Oppression Vs. Privilege

Ampersand says that by his current working definitions, oppression and privilege are simply the opposites of each other. He defines them as follows:

Oppression is a system whereby:

1) A group “A” is systematically mistreated in comparison to non-As in a given social context.

2) The distinctive traits of group “A” are viewed as exceptions to the “unmarked” or “default” traits of a “normal” member of society.

3) Members of group “A” are effectively prevented from holding a significant number of high leadership positions in society’s controlling institutions.

Privilege is a system whereby:

1) A group “B” is systematically, unfairly advantaged in comparison to non-Bs in a given social context.

2) The distinctive traits of group “B” are viewed as the “unmarked” or “default” traits of a “normal” member of society.

3) Members of group “B” hold a near-monopoly on the high leadership positions of society’s controlling institutions.

My first thought, left in the comments at Alas, is that I would remove point 3 from both definitions — lack of leadership positions is a likely consequence (and a common reinforcing mechanism) of oppression as defined in points 1 and 2, but I don’t see why it needs to be elevated to definitional status. Also, it’s potentially distracting, since it implies that "number of As in leadership positions" is a simple measuring stick for level of oppression (and there are cases where I’d say oppression is still present despite things being fine on the number-in-leadership front — Christians being privileged over Jews comes to mind).

Second, I would change "non-A" to "B" in the oppression definition, because oppression is always relative to a specific oppressor group. For example, black people are oppressed because they're systematically mistreated relative to white people, but not necessarily relative to any other non-black group such as Native Americans.

Finally, I think that while points 1 and 2 are both part of both definitions, I would reverse their order in the case of privilege. As I see it, the core of the concept of oppression is the harm it does to the oppressed -- being oppressed means bad stuff happens to you in a particular way. In the case of privilege, on the other hand, I think the mechanism is what's central. Privilege is about being seen (by yourself and others) as unmarked and normative, and feeling entitled to have the world operate on that assumption. Advantages flow to the privileged person, and harms to the oppressed, as a consequence of that mechanism. When one person tells another "check your privilege," they aren't saying "think about how good you have it!" so much as they're saying "remember that not everybody is, or should be, like you!" It's a subtle distinction, because the two parts do go together, but I think the words are not quite opposites because they stress different elements of systemic inequality.

Purslane and Potatoes

At the risk of proving that vegan food is all weird stuff, here's my lunch from today:



This is one of my new favorite things. Our CSA has been giving us verdolago, also known as purslane, the past few weeks. It was kind of sad, though, because when I went over to the trading area, everyone had traded in their verdolago for whatever else they could get. But I was also happy, because that made it easy for me to trade for another helping.

Ingredients (for enough to serve one person, as seen in the picture):
- Oil for frying
- One potato
- About 1/4 of a normal store sized onion
- A few shakes of garlic salt
- A loose pile of purslane/verdolago (leaves and small stems) a little bigger than the potato

Heat a little oil in a frying pan. Chop the potato into small cubes, and dice the onion. Put the potato and onion in the pan and cover, stirring occasionally. When the potato has cooked enough to get soft, add the garlic salt and verdolago. Cover again, and cook for a few minutes (be careful -- verdolago is a succulent, so some of the leaves will pop like popcorn).

In the picture I made some edamame to eat with it, but I've had this as a meal all by itself.

Assumptions

Here is an interesting example of the way that society makes assumptions about people fitting into a certain way of life, then penalizes those who don't fit. In this case, nominating petitions for some candidates in Arizona are being challenged because the petition signers gave their PO Boxes instead of their street addresses. But the reason they did that is because they live in rural areas of an unnamed Indian reservation where there are no street addresses.

Border Befuddlement

Today the Supreme Court said it won't hear a challenge to the fence the U.S. is building on the Mexican border. The challenge was based on the fact that the law providing for the building of the fence said the Department of Homeland Security could ignore environmental laws, which means the fence threatens various desert species and ecosystems.

I think the "ignore environmental laws" thing is unequivocally bad policy. And I'm sure the environmental side's lawyers had all kinds of interesting arcane legal arguments. But I find it hard to be very upset with the Supreme Court over this decision, because when it comes down to it, Congress has the power to re-write its own laws. Our Constitution was written in the 18th Century, so there's no "right to a clean environment" in it, much less rights for nature in and of itself. All of our environmental protections are established by Congress, and what Congress giveth, Congress can taketh away. The property-rights-based challenges that are working their way up may have more ground to stand on (since while the Founders may have been too early for John Muir, they knew all about John Locke), and may be better politics to boot -- a property-based challenge takes the progressive concerns about militarized border enforcement and environmental protection and marries them to a core conservative concern with protecting private property, through the less politically marked medium of preserving border-area communities and economies.

I find it a little strange, then, to hear Democratic members of Congress complaining about the outcome of this case. They can blame Republicans for passing the bad law in 2005. But the Democrats have controlled Congress since the beginning of 2007 -- so they have the power to introduce a bill that would change the bad law. They could tack it onto something like an Iraq funding bill or wiretapping authorization that they were going to pass anyway and that Bush wouldn't dare veto.

I also find this statement by DHS secretary Michael Chertoff depressing:

"We have had multiple meetings with some of the most bitter critics, people that we have talked to again and again," he told the Houston Chronicle's Editorial Board on June 6. "Now consultation means we try to see if we can work out an accommodation. It doesn't mean we consult for two years, it doesn't mean that a local official has a veto."

I've spent a lot of time reading research on collaboration and consultation in policymaking. And the lesson that gets hammered home again and again is that if the agency treats it as a one-way flow of information -- an opportunity to convince the public that the agency's decisions (which they'll carry out regardless of the results of the consultation) are right -- then the whole thing is a charade. And this lesson is more important the more politically charged the issue is.

What UUism Means To Me

The church I went to as an undergrad had a segment of the service called "What my faith means to me" or "What University Church means to me." Every week, one member of the congregation would give a mini-talk about their religious background and outlook. It was an especially useful device for that congregation, since we were coming from such wildly diverse backgrounds (from Pentecostals to agnostics, and including at one point both the president of the College Republicans and the head of the campus feminist group) and thrown together for just a few short years. In 7 semesters, I never quite had the right combination of self-assurance and extroversion to do "What my faith means to me."

I think a similar sort of confessional may be in order right now, though. I don't recall exactly how it happened, but at some point years ago I got adopted into the UU blogosphere. I've been linked (with a gold medal, no less) on Philocrites' UU blog list through numerous purges and trimmings, and my posts have been fed into pretty much every UU blog aggregator there is. And because of all this, I get commenters from time to time who begin their comments with "As a UU, you ..." or something similar.

I've decided it would be useful to set out exactly in what sense I'm a UU. I don't mean this post as a criticism of those who make a UU-centric reading of and response to what I write. But I do think there is a potential for misunderstandings if all someone knows is that, since I'm on a UU blog aggregator, I must identify as a UU. So here's "what UUism means to me":

The easiest way to begin is with biography. I was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America -- the largest and most liberal of the Lutheran bodies in the US (to be even more specific, we always ended up, for geographical reasons, in German Lutheran churches, though my mom grew up in Swedish Lutheran churches and my dad had been a Methodist). When I went off to college, I joined University Church, Colgate's ecumenical protestant church. I attended UC faithfully for all four years (minus the semester I spent in Australia), even becoming a deacon my senior year.

During my last two years at Colgate, I began drifting away from orthodox Christian belief, starting with the doctrine of Hell (I was aided in this by, of all things, a Jehovah's Witness friend). Over the summer before my senior year, I heard several people speak favorably of the Unitarians. I looked them up online, and was excited to discover the combination of a church-type social organization with a deeply open-ended and liberal theological non-doctrine. At that point I took up using the term "Unitarian" to describe my religious orientation.

Nevertheless, I didn't actually set foot in a UU church until the following summer, during an internship in DC. I attended Universalist Memorial every Sunday that summer. Then I headed to grad school. In theory, going to grad school in the heart of New England should have been the perfect way to get more involved in a UU church -- but in fact it was a 40-minute hike through downtown Worcester to get to First Unitarian. So my attendance quickly became spotty at best, and I may at some point have gone a whole year without going to one service there. (Interspersed with this was attending my hometown's Lutheran church while visiting family, occasional visits to a much more conveniently located Methodist church, and a few trips -- at the invitation of my housemate -- to a Mennonite church.) Halfway through my second summer (which I spent at another internship, this one in Dayton, OH) I discovered the Miami Valley UU church, and went there for the rest of my time in Dayton. After that I returned to Worcester for several years.

Leaving Worcester, I went to Australia again to do my dissertation fieldwork. I was a faithful attendee at St. Anthony's Uniting Church. I loved the community there, though its orthodox protestant theology (the Uniting Church was formed by a merger of Australia's Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists) didn't quite match my beliefs. Returning to the US, I moved here to Casa Grande, where there is no UU church. Going to the nearest one (40 miles away) would be both too expensive (in gas and time) and ineffective at one of the key benefits of church attendance in my book -- forming relationships with people in your local community (which is also why the Church of the Larger Fellowship wouldn't work for me). So at the moment I have no church home. I did, however, get married back at First Unitarian in Worcester -- I wanted a wedding in a church setting, and the UUs' beliefs about marriage are closer to mine and Christina's than any other church.

What all this means is that I have never been a member of a UU church, or even attended one on a regular basis for more than a few months. The culture of UUism is largely alien to me. When I occasionally look at other UU blogs that focus much more explicitly on the church, I can't really connect with what they're saying -- either about church politics, or about UUs' heritage, or about how UU practice should or should not change. This isn't a criticism of those bloggers -- those discussions are obviously important for people deeply involved in the church, and there's no reason it ought to be relevant to me given my position. But it is something that differentiates me from the typical "UU blogger."

Why, then, keep calling myself a UU? Why not "secular" or "lapsed Lutheran"? Besides the hits I get from being in various UU blog aggregators, that is. Several things.

First, it's a useful way of giving Jane Q. Public a very quick pointer in the general direction of what I believe. It signals a respect for (the potential of) religion as an institution (which is both true as well as reassuring to people who might be freaked out by outright atheism), while also indicating the extreme liberalism and non-doctrinalness of my theological views.

Second, there's the thing that drew me to the UU label (and to those churches I've managed to attend), which is what I understand the UU approach to doing religion to be (at least potentially). First and foremost, of course, is its non-doctrinalism. I like the idea that no text or authority has a metaphysically privileged status or is beyond critique, and that it's reasonable to expect some wisdom to be found nearly everywhere in the human experience (and here I would take things like the 7 Principles to be descriptive summaries of what UUs have come to believe, rather than prescriptive axioms which they must work to bring themselves into accordance with and to ground their beliefs on). Related to this is UUism's tentativeness, fallibility, and openness (between persons and over time) with respect to any question. (There's also the fact that, insofar as I'm willing to frame my beliefs in a language approximating orthodox Christianity, I would endorse the heresies of unitarianism -- one god, not a trinity -- and universalism -- nobody goes to hell.) Finally, I like that UU churches put "doing community," both among members and between the church and the wider world, prior to having all of the answers, so that practice dyamically informs the interactive (neither solitary nor collectivist) search for truth and meaning. (In other words, I see UUism as having an inductive style, whereas orthodox churches usually strive to be deductive.)

In the end, though, my beliefs and history are prior to, and the sole basis for, my affiliation with the UU church. If I ever come into conflict with what, "as a UU" I should be, then it's my ties to the UUs that must give.

The Paradox Of Change

Barack Obama is running on a platform of "Change we can believe in." Most of his backers seem to assume that change is going to happen in a progressive direction. Let's look at why that won't happen.

To even get started, we have to assume that Obama wants to change the country in a progressive direction. This, of course, is a patent falsehood. But we'll assume it for the time being.

There are two aspects of progressive change: substantive and procedural. Substantive change means things like withdrawing troops from Iraq and limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Procedural change involves change in how our government is run, most notably the excessive power claimed by the presidency over the last eight years.

Obama will have to work with a center-right Congress, not too different from the one we have now. That Congress will seek to stymie any substantively progressive measures that come through -- for example, a climate change bill would be so watered down by the time that it reaches Obama's desk that the ecological footprint of the ink he uses to sign it could well outweigh the bill's actual impacts. That means the only way he can create any real substantive change is to do an end-run around the legislative process, claiming authority as The Decider to do whatever he wants.

In other words, achieving substantive substantive change would require abandoning (or even working contrary to) procedural progressive change. And achieving procedural progressive change would destroy his ability to achieve substantive progressive change.

The Tenacity Of Rationalization

The human brain is a marvelous organ, and perhaps the thing it excels at the most is rationalization. Here's an illustration.

I read this post, about a professor so aloof he couldn't engage in small talk with his (suspiciously stereotypical) plumber. The consensus is that this refusal is a form of classisim or elitism, as the professor is effectively saying to the plumber that the plumber is so beneath the professor, his interests so gauche that the professor has gone out of his way to avoid having any common cultural reference points, that the professor can't even show him recognition as a human being rather than a pipe-fixing automoton.

My thought process went something like this:

Well, I probably wouldn't engage in much small talk with a plumber either. But it's not because I'm elitist and I think I'm better than him.

Oh really? Try me.

I don't really make small talk with anyone. It's nothing against the plumber -- I wouldn't make small talk with other academics, either.

The plumber doesn't know, or care, what you do around other academics. The issue is that you've committed an actual slight against him, a slight which, given its context, will function to reinforce class-based elitism. What you do to anyone else is beside the point.

But I'm just not good at that kind of socialization. I'm an introvert -- so where's the sympathy for how these kind of social interaction expectations disadvantage me?

Don't think about pulling that "reverse discrimination" crap. Social interaction is a learned skill -- a skill you can choose to learn, or choose to not learn because you've got something else oh-so-important to spend your time doing. If anything, being able to be introverted (not to be confused with withdrawing as a self-defense mechanism) is a privilege, not a source of disadvantage.

OK, so I won't make this all about me and my needs. But when I try to put myself in his shoes, I think that if I was a plumber, I'd want to be left alone to do my job in peace. After all, back when I was stocking shelves in the grocery store, I hated it when people tried to make small talk with me.

You say it's not going to be all about you, and yet it still is. For starters, what you would want in his position has exactly nothing to do with anything. What matters is what he wants in his position. Then there's your wank-tastic example of being a shelf stocker back in college, as if that means you're down with the hoi polloi. Take a second to think about why you hated people talking to you so much. It's not just some innocent aspect of human diversity. It's probably because you were (consciously or unconsciously) embarassed about working such a menial job.

And if I'm honest with myself, at the end of all this, if I had to have a plumber over tomorrow, I'd still end up going in the other room while he worked. And I can't be entirely sure that my italicized anti-rationalization voice isn't just rationalizing my elitism in a different, sneakier way.