Letters to the Editor
vagueabond
Published Letters: 5
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Who's in charge of deciding how privilege is supposed to feel?
[Read the article: Killer reflection]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Paul in KY:
"Any white male who claims he is being discriminated against & society has it in for him, etc. etc. is by definition a whining pussy crybaby."
I agree with Emily.
I don't know how it can be possible to claim that it's racist to refer to African-American's as "you people" or to make blanket statements about them as a group, while at the same time announcing what the definitive young white male experience is with such authority.
Everyone, everywhere, lives complex and confusing lives, permeated by all sorts of conflicting messages from piece-meal cultural influences. No one likes being generalized about or condescended to. (And yes, I know I'm generalizing here =))
IF you want to say "Your lot is so much better than that of (insert contrasting group here), whatever hurts your feelings doesn't matter, pussy - man up", then all I can say is, by that logic, given how much better off on average everyone in America is compared to developing countries, no one within American borders has any right at all to complain about anything ever, the bunch of pussies... right?
Most recent studies I've seen about isolation and dissatisfaction seem to indicate that the happiness people feel is strongly correlated to 1) their perception of their wealth, success, opportunities, and social standing relative to people they consider their peers or competition and 2) the strength of their support networks, families, sports teams, and other (hopefully) stabilizing groups in their lives. That's one model of the human psychology of happiness (or, conversely, isolation). If you think that model has any merit, clearly there is space for "privileged" people to be painfully miserable.
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Candypants:
[Read the article: Killer reflection]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Young white males are not marginalized. They don't have to be ashamed of their feelings, but nor should such feelings be vindicated. This whole marginalized white male thing is psychological fall out from recent advances in civil rights."
I agree that it is unhelpful for young white males to buy the story repeated so vigorously on right wing talk radio that white males literally have it worse than other marginalized groups along race and gender lines now. That's a really unfortunate kind of propaganda.
With that said, though, I also think that confining discussions of marginalization to the holy trinity of race-class-gender is exactly the sort of unnuanced paradigm that perpetuates these deeply unhappy, occasionally deadly kids. There are many ways to feel marginalized, many ways to feel isolated, and many ways to be absolutely miserable. Responding to someone's unhappiness by announcing that it's not a valid or reasonable type of unhappiness seems unhelpful and, honestly, pretty cruel. The whole problem here is kids feeling isolated and misunderstood - announcing that they are having socially unjustified emotional reactions seems like the best way to confirm their fears.
So let me ask this - take an upper-middle class white 14 year old boy who is socially awkward and raging with baffling hormones, at the bottom of the social pecking order of his class at school, interested but ashamed by all the geeky, socially unacceptable things that he likes, fixated on all the girls who find him repulsive, occasionally bullied but much more often persistently aware of the threat hanging over his head that the popular, athletic boys in his class could beat the hell out of him if they wanted to, governed by parents who care but are often distant or busy with work and superficial in their attempts to understand what's upsetting him, barraged with conflicting and confusing messages about masculinity and feminism and race and opportunity... can you quantifiably _prove_ that the hurt and misery felt by this hypothetical boy is dwarfed by those of any other race-class-gender combination you can concoct?
It's well and good to whip out the normative and declare what people _should_ feel, given their overall social situation relative to every human being who has ever lived, and I suppose if we were all really Marxist economic robots who had perfect information about the world and no emotions we might very well do so, but people aren't happy or sad or isolated because they should be. They feel what they feel... and sometimes those feelings, earned or not, make them hurt other people. At least from my perspective, trying to understand those feelings without first judging them has to be the first step in defusing them.