This is a little old and I don't recommend reading the comments, but I love it nevertheless. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.
I love it because it explains "privilege" in an accessible way that conceptualizes why "but I was born (relatively) POOR and had to WORK HARD" isn't a rebuttal of the concept of privilege. And it does it by employing the term "dump stat" which is only one of the best terms ever. Seriously, I want to print this article out and hug it.
RECOMMENDS! What have you been percolating?
11 comments:
Damn that's an excellent analogy.
Percolation: I've finally managed to get started on Gothic Detective, a set of stories I'll hopefully be able to update weekly.
That said, I was so tired while writing much of the second one that it could be incoherent for all I know.
I haven't read this particular one yet (once I'm done catching up on the comments here), but you often worry about being incoherent and only once was it anywhere close to true (the one with Mothra and Godzilla, which had confusingly convoluted nested footnotes).
Thanks, but this one might have been written under equivalent tiredness to that one. I just wanted to finish and get it posted, and I was low on sleep to begin with, so as I got toward the end of writing/revising, and it was significantly later than I had intended to be awake, I was at truly epic levels of tired.
I should, of course, just look through and revise it. But there's other stuff I want to get done too so I'll probably end up letting it sit off to the side until I forget about it.
Read the book Black Images In The Comics: A Visual History, showing the evolution of black characters from horribly racist charicatures of the nineteenth century to Ultimate Spider-Man's Miles Morales. Then I blogged about it.
Scalzi's article is brilliant. Sadly, my go-to phrase lately has been 'you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into', and the article's comment thread is strong evidence in that direction. My favourite (no it isn't) is the guy who insists that straight white male privilege has already ceased to exist.
I have a recommend of someone else's material - someone inspired by Ana's decon work here, as well as the efforts of folks like Mark from MarkReads, has started doing a chapter-per-week analysis of that phenomenon of the moment, Fifty Shades of Grey. She notes that it is in more of the MarkReads style of ranting and hyperbole, but still with analytical moments as well. It is also drink-sporflingly hilarious.
The announcement is here: http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/2012/05/announcing-bad-idea.html
Chapter one post is here: http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/2012/05/50-shades-of-grey-chapter-1.html
Chapter two post is here: http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.com/2012/06/fifty-shades-of-grey-chapter-two-in.html
Also, folks should be forewarned that the main character's name is Anastasia and this usually gets shortened to 'Ana', which is weird coming directly from this site, for reasons which I assume are self-evident.
(This the blog of a local friend of mine who has lurked here at Ana's site for some months, and finally come out of hiding to comment recently as CleverNamePending. She didn't want to be all self-promotional, but I can give this undertaking a stamp of approval.)
OMG, adding that to the RSS feed NOW. Thank you for the heads-up. :D
Thanks for the reference. Bookmark get~
Also, folks should be forewarned that the main character's name is Anastasia and this usually gets shortened to 'Ana', which is weird coming directly from this site, for reasons which I assume are self-evident.
No kidding. I tried to read a short story with a protagonist named Brin a while back. Couldn't do it. Too weird. I don't know how people named Jack cope.
(Oddly, despite my given name being fairly common, I've never read a story where a major character used the particular form of it I do. Just a couple of TV shows, which is fine as it only bothers me written down.)
I had a friend in university named Mark - I brought this up one time while we were both being swamped with marking jobs as TAs, and his response was basically that hearing 'mark' used as not-his-name so often meant that he just got used to it at a very early age. I imagine it's the same for anyone with a really common name.
I tend not to get along super well with people who share either of my go-to names, for reasons that I cannot fully articulate. Possibly I instinctively suspect some kind of Highlander deal to be going on and one day we're going to have to fight to claim the other's power. (Although I notice 'Will' less often because it's only used by folks online.)
I tend not to get along super well with people who share either of my go-to names, for reasons that I cannot fully articulate. [...] (Although I notice 'Will' less often because it's only used by folks online.)
I should think that even if a smaller percentage of Wills bug you, they'd bug you more often because there's more of them. I don't know about you, but I can't name any other Trevors that aren't Neville Longbottom's pet toad.
There was a Trevor in our JW congregation. He was also a year ahead of me in school. I can't, off hand, think of any others, but I wouldn't have thought of it as a rare name. In fact, if I ever get around to writing one of those stories in my head, it's a name I might well use. (I rarely have names for characters in my head, for some reason. I try, but the names don't stick.)
TRiG.
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