Moments of Permanence - On differences in oppression, derailment, and the hierarchies of hurt

From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 08:15 am (UTC) (Link)

"If the bigotry doesn't affect you personally, there's no reason why you would even be thinking about it. That doesn't make you a bad person, nor does it mean that you don't care about bigotry."

Perhaps. Bigotry has systemic effects other than those that affect you "personally". Of course, bigotry, prejudice and entrenched disadvantage in my country do affect me personally. In the last few days I've had to intercede to defend a blind woman in the park from a drunken indigenous man who is forced to live there (in the park) because of the debilitating social disadvantages of his people in Australia; and I've been sexually vilified while walking my dog twice, on one occasion threatened with anal rape, because owning a poodle means I'm gay and because being gay is a terrible thing to some people. I've picked up a book in the last two days, only to learn (not that I truly suspected otherwise) that more or less everything I was taught in primary school about the history of my state was a lie. Not that these turns of affairs are emblematic or that I claim them as evidence of personal difficulty, but they're hardly great fun: I could very much do without them.

"And this sentence: <Economic and political inequalities affect us all negatively> is just wrong. The fact that, for example, a black person is given harsher sentences than a white person who committed the same crime, does not negatively effect the white defendant. In fact some forms of prejudice, particularly the economic ones, actually benefit the group in power."

The negative effects of the imprisonment rate amongst black men on wider society in the US are well documented, aren't they? Just as organised crime is a consequence of the total disenfranchisement of a social group by the ruling class: the Mafia theoretically arose in Sicily because of the brutal and corrupt nature of the government installed from northern Italy, so that the locals were compelled to build their own shadow network of governance and usury. Reckon there's anyone in Italy who'd argue that society is not still paying for that oppression?

"Furthermore, bigotry is a lot more than economic and political inequities. In fact, I'd say that these are the external manifestations of these prejudices and should not be confused with the prejudices themselves."

A confusion which I'm not suffering from simply because I didn't include the phrase "and the underlying prejudices that cause them" in the above.

I certainly don't know what I'm talking about though, and I have a lot to learn; you're right about that.

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