "belongs" to "real workers" or the "truly oppressed" is based on political assumptions rooted in 20th century paradigms. The contemporary discourse on "privilege" has had the perverse effect of devaluing whole segments of political opposition ("It's just a bunch of middle-class white people"). It has also tended to reinforce a pernicious tendency to hierarchy in this society by continuing to rank people by status.
In Atlanta, Rachel Spiewak is a cofounder of the Sopo Bicycle Cooperative and promoter of Critical Mass rides in that car-centric southern city. In May 2006 she attended a Bicycle Organization Organization Project (BOOP) conference in Milwaukee where she sat through an "anti-oppression" training (which she found offensive) conducted by colleagues from the all-white Boulder, Colorado area.
In Atlanta we know that skin color does not dictate consciousness… I don't care about awareness or attitude. I care about what people are doing. Are people treating each other with respect? Are people treating each other like we all have the same amount of worth? Are people making environmentally responsible choices? Do all people have access to doing these things? The change I want to see in the world is in the "doing."
The golden rule is not about who or what you are, and it's not about consciousness. It's about what you DO. If we lay the groundwork for being able to DO these things, i.e. we reorient material culture, then we will see shifts in social culture. There will be more opportunities to build community and observe the full humanity of each other, despite socialization that dictates who counts less as a person and why. The ideological shift will follow, quietly and slowly, and we'll take it for granted.
—Rachel Spiewak11
Spiewak's comments show how the overemphasis on racial politics and politics of privilege can confine political activity to the level of the individual and focus on perfecting personal behavior rather than actively doing work that attacks the capitalist system or even systemic discrimination. The ongoing legacies of black slavery, Indian genocide, and a century of imperial wars against "chinks, gooks, japs, niggers, injuns, hadji's," etc., haunt radical politics as much as they haunt American society in general. Finding a way forward without negating this barbaric past and its continuing influence in the present, is a task that continues to elude radicals. The identity politics and anti-racist organizing developed over the past decades have been important but they have not solved the problem. These movements have been and still are useful to bring attention to the oblivious or semi-conscious discrimination enacted within radical alternative movements, but it is all too easy for the emphasis on so-called "privilege" to seriously hamper a clear appraisal of the enormous similarities faced by people at many different locations of this stratified and hierarchical society. As Richard Day puts it, "If the multitudes are ever to come together in any way, this will be the result of a long process of building solidarity and dealing with differences and structured oppressions that plague movements for radical alternatives as much as they do the political mainstream…"12
One task that this book has set for itself is to break down the idea of the "middle class," especially the notion that people so designated have a life radically different than those who supposedly fall below the threshold. So-called "middle class" life is not "privileged." Granted, the material well-being of most people defined as middle class is far better than a huge majority of the world population. But material comfort should be considered a universal human right, rather than a privilege, and anyway, "material comfort" must be carefully and democratically re-thought in light of our increased biological and ecological awareness.
Similarly, it is problematic to refer to the freedom to act, or a sense of personal agency, or unfettered access to public spaces as examples of "white privilege," as some do. These qualities are aspects of a normal daily life that should be taken for granted by everyone. That they aren't is a reprehensible remnant of the racist roots of our society, but the path forward is not to attack or suspend them as undue privileges, but to extend them to all without qualification. Our rhetoric should reflect our commitment to extending rights and freedoms to everyone, not to attacking the population that seems to enjoy rights and freedoms relatively unhindered. (The perception that white people or men have the ability to live freely is itself highly exaggerated, in my opinion, since this society only gives a tiny minority anything approaching real freedom.) Nowtopians are engaged in practical projects that depend on new relationships around leadership, skill-sharing, and power dynamics within groups, practices that are probably more useful to combat racial and gender inequality than dogmatic doctrines of privilege.
In the new communities of Nowtopians we consistently encounter a range of people from affluent to poor, often—but not always—in multiracial constellations. It is common to find that some of the people making the new world today are white and sometimes well-paid. If radical political organizing continues to use a blanket rule of "identity" over behavior, it will reinforce the existing divisions that already keep people fighting each other more than fighting the system. In embracing a new politics of work, outside of wage-labor, Nowtopians lay the foundation for new alliances across the old boundaries, on the basis of practical aspirations and activities.
from "Nowtopia: How pirate programmers, outlaw bicyclists and vacant-lot gardeners are inventing the future today" by Chris Carlsson, AK Press 2008 (pub date: May 1)
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www.chriscarlsson.com
Fall-Winter Talks 2007-08: www.counterpulse.org/fall-winter-talks.shtml
The Nowtopian (my blog): http://www.lipmagazine.org/ccarlsson/
www.shapingsf.org
www.processedworld.com
www.fullenjoymentbooks.com