I was once told that the 1940s-50s were the best era and we should go back to that. I told him that he could only say that because he was a white, middle-aged, Christian male who lived in the US. Had *I* lived in that era, being every single minority status there is (and some of my privileged statuses today would have actually been a liability back then, i.e. a college educated woman), I would have been hung or jailed just for being me. He actually stopped and blinked at me, as if it had never occurred to him that being a Hispanic atheist polyamorous deliberately unmarried and childfree woman in post-WWII might not have been the idyllic pinup world that he envisioned his own experience of it might be. It *literally* never occurred to him that other people have different experiences and that past eras were not as kind to those other people as they would be to him. That is the definition of privilege - the luxury of assuming that his own experience was universal and not needing to consider that other experiences were, not just different, but less pleasant. I dont think I changed his mind that day. But hopefully I at least produced more cognitive dissonance for him to make it more uncomfortable for him to maintain that viewpoint and require more mental gymnastics to defend it.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 18:11:54 +0000
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