sex, art, and politics

Ironically, there is a certain privilege conferred on white/male/well off/heterosexual people just by TALKING about our privilege. We get lotsa cred for it. As if it were such a huge and momentous thing to acknowledge something that shapes our entire existence. When white people talk about privilege, they get the spotlight. It enacts the same power dynamic that our politicized spaces claim to oppose. The fact that people can treat “dealing with your privilege” as if it were some kind of burden - some kind of OPPRESSION - is pretty absurd and insulting to people actually dealing with being on the bottom end of structural violence. No wonder so many activists of color are sick of hearing white kids gripe about “dealing with their privilege.” Serious questions of intent need to be raised. Are we talking about this stuff because we actually want to deal with it or are we talking about it because we want our cultural sensitivity to be validated? Do we just want to prove to ourselves that we are not racist?