I get where you are coming from because I use to believe this too. However, the principles of what you are saying are not compatible with equality, individualism, and liberty. And I know that may sound extreme but the ideas you are implying are extreme and toxic.
To be clear, you are saying that is if you are white, male, cis gendered, and from the west you are priviledged and an active oppressor of people who are not in those groups.
And that brings us to the first issue I have with that is that it focuses on group identity over individualism. Anybody who advocates for group identity focuses on what you are and not who you are.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
What you are saying takes the EXACT OPPOSITE approach of what MLK Jr. talked about in his famous speech.
By what you’re saying, the world is not made up of individuals with their own skills and faults and their own backstories and their own struggles that are specific to their own situations. Instead, society is made up of distinct groups and in one group you have the oppressors and in another you have the oppressed.
Men oppress women. Straight people oppress gay people. Cis gendered people oppress trans people. White people oppress non-white people. Able-bodied people oppress disabled people. Native populations oppress immigrants.
Essentially, this focus on labels is that it lends itself extremely well to identity politics. I’m not a fan of identity politics.
Identity politics tell us that different groups have different interests, which I just don’t think is true.
I think it’s safe to say all people, no matter who they are, want equality and liberty and opprotunities for themselves. That doesn’t change based on somone’s skin color or genitalia.
Most importantly, and worryingly, what you are saying and what identity politics also says allows for the beliefs that groups are responsible for the actions of individuals within those groups. This is where the logic may come from that all white people are responsible for slavery, even though no one in the west who is white and alive today owned a slave. And that all straight people are responsible for marginalizing gay people. (Whether they actually do or don’t as individuals is irrelevant because those individuals don’t make up all straight people as a whole).
I am not a fan of being blamed for actions that are not my own, nor am I a fan of people assuming my interests based on what I look like. So no, I’m really not into this whole group label thing.
This leads me to my second issue of what you said, is that you’re focusing on justice over equality.
I want to be perfectly clear that I’m not against justice. I think a justice system is extremely important for a society to function.
However, when the concept of justice is applied to group identities it can be problematic.
“The maintenance or administration of what is just especially by the impartial adjustment of conflicting claims or the assignment of merited rewards or punishments.” - definition of justice
And here in lies the problem of justice over equality. For example, affirmative action groups reward miniority members and, because they don’t qualify for it, punishes majority members. Diversity initiatives rewards those who are “diverse” while overlooking those who aren’t. Any social justice initiatives that are designed to benefit groups like women or the LBGT+ community, by definition, specifically exclude those who aren’t in those groups.
I find it extremely wrong to favor or disfavor people based on their gender, race, religion, etc. and I know you do too because that’s essentially what you said! You believe that these miniority groups that you talked about are being excluded, but your logic is flawed in that you want to exclude the supposed “oppressor” groups to make things fair and balanced in your worldview.
The problem with your logic, is that justice, i.e. rewards and punishments, can NEVER lead to equality. These are two opposing ideas.
Either people are equal and we treat them the same way regardless of their skin color, orientation, or gender or we try to hold groups accountable for percieved wrongs they have committed in the past. Trying to artifically prop up members of the miniority group while trying to artifically push down members of the majority group goes completely against the concept of equality by you not treating these groups equally.
Either you have initiatives where you pigeon hole people for being black, white, gay, or straight attempting to correct for for percieved injustices or you treat everyone the same and with human decency. Those are two very different concepts and yet we have to pick one or the other.
And to wrap up, since I’m strongly against identity politics and very much for treating everyone equally I think you can see where I lie on that spectrum. I want to be a teacher when I finish college and I’m not going to let a black child bully a white child (or vice versa) just because the black child is in an “oppressed” group. It’s bullying either way you hash it out and I won’t stand for ANYONE doing that.
And while the person I called out in a past post may or may not have been “just joking” they do it a lot and believe they can get away with it. They start drama and call people racist, even though there was no indication of those people being racist, and I was sick of seeing that type of negativity on my dash and I wanted that person out of my life completely.
I understand if what I said you end up not agreeing with, but I hope you could hear me out and my reasoning just as I did yours. You can take this information however you want. You can unfollow me (if you are), block me, etc. my feelings won’t be hurt. Or you can digest what I said and maybe resonate it into your day-to-day life someday and know that just because you are white that doesn’t account for WHO you are as an individual at all.
