Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

In some ways, terms like racism and sexism are also misleading: they fail to bring to hght the fact that in every instance of oppression, there is a privileged group as well

as a targeted one. In using such language, we can overlook the role we play in these undermining Oppression systems of oppression. Racism sounds like a mere matter of prejudice and ignorance, 563

but the problem is deeper than this: it is the centralit)^ of whiteness in our culture, which is better described by a term such as white supremacy. Modem white supremacy is a long-standing, institutionally perpetuated system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color. White people and nations tyrannize others in order to maintain and defend a system of wealth, power, and privilege. By using language that indicates this, we can identify clearly where privilege resides and what is actually at stake.

Identity Western culture reUes upon binary logic to classify things and people. From childhood, we learn oppositions like day/night, good/bad, boy/girl, and understand each word to have meaning only in relation to its opposite. Good means the complete absence of bad things, boy means the complete absence of girl things: boys are taught to be boys in large part by being discouraged from all behaviors deemed girlish. As we grow, we learn the many dualisms that frame the ways we see ourselves: feminine/masculine, homosexual/heterosexual, immigrant/native, children/adults, elderly/youthful, trans-gender/gender normative, color/white.

These dualisms contribute to a conception of the world that is oversimplified, even outright false. Not one of us embodies the extiemes they define. All the same, we attempt to fit into the rigid boxes these words outUne, so we can find words to describe who we are and live up to the words that describe what is worth being. In the process, we construct our individual identities, our sense of self, the defining of which then creates another binary; the I/other dichotomy. In rigidly defining who we are, we cast everything else as not like us, as other.

Just as each of us has an individual 1, our society has a cultural I. The cultural I ptu-

Undermining Oppression P°^^ ^° represent the most prevalent social experience, even though the perspective it

564 presents is actually that of a small minority, if of anyone at all The cultural I is white,

male, able-bodied, heterosexual, and every other characteristic defined as "normal," and is coded into our society through a variety of visual and linguistic cues: the faces we see overwhelmingly in mass media, the implicit meanings in words like history and mankind. The cultural I can be recognized in what is not said, but assumed: philosophy means Western philosophy, history means US history. The assumptions that some people don't have accents, that only non-white communities are ethnic groups, these are both evidence of the cultural I at work; the same goes for the habit of referring to non-whites, women, and other demographics as "minorities," despite the obvious fact that they comprise the majority of the population. The halves of the binaries which are normalized in this way come to be taken for granted as standard?even if, like the blonde actresses in Mexican soap operas, they are extremely uncommon?and we only specify aspects of people's identities when they deviate from the norm.

Whether they wish it or not, members of dominant social groups possess unfair advantages over members of less privileged groups. Privilege depends on the existence of hierarchy: an imbalance of power extending throughout society, providing some demographics with more resources, leverage, and comfort than others. The workings of hierarchy are justified by supremacist thinking, such as the idea that some groups are harder working, better equipped, or more deserving than others; they also are obscured by the obliviousness that comes of identifying with the cultural I. Privilege can be practically invisible to those who have it; it is often painfully obvious to those who do not.

Social dynamics are never so simple that people can be divided easily into oppressors and oppressed, however. Any individual may partake of privilege in one situation, and suffer its absence in another. It makes more sense to focus on the ways some benefit and others suffer in regard to specific criteria, with an eye to following

Privilege

Undermin'mg Oppression 565