hlwiley asked me in a recent comment whether I thought were any useful analogies to be made in the -isms spaces. I responded that while I thought in general, analogies are really sticky and tricky and dangerous things, I would think about it and get back to it.

Here’s my attempt at starting the conversation.

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In which I shall attempt to explain how I think entitlement/privilege is related to docentry/tokenism, reverse racism and how I think you can use your entitlement/privilege for good.

Updated: To try to clarify a bit.

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After a particularly good talk with H, I have a lot to say. I want to break it down and talk about it in chunks both from the point of view of not knowing exactly how much energy I’ll have tonight to do it and also from the point of view of being able to manage any ensuing discussion.

First, let me talk about my posting, as a reminder for regular readers and for those who’ve missed previous discussion.

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Idea totally ripped off from Gary Dauphin’s Should I use blackface in my blog? flowchart. I find Visio a lot easier to work with, though it doesn’t allow any sort of easy image mapping in HTML that I can tell. More tinkering is clearly needed.

Meanwhile, I present for your enjoyment an examination of how fraught it is to compare one group’s sufferings or civil rights to another as a rhetorical ploy. Any well-intended feedback is appreciated.

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Feel free to join in, if you like.

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I got an e-mail last night that got me thinking. It was from someone who’d taken exception to the language I used in my latest “Dear White People…” post. At issue were many interrelated things, but one primary concern expressed to me was my choice of the pronoun “you” when I spoke to and about white people. One point brought home to me was that at least this person in specific felt like those “you” pronouns were calling em out to speak on behalf of all white people.

I want to say a little bit about both language and rhetoric in my essays as well as my feelings about my allies, and finally touch a little on tokenizing and being tokenized (i.e. being called upon to speak for a group either in a formal or an informal capacity).

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It seems to me that this kind of system could be used for other -isms aside from sizeism, but the folks over at Big Fat Blog have a new scoring system for blog entries and other Internet sources that support reader comments. The scoring system is based on both the tenor of the original article/post/entry as well as on how long it takes for an -ism comment to show up.

Obviously the scoring system presupposes that both the scorer and the scorer’s audience have the same sort of sense of what’s pro- and anti- to whatever cause you’re talking about, but I think it is helpful to overall civil rights movements that are based on rhetoric to have a shorthand for talking about the rhetoric of the opposing side(s) when talking about those sides.

Here’s the post, and also the comment that really gives specifics on the scoring system.

In other news, my WordPress blogging host is being really slow and laggy, and I can’t honestly tell if it’s the network set up at work, or that the host is effed up. It was working fine yesterday, though, unless my time sense was a lot more screwed up from having food poisoning than I thought.

This is a great read (from crayonbeam), which she didn’t comment much about, but which I see as a treasury of examples of privilege and entitlement, examined and unexamined, and it’s in the framework of gender, so it may be easier to take in than the scary jungles of race-related issues.

Har.

I’m copying/pasting the entirety of my answer here because sometimes comments are deleted from Ask Metafilter if they’re deemed “off-topic” by the moderators.

Anyhow, the original question is here. Essentially this straight white guy read “Unpacking the Invisible Backpack” and is looking for more resources to self-educate, having had eyes open a bit.

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