Here is a true story: In the early 1980s, my dad and his friends were involved in the May Day parade in our town. The theme of their particular charity float was “Around the world in 80 days”. So my dad decided to black up with Kiwi shoe polish and go as Idi Amin. We have, conveniently, now lost the photos, but I’m absolutely sure I didn’t dream this. Indeed, I was in some of the pictures myself, dressed as Mrs Mop (whoever the hell she is - I’m guessing that since my dad had racism covered, I was doing my bit for class prejudice by dressing as a cleaner).
Whenever I tell people about this (and I don’t tell them often), the response is typically one of amazement. Where the fuck did you come from? they ask, terrified and amused in equal measure at the thought of the redneck backwater whence I came. And yes, rural Cumbria in the 1980s was a funny place. It’s a funny place still. But even so, there are times when I could do without the liberal horror of peers whose skin is every bit as white as mine, peers who just happen to hail from more metropolitan quarters and who may even boast about having attended school with real, live black people. Ha ha! they chuckle. What a terrible family! What a thoroughly racist town! But it didn’t feel weird or racist at the time. It felt normal. It felt the way things feel now, the way they’ll always feel to those with advantage. Years later we’ll wonder how we ever thought this was okay, yet at the time it’s an incredible effort to picture the world being any different.
These days I check my privilege all the sodding time.* All the same, I hate “checking my privilege”, just as much as I hate the word “intersectionality”. Only privileged people use words and phrases like that, people who – regardless of their background – have still got the time to sit around analysing experience and offering up alternative ways of being. All the same, privilege is relative. It’s one thing to write a tremendously fair-minded, carefully worded article on intersectional friction, as Bim Adewunmi did yesterday; quite another to have the time and self-serving bile to wait for such an article to appear, only to shoot it down with pointlessly time-wasting comments about how pointlessly time-wasting it all is.
Right now, certain prominent white journalists and writers are expressing frustration at the anger currently being directed at Caitlin Moran over her infamous “literally could not give a shit” tweet.** Zoe Williams has tweeted the following:
I cannot fucking stand this self policing bullshit feminism.
She goes on to clarify this by offering “I get incredibly infuriated when feminists police each other for not being feminist enough”, while Deborah Orr offers this:
It’s horrible, women being attacked because they don’t represent other women enough. In autobiographies.
Meanwhile Dorian Lynskey complains that “a friend of mine was being called racist on no fucking basis whatsoever”, while Graham Linehan fumes about people “actually DEMANDING tokenism”. All of this seems to me a gross misrepresentation of the issues being raised and the genuine hurt felt by those who are being told such things don’t matter. Nonetheless, there is a bit of me – a privileged/unprivileged bit – that identifies with the big-name writers. Isn’t all this anger directed at Moran a bit smug? Why are people being so mean about someone who is so nice? Isn’t the response in and of itself privileged and bullying? Since when was everyone else so perfect? I get all this, I really do. But it’s still not right.
Understanding that what you think is normal is alienating to others is difficult. It’s hard to do it on your own, and it’s hard to point it out to others without sounding like a self-satisfied knob who can’t see the mote in his or her own eye. Don’t you know about intersectionality? Ha! I know about intersectionality. As discourse goes, this is really fucking irritating, especially when you’re being told this by someone who appears to have sod all personal experience of being any less privileged than you. Hence the trend is increasingly to say that all the discussion amounts to is competitive feminism, competitive privilege-checking, willful showing-off at the expense of someone who just happens to disagree with you on one little thing. Even so, I don’t believe it’s possible to mass-interpret motivations in this way. It’s incredibly easy to ridicule people who use unfamiliar words to criticise that which to you is just “how things are”. And it appears to me that many journalist and writers whom I’ve admired are all too eager to form a closed circle, protecting and reflecting their own experience of “how things are” while misrepresenting the criticisms of those who don’t share their vision.
I think my dad still uses Kiwi shoe polish, but just for shoes these days. Still I bet back then, if anyone had challenged him, we could all have closed ranks. We could have claimed not to be able to stand “this self policing bullshit charity work” and expressed outrage at how people were “actually DEMANDING we all look white”. But this was all in the days before twitter. It’s much more normal now.
* Although not as much as Laurie Penny, who checks hers “in the manner of an anxious homemaker constantly checking that the gas is off”. Is it me being on privilege hyper-alert, or is the “anxious homemaker” image just a little bit on the patronising side? …
** Analysing the tweet yet again, I’m wondering if a possible late-in-the-day defence for Moran could be that while she “literally” couldn’t give a shit, she “metaphorically” still could. Unfortunately, I fear subsequent tweets have put paid to this line of interpretation.
October 10, 2012 at 3:32 pm
So (while with the disclaimer that I’m a white feminist and so obviously not the best placed to speak about this), I think Moran handled it absolutely HORRIBLY, but she did say one thing which was kind of right and kind of interesting.
This is a much bigger conversation than just Girls itself (which I got from latter tweets when she said she didn’t give a shit about Girls in particular, rather than all media representation of women of colour.) And I’m not sure why so many other scriptwriters are given a pass on considering the white experience to be “normal” while Lena Dunham is the one person I can remember this coming up from. It’s been addressed by a lot of smart, interesting people in the context of Girls and I think as a TV critic, Caitlin Moran can note that plenty of people have discussed representation of women of colour in Girls and this doesn’t necessarily have to be a “Lena Dunham” conversation anymore, but a broader one. As a TV critic, I think you can make the call that “other people have considered it from that angle better than I could, I’m going to do a different one.”
But as a feminist and a human being? She’s so wrong. Of course non-intersectional feminism is bullshit. And she should care about how ALL women are represented and she was beyond insensitive and arsy and just plain hurtful. But I seem to have read the tweets differently from other people because I got that she was saying that the conversation about minority representation should not just be a “Lena Dunham” conversation. So maybe that’s where some people are coming from.
October 10, 2012 at 3:49 pm
Funnily enough I learned about privilege and intersectionality from trans women from a variety of backgrounds. I don’t think it’s fair to say that these terms are somehow privileged by their nature – isn’t it reasonable to assume that intelligent oppressed people are going to seek a language to explain their experiences?
That aside, I generally agree with you. Privilege is insidious and learning to check it is really really hard. I’ve got worse at it over the last year or so, because it takes energy which I’ve been devoting to other things. The real point of it all, as Laurie Penny says in her New Statesman piece on this, is learning to apologise and take on criticism when the inevitable fuck ups occur.
October 10, 2012 at 4:01 pm
Yes, I think you’re right about that. I do still worry there are instances when people use these terms to silence others who are less privileged – and I suppose I’m less comfortable about people like me using them than someone like Bim Adewunmi (because I sometimes feel like, even if I mean it, I’m exploiting the terms to get one over on people who haven’t had access to the same language. Possibly overthinking it, though…)
October 11, 2012 at 9:23 am
If your dad is anything like mine it’ll be the same tin of polish.