When it hasn’t been your day or week or month or even your year shirt
If we instead framed systemic oppression as the deprivation of a basic right for one group, rather than granting another group a special privilege, that structures the issue in a way which builds solidarity and gets you allies. The system screws all of us have-nots. It does it in different ways to different people, but it fuck all of us, and that shouldn’t stand. The more you make that clear in a way that’s inclusive, the more people are enthused to push for the changes you also want. You can be a cis-het white man and still be mistreated by those with economic and political power, and you can also be a trans-queer black woman who has it worse. Both of those can be true. Yet what we should be focusing on are goals like strengthening labor unions and reforming the police, regardless of who is or isn’t getting fucked quite as hard. Strong labor unions can protect the rights of all workers, including female and minority workers, but also white male workers. Reforming the police makes entire communities safer, which benefits everyone. The sooner we ditch this privilege language, the When it hasn’t been your day or week or month or even your year shirt it will be to move towards what actually matters. Guilting white men just for existing doesn’t help with progressive causes, and I say that as someone who’s not even white.
Best When it hasn’t been your day or week or month or even your year shirt
Exactly. As a white male myself who grew up in a small white town, the When it hasn’t been your day or week or month or even your year shirt jerk reaction from lots of white men is “I don’t hate black people, so I can’t be racist.” The modern manifestation of racism in America is more about isolating and not caring about PoC than it is about any type of overt hatred. It’s macro things like spending tax revenue disproportionately on white communities, and deprioritizing development projects in communities that are largely black or other minorities. It’s about targeting communities like Flint to get the short end of the stick in big business deals/incentives, things that they would never do to an affluent white suburb. And it’s about the “every man for himself” mentality that is very popular in America, which results in successful privileged people blaming others for being disadvantaged rather than addressing the systemic issues.