There’s a myth being marketed – though I’m skeptical that anyone’s buying it – that those of us who are unjustly privileged able-bodied cisgendered white male settler-colonialists are uncomfortable talking about the unjust privilege of being able-bodied cisgendered white male settler-colonialists. That we’re not buying it is not because we think we’re not unjustly privileged in our able-bodied cisgendered white male settler-colonialism. It’s that privilege, just or not, is by definition comfortable. If it were uncomfortable it wouldn’t be privilege. Well duh!
The people who are pushing this nonsense are hoping that, by pointing our comfort out to us, they can replace this comfort with some kind of discomfort. But it’s not clear to me how they think this is supposed to work.
Speaking of work, apparently they’re encouraging us to do (something they’re calling) The Work. As near as I can tell, they take this notion from what people need to do to repair their marriage. Though usually, by the time they go for marriage counselling, it’s just the downpayment on what’s going to prove a very expensive divorce. And so by parity of reasoning, doing The Work is just the precursor, as it was for me, to fully appreciating one’s privilege and becoming perfectly comfortable crowing about it.
So I guess what I find baffling is, How stupid must these people think we must be? Come to think of it, didn’t Nietzsche write about the weak inveigling the strong to turn their strength against themselves? He thought it worked, producing Judaism and then Christianity. So yes, it does have something of a track record. Except that Nietzsche was whistleblowing on the ploy, not celebrating it, and now too many of the unjustly privileged able-bodied cisgendered white male settler-colonialists have read Nietzsche.
Well, I guess literacy isn’t always a blessing.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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