alexandraerin

For tonight's soapboxing, I'm going to start by linking to an excellent post by Fred Clark, AKA Slacktivist, in which he quotes and discusses the following maxim by Abraham Joshua Heschel:

"Few are guilty; all are responsible."

Clark uses this bit of philosophy in discussion of climate change*, but it's elegantly applicable to the ongoing attempts to discuss privilege and power and systematic oppression in our society. When we talk about privilege, it's not uncommon for those who enjoy that privilege to get defensive, to think that they are being attacked, that they're being blamed, that they're having guilt thrown at them.

Some of this can perhaps be chalked up to the idea that people who are privileged fear losing that privilege and thus it is to their advantage to deny it's a bad thing or that they even have it in the first place. This is a fairly common interpretation of the phenomenon, I believe.

However, I don't think it's a sufficient explanation... it's an appealing one, but the nature of privilege... especially implicit privilege enjoyed by a majority... is to be invisible to the ones who enjoy it. Privilege takes many shapes, many of them subtle and many of them small, at least to the people who've never had to do without them.

No, I think it's true that this defensiveness protects and reinforces privilege... I think, in a "memetic evolution" sense that this is the purpose of the behavior, but within an individual, it's not a matter of nefarious mustache twirling and going, "Oh ho, they're on to me and my privilege! I'd best dazzle them with a bit of conversational skullduggery by denying I have any in the first place!"

It's more like, "Oh, shit... they're talking about ME here. But my life is hard. I have problems. And I'm not racist/sexist/ableist. How can I have privilege if my life is hard? How can I oppress if I don't hate? They're acting like I'm the bad guy! I'm not the bad guy!"

But privilege isn't something one is guilty of. It's not something anybody asks for and it's not something that any one person creates. It is something that we all may act on in various ways, especially (though not exclusively!) before we're aware that we possess it. And we are responsible for our actions, and it is our actions in the aggregate that create and reinforce the system that privileges us and oppresses others.

Few are guilty, all are responsible.

Privilege is not a crime, it's not sought, it's not simple, and it's not obvious. It's also not a good thing, for society (if we define society to mean all of us) and for other people. Because it's not obvious and it's not good (even if it's not a crime), there will always be a tendency to downplay one's own privilege.

Now, nobody can make you confront your own privilege. Nobody can make you do anything about it. This is part of the magic of being privileged. But if you're not interested in working through your own privilege, the least you can do is to not jump into conversations where people are talking about it to announce how completely unprivileged you think you are or to demand that people stop trying to make you feel guilty.

Guilt is not a tremendously useful thing. Unless you have some unconfessed-to crime burdening your soul, your guilt is not going to accomplish anything for anybody. Really. Nobody's trying to make you feel guilty. That might happen as a side effect when you become aware of your privilege, particularly if you realize that you have been taking part in racist behavior, or sexist behavior, or ableist behavior, or so on... but I guarantee you, the people whose talk is "making" you feel guilty... if they had the choice between you continuing to feel guilty or you learning something and not doing the thing which you're feeling guilty about anymore, they'd choose the latter.

That's the point.

It's not like we folks who talk about privilege don't have our own and it's not like we possess some sort of perfect awareness of it that lets us go through life doing no harm. I could sit here and list off the ways in which I am underprivileged and oppressed... really, it's not a short list.

But I'm also white. I have five functioning senses and four functioning limbs. I benefited from male privilege growing up. I had a middle class upbringing and the education that goes with it, at a good public school in a place with little crime. I'm literate. I speak English as a first language in the middle of the United States of America. These things? They are all ways in which I'm privileged.

Now, it's one thing to say that I belong to a category--like white, or trans, or whatever--and say that I experience privilege or oppression because of it, and another thing to identify some specifics. You can see this in almost any discussion of privilege: I'm white, but nobody ever gave me anything. My life's been hard. I worked for what I have. I never got a hand up.

Okay. Well, I don't know you, so I'm going to talk about Kevin Smith for a minute. He's been in the news so he's in my mind.

Kevin Smith is as much of a "self-made man" as you're going to find in Hollywood. He hocked his shit to make his first feature length film himself, using his friends and filming on location in a store after hours, and through the success of that he broke into the scene and got movie deals and made cartoons and comics and all. Nobody can say he didn't work for what he has.

But imagine his life's trajectory if we changed one thing about him. Make him a woman. Make him a trans man. Make him openly gay. Make him Hispanic. Make him blind. Make him paraplegic. Not all of those things. Just pick one. Do you think that working just as hard as he did, making the same moves, he would have gotten just as far? All it takes is one person who doesn't take him seriously, one opportunity that's not open to him, one perception of him by a key other player in his fate that changes as a result of this change in identity... just one changed reaction, at any stage in his life.

Do you think it's likely that at least one person who took a chance on Kevin Smith, able-bodied white dude, might not have done the same if he'd been... OTHER?

Privilege.

You can look at your own life, through that lens. Even if you can't see anything that was explicitly given to you because you're white or male or whatever, chances are that if you are a member of such a privileged class then at the very least you have been given slack that you wouldn't have otherwise been given, that you have been given a pass when somebody else would have been slapped down or called out or held back. Chances are you get away with things that you don't even think about as "getting away with" because it just seems so right and natural to you.

I'm going to talk about one thing... one little thing... that I can get away with. One piece of my privilege.

Heck, I won't just talk about it.

I'll show you:

I have a boyfriend.

No, having a boyfriend isn't a privilege. What I just did is an exercise of privilege. And what did I do?

I said I have a boyfriend.

Now this is my Livejournal and I can say what I want here, but I could go and say those words just about anywhere. I can do this without thinking about it.

Online or anywhere that I can be secure in my ability to present myself as and be accepted as a woman, I can say "I have a boyfriend"... or mention my partner by name or gender-specific pronoun... without stopping to think about what kind of space I'm in and what sorts of folks it might be friendly to.

I will not be challenged seriously by anyone as a result of this revelation. If anybody decides to make an issue of it, society does not sanction their actions.

This, folks, is privilege.

No, seriously.

It is.

Being able to say... casually, without a second thought... that you're in a relationship with the person whom you are in a relationship is privilege.

It's something that society protects the right of some people to do while restricting the ability of others.

If I had a girlfriend instead (and I have had girlfriends), not only would I have to think about that sort of thing more often but I would have to be on my guard. Even if I wasn't going around volunteering the information I would have to stop and think whenever somebody asked me if I was seeing somebody, in the ways such questions are most often phrased to women ("Do you have a boyfriend?")

If I had a boyfriend while presenting myself as male (this has also happened, briefly), I would have to be even more careful how and where I let that information be known. I would have to think about it more. I could live in San Francisco, in Seattle, in any of the cities we think of as being "progressive" and "diverse" and if I went out around town at all I would still not be able to forget what it meant to be a man involved romantically with another man.

Queer folk get attacked on the West Coast, too. I swear to God they do. We are everywhere, and everywhere is dangerous.

But, insofar as I'm in a heterosexual relationship, I am privileged... I don't have to stop and think before I talk about my partner. I can be open about that element of my life without implicitly "outting" myself to everybody around me.

This isn't to say that bisexuals and pansexuals don't get shit. It's certainly not to suggest that I don't have to be mindful of anything when I go out and about town, as a trans woman. But in this respect, I'm privileged.

This privilege doesn't give me free parking anywhere. It doesn't give me vouchers good for a free dessert with purchase of entree. It doesn't make me the queen of all creation.

What does it do for me?

It lets me say "I have a boyfriend." A little thing? Sure, to those of us who can doit. It gives me an answer I know is safe and socially acceptable when somebody asks me "Hey, are you seeing anyone?" I don't have to know the person's politics. I don't have to guess at their prejudices. I can say, "Yes, actually, I have a boyfriend. His name is Jack."

Other people who have this privilege might argue that it's not a big deal. This might go in a couple different ways.

One way I've heard comes from people saying that the only reason people get gay bashed is if they "flaunt it" and that there's no reason for anybody we encounter to know if we're gay or straight or bi or whatever. But this ignores the fact that a person's relationship status is treated as a public feature of them, something anybody can ask about without feeling embarrassed. Society as a whole doesn't regard questions about relationship status as intrusive. Without being asked, people "flaunt" their relationships regularly, through jewelry they wear and photographs they display and simply engaging in small talk about what's going on in their lives. Those who never talk about dates or significant others are in small ways othered... assumptions may be made, questions may be asked, so that the anomalous person may be filed appropriately

The other way goes something like this: Who cares who knows if you're gay? I don't care who knows I'm straight. I don't care if you're gay. Nobody I know cares if you're gay. No decent thinking person could care in this day and age. I see gay people walking around openly gay all the time. So what's the big deal? You can't go around being afraid your whole life! The problem with this is that it's rooted in your own perspective, your own experience. When you see people walking around, you don't know what they're thinking... you don't know what they do or don't worry about.

Privilege. I can say "I have a boyfriend." I can acknowledge my partner in a public setting without ever thinking about it, practically.

You still might not think that it's a big deal. Your reaction might be "Okay I guess that kind of sucks if some people feel like they can't talk about their relationships, but what are the real consequences?"

The real consequences are that you can't participate fully in certain conversations, you can't feel at ease at your workplace or in certain public settings... in short, you cannot fully participate in society.

I'm going to repeat that with HTML formatting because it really deserves emphasis: You cannot fully participate in society.

Someone's probably reading this and thinking I'm saying that single people can't fully participate in society, either, then. Well, since our society does prize people who form what we think of as "stable" relationships and families over those who don't... yeah, actually, but that's beside the point.

Single persons can say, "No, not right now." when asked if they're seeing someone. The "stigma" of being single isn't even approximately equivalent to what gay people experience.

Those who are might get pressure to "pair up" from some directions, but nobody ever gets beaten or murdered for letting slip that they're single, and other single people aren't then collectively traumatized when the courts entertain a defense of "I found out he was single and I just panicked!" as if the murder were an unfortunate but understandable reaction.

Of course, if I start filling in details like he has another girlfriend and it's consensual all-around, or any of the other ways in which our relationship breaks from the accepted mold, I do have to start thinking about where I am and who I'm talking to a little bit, but not at anywhere near the same level that I would have to worry if I were a man talking about my boyfriend. Poly folk and kinky folk are hardly embraced by society at large, but there's nothing like the systemic oppression directed at gay men.

The only thing in my particular basket of eggshells that I have to walk on that is on that level is our respective gender histories. Because as soon as people know about that, we're dealing with transphobia and the crossover with homophobia from people who don't know or care about the difference. And that is something that could one day cause a lot of trouble for us, if we weren't thinking about it at the wrong time.

There's privilege I have.

There's privilege I lack.

Being able to discuss my relationship status in the same terms that the rest of the world gets to is not the biggest piece of privilege I have and it's far from the most consequential. So why did I use it as an example? Because I feel that pointing out something so "small" and so easy to overlook is a useful exercise.

"White privilege" doesn't mean we get to go to the front of every line and it doesn't mean we get a basket full of money when we're born, after all. Most often it's expressed in "little things"... or rather, things that don't loom large in the consciousness of those of us who possess it.

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*The Conversations We're Not Having Here: Global warming/climate change debates.

I've still got the follow up to my "Throat-Punching" post saved up, but I'm going to wait a few days for my blood pressure to go down before I try to tackle that subject again.

In the meanwhile, here's a nice, calm, relaxing topic instead:

According to the USDA, which apparently tracks such things in the United States, the typical cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is a hair short of $125k for the poorest bracket of households and just shy of $250k for the wealthiest. Keep those figure in mind.

The chart on that page actually breaks down the cost year by year, by age, so if you were looking at a hypothetical situation where somebody took on the responsibility of raising a child who had already been born, you could do the math appropriately.

These figures aren't any kind of absolute benchmark for the resources needed to merely keep a human being alive from one age to another, of course... they're based on the amount of money that is spent on children in the country that is sort of the poster child for the First World. It's based on our way of life and our standard of living.

This is how much money we spend on a child, on average. It doesn't include the cost of bringing that child into the world. It doesn't include the cost of post-secondary education.

If an American adopts a child from a country that's impoverished, that's the kind of money that is going to be spent making sure that child has "a good life": making sure they have nutritious food and clean water and education and possibly health care, clothing and shelter and toys to stimulate and educate and entertain and distract.

$7,000 to $14,000 dollars a year to take this one person out of a life of poverty... is that a bad price, to take someone out of those circumstances? It might not be, if our reaction to the sort of desperate circumstances that much of the world exists in is to take one specific human being and remove them from those circumstances.

But with that kind of money... well, the gross capita income in Haiti is $480. (It was, anyway, at the point that chart was made. I think the figure for 2010 might be lower.) Think about how little money it would take to change somebody's life if that's all that they have to get by on to begin with.

You could pick twenty-eight random people and double their income with $7,000 dollars. How many mouths would that feed? How many lives would that change?

You could give clean water to 500-1,000 more people a year, with the amount of money it costs to raise a child in America.

You could send Afghan children to school.

You could invest in infrastructure and education. You could support economic opportunities for disadvantaged women. If you had the money to take on a child from overseas, you could, in short, spend that money... you could even spend a fraction of that kind of money... to change the conditions that we find so horrifying to view from afar that it motivates us to swoop in and "rescue" children from their own families.

...

Now, I don't honestly think anybody reading this right now has an extra hundred grand per year and is thinking to themselves, "Gosh, I can't make up my mind... do I want to adopt a child from overseas or do I want to start a lifetime of philanthropy to try to change things from the ground up?" While it would be great if the above motivates a few donations, the other purpose is to lay the groundwork for what I'm going to say next.

Laura Silsby is, unless the news has been uncharacteristically skewed against a white American Christian lady, a human trafficker. Another word for that is "slave trader".

What's going on in Haiti right now is not that a group of well-meaning people, through their ignorance or lack of judgment or impulsiveness, have been accidentally ensnared by a law meant to curtail an activity that their plan sort of resembled. The law accomplished its purpose.

There's enough coming out in the news that there is room for some semi-informed speculation about Silsby's motives, but I'm not even going to get into that. I'm just talking about what she did.

Her plan involved claiming (both to authorities and her co-congregants, it seems) that she had documents giving her permission to take "100 Haitian children" out of Haiti and into the Dominican Republic, where she'd be able to put them up for adoption. Stop and think about that. 100 children. Not "the following children". Not "the individual children listed below". She was claiming to have permission to pick up 100 children and transport them across the border, where she would make money giving them to people.

She was claiming the right, in other words, to treat the children of Haiti... brown-colored children of a poor, non-Christian, non-American nation... as a commodity. An absolutely interchangeable commodity.

And... though she didn't really think this through... she obviously believed this claim was plausible. Anybody who was working with her who wasn't actually in on the scheme certainly found it perfectly believable. The authorities she dealt with on both sides of the Haitian/Dominican border were less persuaded.

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert on international adoption. Even knowing that there are abuses of the system and there is endemic exploitation and there is commercialization and commoditization of children going on within the legal channels, I doubt very much that any nation which actually tracks such things issues papers that say, in effect, "This document entitles the bearer, A Nice White Lady, to one hundred (100) children." Her imaginary document apparently had no reference to the legal status of these children and put no onus on her to coordinate what she was doing with any kind of authorities who might be tasked with looking after their welfare... again, not just on the Haitian side of the border.

Her whole scheme seemed to hinge on the idea that for any Dominican Republic officials who happened to notice a new orphanage suddenly appearing in a posh resort catering to wealthy white people from overseas, "oh, these are Haitian children" would be sufficient explanation for how they came to be in her (and this really is the right word) possession.

Commodities.

To anybody who thinks that under the circumstances she should be let off with a warning because of some sort of perceived "gray area" or the idea that maybe she really didn't understand the enormity of what she was doing, it turns out she was let off with a warning the first time she tried to steal a busload of kids. And she turned right around and picked up another batch of lil interchangeable commodities to try again.

Given our history in this country... our shameful and not at all distant (150 years is only two, three human lifetimes) history as the last "civilized" nation of western, European-descended folk who thought it was really cool to literally commoditize human beings of another race... we should be way more sensitive about this stuff than we are. We should be way more aware of this.

There should be nobody in the United States who misses the undertones of what was going on here, but of course there are.

Look, we all know there are people who are also trafficking in children for much worse purposes... there are children being trafficked who suffer far worse fates than being adopted by well-to-do foreigners. But that doesn't change what Silsby was doing. She can't claim ignorance of the law when at every turn, she was told by officials on both sides of the border that what she was doing was trafficking and chose to ignore it. Did she think the laws of Haiti wouldn't dare to descend upon her? Did she think that the risk wasn't big enough to outweigh the reward?

I don't know.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for her cohorts. I understand how they might have been sucked in... there are actually numerous scams going on in the United States at any given time that are based on taking advantage of the belief that one's congregation is full of people who are Right With God and who will never lie or deceive you. It's a dangerous belief, and one that's not particularly well-supported by the Bible (I don't recall what number of people the Bible says are righteous, but I think it's smaller than the number it takes to fill a church), and even that speaks to an arrogance, a sort of imperialism: we are the good people and everybody else is bad. Anything WE do is right. Anything they do is suspect.

And of course that leads right into any child is better off with one of US than with one of THEM... the kind of thinking that leads to stolen generations. So, yes, perhaps some of the people involved really wanted nothing more than to improve the lives of some children. They didn't approach that goal from a very pure place, though... and see also: what several thousand dollars a year can really do to improve the lives of children.

Also, whatever they believed about Silsby's plan and the legality of what they were doing, they were evidently lying to the parents, lying to the children... if your plan requires you to lie to children, Jesus may not approve of it as strongly as you think.

There have been other news stories done in the wake of this "scandal" crime with reporters talking to Haitian parents who explain how willing they are to give their children up to families overseas. I worry about this stirring up sympathy for people running schemes like Silsby's. The thing is, these parents are in an impossible situation where there are no good options available to them, and so some of them take the one that seems like the best for their children.

But the key is that this option is contingent on the idea that a foreigner with enough money to care for a child in the American fashion intervenes in their lives in the first place! I'm not going to sit here and condemn everybody who's ever taken part in a foreign adoption (though honestly there are people who will do that, and they have several good points), but I will point out again that this kind of money could be spent on the ground in countries like Haiti to help end the circumstances that will otherwise result in even more children being born and living in the conditions you might "rescue" one single child from.

I could keep going on this forever but I'd just end up repeating myself. Children aren't commodities, no matter how desperate the circumstances they're living in. Adopting a child doesn't "make a difference" in a statistically meaningful sense.

Please Note: The question of "Why should we...?" (spend the money to improve Haiti, get involved, feel any sense of guilt or responsibility) is a separate topic from the one I'm addressing here. It is, for the purposes of this post, The Conversation That Is Not Happening Here. The adoption scheme of Silsby hinged upon the idea that there are already people with money to spend on improving the lives of Haitian children.

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Related reading:

Orphans???, a posting from Anthropology Now that partly inspired this.

Also worth reposting, since I know many people don't have money to spare:

The Hunger Site.
Free Rice