bravura and privilege

[badgerbag]

What was percolating yesterday in my post was something I know, but most of the time I get to ignore. It's that I get a lot of props for a sort of bravura that is real, but that is fueled by, that works through, mostly by various kinds of privilege that I have, and that won't always be there and that won't always work and that are a result of luck or arbitrary conditions, not things under my control. It is not that I was angry at that specific bus driver. And it is not that we shouldn't speak up or resist power and authority and social injustice whenever we see it, in a big or a small situation. It is that those tools I used Don't Work unless you are me. (I take credit for all the bits of what I do that are awesome, also. I could be me and still not have the will to resist or the knowledge of how to.) When they stop working for me (and I can think of many reasons why a bunch of those tools will stop working) I may not have the political tools, the political organization, that's necessary to fight. So I need to look to that and think harder about what I should be doing and how I should be living my life. Feedback on this thought is welcome.

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Hmmmm. One of the reasons I hang out online is that a lot of the tools and workarounds I'd been using since oh 1970, which mostly worked because I was exploiting exceptions to various conditions and weirdnesses, stopped working. I should never have looked down after running past the edge of that cliff...

So. Developing political ju-jitsu (so to speak) is an excellent idea. Implementing it is what has to be done. Especially since some of the political tools have gotten rusty from disuse.

[mecurtin]

I can offer no advice at the moment, because you are one of the people who first comes to mind when I think "real-life female superheroes".

[wild_irises]

It seems to me, on first thinking about this, that any tools we have that work only because we are us are tools of privilege, and of American individuality and exceptionalism.

In the long run, I suspect that the only tools that work are tools of combined (or mass) effort, tools that exploit the variety of who we are, not what makes any one of us special.

There's lots more here, but that might be a useful first cut.

[xuli]

Dealing with access issues currently requires heroism; getting a good outcome takes way to much skill and/or privilege. It shouldn't be an individual thing. Collective action should be a lot easier; it should be possible to report and then assemble and visualize all of the complaints about asshole drivers, busted elevators, locked doors, missing curb cuts, etc. etc. etc. That is one piece of what is missing.

[badgerbag]

It is! I have begun taking photos of the bus numbers, and taking notes. The form to report problems is ridiculously complicated.

[xuli]

a tumblr?

the awesome thing would be a form with some structured fields where you could report the location and specifically what's wrong.

the awesomest thing would be a gizmo that also could post to a city or agency's back end 311 system. Perfect for SF, Oakland, or Palo Alto civic hackathon.

[metaphortunate]

Yeah. It is scary to lean on stuff that you know could be taken away from you at any second.