My understanding of privilege in this context is that you don't belong to a group that experiences some kind of discrimination.
That was also my understanding. However... that doesn't quite work for me. I'll try to show you in one or two fictional examples (because thank God I didn't have this happening to me yet but I also know that it's not impossible):
Example #1: Berlin has a few neighborhoods where the majority of the inhabitants are Turkish or of Turkish descend. It’s possible for a German w/o migration background to walk through those neighborhoods and get insulted with for example getting told that "German girls have much loser morals than Turkish girls" both by men and women. So when a woman of Turkish descends tells me that… no, I don't want to go through a list of privileges and non-privileges first... I want to call it what it is: racism.
Example #2: A lot of neo-Nazis are from non-privileged backgrounds: working class, families who have been living off social welfare for years... When one of them starts bitching about the damn Turks, I don't want to think about privileges and non-privileges (because, as a middle class kid, I am much more educated and thus privileged than they are)... I want to call them what they are: stupid racist assholes that have learned nothing from history.
(and here I’d wanted to answer the burqa thing but you know, 4300 chars max and all that… do you want me to specifically answer this as well?)
I do sort of wonder if the difference in perspective lies in how our two countries dealt with their acts of atrocity.
I think you're right with that. In Germany, we aren't taught that we are privileged (b/c how can you tell a class that's 90% kids w/ migration background who don't even speak German properly that they're privileged?) and have to be conscious of it.
We're taught that persecuting and killing people just b/c they're different is bad b/c it led to 55 millions dead after 6 years of war and 12 years of industrialized mass murder. We're taught that the most important thing to remember is that we're all humans and that racism, sexism etc. develop out of fear of the “other”.
I gather this is because we learned that the easiest way to persecute and kill all different kinds of people is to dehumanize them and make people afraid of them, like the Nazis dehumanized and made people afraid of the Jews, homosexuals, communists, people with disabilities... We're taught "Nie wieder Faschismus, nie wieder Krieg.", not "Examine where you're privileged and how recognizing those privileges can help you to see the other's point of view."
It seems that your preference is not to discuss these problems. I'm hoping this isn't the case.
No, it isn't. We just have a different way to talk about it. When s/o is being racist, like bitching about the "Ausländerkriminalität" ("non-German crime rate") people will rather call them on it with "Look at the statistics and you'll see that you're wrong. Most of those "criminals" are people applying for asylum that didn't remember to stay in the county they're supposed to stay and that rule is stupid anyway. You wouldn't like that either.” than "You're a German w/o a migration background. That makes you privileged which is why you haven't been able to see until now that making people applying for asylum for political or economical reasons stay in one county is unfair and stupid. Try to see it from their point of view."
I also apologize if any of this has come off as patronizing.
You didn't. I never realized how not prosecuting the people responsible for the Civil War has shaped your country and that this influence is still enduring. It does make a few things clearer now. However... I think that just because we come from different traditions and look at things a different way, it doesn't make either discourse less legitimate than the other.
Rest assured that we all agree that sexism is bad, that racism needs to stop, that people shouldn't be discriminated because of their sexual orientation, their gender, their ethnic background... we just use different ways to identify discrimination (even though we come to the same conclusion in the end) and to realize when we ourselves fell victim to stereotypes.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 02:43 pm (UTC)That was also my understanding. However... that doesn't quite work for me. I'll try to show you in one or two fictional examples (because thank God I didn't have this happening to me yet but I also know that it's not impossible):
Example #1: Berlin has a few neighborhoods where the majority of the inhabitants are Turkish or of Turkish descend. It’s possible for a German w/o migration background to walk through those neighborhoods and get insulted with for example getting told that "German girls have much loser morals than Turkish girls" both by men and women. So when a woman of Turkish descends tells me that… no, I don't want to go through a list of privileges and non-privileges first... I want to call it what it is: racism.
Example #2: A lot of neo-Nazis are from non-privileged backgrounds: working class, families who have been living off social welfare for years... When one of them starts bitching about the damn Turks, I don't want to think about privileges and non-privileges (because, as a middle class kid, I am much more educated and thus privileged than they are)... I want to call them what they are: stupid racist assholes that have learned nothing from history.
(and here I’d wanted to answer the burqa thing but you know, 4300 chars max and all that… do you want me to specifically answer this as well?)
I do sort of wonder if the difference in perspective lies in how our two countries dealt with their acts of atrocity.
I think you're right with that. In Germany, we aren't taught that we are privileged (b/c how can you tell a class that's 90% kids w/ migration background who don't even speak German properly that they're privileged?) and have to be conscious of it.
We're taught that persecuting and killing people just b/c they're different is bad b/c it led to 55 millions dead after 6 years of war and 12 years of industrialized mass murder. We're taught that the most important thing to remember is that we're all humans and that racism, sexism etc. develop out of fear of the “other”.
I gather this is because we learned that the easiest way to persecute and kill all different kinds of people is to dehumanize them and make people afraid of them, like the Nazis dehumanized and made people afraid of the Jews, homosexuals, communists, people with disabilities... We're taught "Nie wieder Faschismus, nie wieder Krieg.", not "Examine where you're privileged and how recognizing those privileges can help you to see the other's point of view."
It seems that your preference is not to discuss these problems. I'm hoping this isn't the case.
No, it isn't. We just have a different way to talk about it. When s/o is being racist, like bitching about the "Ausländerkriminalität" ("non-German crime rate") people will rather call them on it with "Look at the statistics and you'll see that you're wrong. Most of those "criminals" are people applying for asylum that didn't remember to stay in the county they're supposed to stay and that rule is stupid anyway. You wouldn't like that either.” than "You're a German w/o a migration background. That makes you privileged which is why you haven't been able to see until now that making people applying for asylum for political or economical reasons stay in one county is unfair and stupid. Try to see it from their point of view."
I also apologize if any of this has come off as patronizing.
You didn't. I never realized how not prosecuting the people responsible for the Civil War has shaped your country and that this influence is still enduring. It does make a few things clearer now. However... I think that just because we come from different traditions and look at things a different way, it doesn't make either discourse less legitimate than the other.
Rest assured that we all agree that sexism is bad, that racism needs to stop, that people shouldn't be discriminated because of their sexual orientation, their gender, their ethnic background... we just use different ways to identify discrimination (even though we come to the same conclusion in the end) and to realize when we ourselves fell victim to stereotypes.