Privilege

[bcholmes]

Oh! Yvonne Rainer's film Privilege is now available online! When I get home, I want to see if the whole film is there (but based on length, it looks like it might be).

I was just trying to Google a quotation from that film: something like "Is the best I can ever hope to be a permanently recovering racist?"

(I haven't seen it since the mid-90s. I hope I don't re-watch it and discover that it's not quite as good as I thought it was.)

Comments

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Can you explain why "permanently recovering racist" is such a bad thing? Is this one of those world view difference things?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Hm. I guess I liken it to "not being an alcoholic" rather than being a "permanently recovering alcoholic". I feel like there is a gap between those two things.

Or is there an essence to your question I'm not grokking?

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I guess part of the problem is that I'm not sure what "being a racist" and "not being a racist" are supposed to mean - we live in a racist culture; at least I personally acknowledge that as a white person who grew up in a white culture, I've absorbed a lot of automatic Otherisation of people not like myself my entire life. And while I'm now consciously aware of a lot of it, I expect I'll still be having "duh!" moments about cultural/social stuff I take completely for granted and then realise or am told is actually racist and/or white privilege, for the rest of my life.

(My most recent such incident was someone explaining that white people who try to reject mainstream culture in the form of dress - whether hippie or goth or punk or whatever - get huge white privilege in comparison to ways PoC can dress and still get taken seriously or not as a threat.)

Also, because I am white, and because I have weird personal rules about labels I can apply about myself and labels only other people can apply to me, I am not ever going to describe myself as "not a racist" and in fact, "permanently recovering racist" sounds like a really nice possibility in terms of expressing my intentions but leaving the judgement up to others.

Again, an alcoholic/ex-alcoholic can count days they haven't drunk alcohol. I can't count days in a racism-free environment because I can't even imagine what it would take to change the society around me to be such a thing. I accept the weight of history and culture (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2168/2437502710_88edeec69c_b.jpg) and the fact that that means, that as a white person, just me walking down the street and behaving normally will be more of a maintenance of the status quo than a change towards a racism-free environment.