Privilege Archives - Deep Green Resistance Blog

But I’m an anarchist! How can I be sexist?

“Going to Places That Scare Me: Personal Reflections on Challenging Male Supremacy”

Chris Crass, author of the book Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy, devotes one chapter to detailing his personal experience becoming aware of his own sexism and that of his fellow male activists. After accepting the reality of his privilege, he began the lifelong process of uprooting blatant and subtle manifestations within himself, challenging it within male comrades as indivduals, and helping structure activist groups to counteract sexist defaults and biases.

This is an essay for other people raised male who identify as men and who, like me, are Left/anarchist organizers with privilege struggling to build movements for collective liberation. It is written for men in the movement who have been challenged on their sexism and male privilege and are looking for support. I’m focusing here on the emotional aspects of my own experience of dealing with issues of sexism and anti-sexism.

More and more, gender-privileged men in the movement are working to challenge male supremacy. Thousands of us recognize that patriarchy exists; that we have material and psychological privileges as a result; that sexism undermines movements; that women, transgender, and genderqueer people have explained it over and over again and said “you all need to talk with each other, challenge each other, and figure out what you’re all going to do.” However, a far greater number of men in the movement agree that sexism exists in society, perhaps even in the movement, but deny their personal participation in it.

Deep Green Resistance takes very seriously the need for those with any kind of privilege to examine and disarm it within their own lives and relationships, but more importantly to use it to dismantle the larger systemic institutions that uphold that privilege. Crass’ journey touches on many important aspects of anti-sexism work, and gives an excellent entry point for men with interest in facing the problems of patriarchy. He shares personal revelations that many of us might be ashamed to admit:

Learning in a community of largely women and people of color also deeply impacted because it was the first time that I’d ever been in situations where I was a numerical minority on the basis of race or gender. Suddenly, race and gender weren’t just other issues among many, but central aspects of how others experienced and understood the world. The question I sometimes thought silently to myself – “Why do you always have to talk about race and gender?” – was flipped on its head: “How can you not think about race and gender all the time?”

The whole piece is important for men to read, as undoing sexism is a process that requires work and has no easy answers. But it’s also valuable to keep in mind concrete steps men must take to challenge male supremacy, such as these laid out by a friend of the author:

“Gender-privileged people can offer to take notes in meetings, make phone calls, find meeting locations, do childcare, make copies and other less glamorous work. They can encourage women and gender oppressed people in a group to take on roles men often dominate (e.g. strategic leadership in actions, MCing an event, media spokespeople). You can ask specific women if they want to do it, and explain why you think they would be good, as oppose to tokenizing just to get a woman to do it. Pay attention to who you listen to and check yourself on power-tripping.”

Read the entire chapter by Chris Crass: Going to Places That Scare Me: Personal Reflections on Challenging Male Supremacy.

“Politics of Reality” Book Review

Ben Cutbank / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin

The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, written by Marilyn Frye in the 1980’s, is one of the most instructive books I have read to date. The succinctness of each of her essays, which cover such fundamental topics for the feminist learner as white privilege, male supremacy, lesbianism and gay rights, and violence against women, combines with an impressive comprehensiveness that leaves the reader with little room for debate. It’s simple, but forceful, similar to, I would assert, the works of radical environmental author Derrick Jensen, and especially his two-volume book, Endgame.

In one essay, a difference between love and arrogance—two forces that, in a sense, speak to the entire battle of life against oppression—is drawn out:

The loving eye does not make the object of perception into something edible, does not try to assimilate it, does not reduce it to the size of the seer’s desire, fear and imagination, and hence does not have to simplify. It knows the complexity of the other as something which will forever present new things to be known.

The arrogant perceiver’s perception of the other’s normalcy or defectiveness is not only dead wrong, it is coercive. It manipulates the other’s perception and judgment at the root by mislabeling the unwholesome as healthy, and what is wrong as right. One judges and chooses within a framework of values — notions as to what ‘good’ and ‘good for you’ pertain to….If one has the cultural and institutional power to make the misdefinition stick, one can turn the whole other person right around to oneself by this one simple trick.

As a woman living under the rule of patriarchy, and as someone with a radical feminist analysis, Marilyn Frye is no stranger to the meaning of privilege, both in concept and practice. As one might expect, she speaks thoroughly and often about the privileges afforded to men over women. However, her analysis doesn’t stop there: those with white skin, including white women, experience a certain kind of privilege as well, because the dominant culture is both patriarchal and white supremacist. Connecting these dots is both crucial and, unfortunately, too rare. Says Frye:

In a certain way it is true that being white-skinned means that everything I do will be wrong—at least an exercise of unwarranted privilege—and I will encounter the reasonable anger of women of color at every turn. But ‘white’ also designates a political category, a sort of political fraternity. Membership in it is not in the same sense “fated” or “natural.” It can be resisted.

Members of the dominant culture must be able to mark or define the sex of human beings so that it’s clear who is to subjugated and who is to do the subjugating, who is to be exploited and who is to do the exploiting. Masculinity and femininity are concepts created and enforced by patriarchy to keep the social order running smoothly. As Marilyn Frye puts it:

I see enormous social pressure on us all to act feminine or act
masculine (and not both), so I am inclined to think that if we were to
break the habits of culture which generate that pressure, people would
not act particularly masculine or feminine.

Imagine a bird in a birdcage. The bird is confined by numerous wires that connect with each other in order to imprison the bird. If one looks at one of the wires alone, it could seem silly as to why the bird doesn’t simply fly around it to freedom. However, it takes stepping back and seeing the whole picture that is the birdcage in order to understand why the bird is trapped. This is the classic metaphor that Frye has used to describe the meaning of oppression. She goes further to give a basic definition:

Oppression is a system of interrelated barriers and forces which reduce, immobilize and mold people who belong to a certain group, and effect their subordination to another group (individually to individuals of the other group, and as a group, to that group).

In a discussion of the gay liberation movement, and the fatal mistake
of gay men often trying to embrace masculinity instead of rejecting it,
Marilyn Frye speaks to a different vision, a lesbian vision, in a line that I
believe is one of the most powerful in the book:

The general direction of lesbian feminist politics is the dismantling of
male privilege, the erasure of masculinity, and the reversal of the
rule of phallic access, replacing the rule that access is permitted
unless specifically forbidden with the rule that it is forbidden unless
specifically permitted.

This book is crucial reading for any person with the love and courage it takes to fight for a better world. While anyone would benefit from heeding the lessons that Marilyn Frye has put forth, I especially think that men need to hear this radical feminist message and begin to join women in the fight against patriarchy and for the liberation of all of life.

Are You a 'Good White Person?'

Having been raised in a culture predicated on racism and vilification of the “other”, we have all internalized a racist perspective. Relationships across lines of difference often fall prey to power dynamics reinforced by this perspective. The proliferation of “good white people” has not made the situation any better. In fact, as argued in this blog post, they may have made it worse.

Excerpt:

If you’re a POC [person of color], you probably know at least one of these Good White People! If you’re white and reading my blog, maybe you are one; a well intentioned whitey. You’re ‘on my side’, right? You figured out racism is ‘bad’ so now you’ve joined the fight against racism! Maybe you work in a social enterprise, for a charity, with refugees, or Indigenous people, or in the multi-cultural arts. You’re proud of yourself for your many years of human rights work. You’ve claimed your anti-racist identity, you have friends and maybe even lovers who are people of colour, so how could you possibly be racist?

How could you NOT be racist? We have been raised in a white supremacy and we have all internalised racism. We are all racist.

I don’t have the emotional or political energy for friends and acquaintances who express that they are hurt and offended that I’ve inferred that they are racist by critiquing their behaviour or by simply withdrawing from their company. I know that it hurts to feel admonished or abandoned, but this is not comparable or relevant to the hurt and betrayal I feel by people who have tried to contextualise the racist behaviours I experience in terms of the person who has enacted racism’s ignorance, insecurities, or good intentions (which are factors in their behaviour, but don’t alter my experience of their behaviour as racism). This justification de-validates my experience, and though I remind myself that friends are well intentioned in trying to comfort me by convincing me that I needn’t feel bad because nobody meant any harm, they are silencing me as a person of colour, re-centering the experience around whiteness, and being complicit in white supremacy. In contrast, I emphasise how empowering it has been to share experiences of racism and have my anger and sense of alienation validated by others. This has been infinitely more ‘comforting’ than the friends who have had a ‘Don’t worry about it’ attitude. That’s their privilege not to worry about something that permeates all aspects of my daily, lived experience.

Excerpted from an article at harshbrowns.wordpress.com