Tag Archive for: privilege

Pandemic, Protests, and Privilege

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By AB Plum

Paraphrasing E.L. Doctorow, “Writing is a socially
acceptable form of committing murder.”

I’ve been killing a lot of characters this past month.

Not because the pandemic has demanded much of a change
in my life. I, basically, lead a life of privilege. I think killing “the bad
guys” is my way of venting frustration about the handling of the pandemic fueled by institutional racism.

Food, good, fresh food,
appears on my table nightly. The house where I live provides more than adequate
shelter. Walking daily remains part of my routine. I am white, well educated,
and healthy (except for a heart condition that puts me in the “Higher Risk” COVID-19 category). One risk I don’t have to deal with: 
living in constant fear of the police.

I like to think I’m smart enough to be grateful for my
lot in life and to be sensitive to so many others less fortunate. (It sounds
self-serving, but I grew up poor as dirt and have never forgotten my deep roots
in poverty).

Unconsciously, I write about flawed characters who
often are well-to-do. Many of them, though, have memories of being poor,
disenfranchised, ill, mentally incapacitated, and marginalized because of race
and/or gender.

In my Ryn Davis Mystery
Series, she runs a safe house for former prostitutes. With Hispanic surnames,
little education, less money, and children with absentee fathers, these women
are struggling to learn computer skills that will give them better chances to map
out independent lives and to protect their children. None of them has ever met un policia they trusted.

Beau “Peep” Scott earned millions as a drummer in The
Stoned Gang. The rock group’s name is apt since Beau burned too many gray cells
to take care of his fortune. His parents were drug addicts who neglected him,
and he deals daily with people’s sneers about his intellect. He adores Ryn and
may be the only man she trusts completely.

Elijah White, former Stanford law school and business grad,
successful corporate attorney, and the oldest of five siblings, now runs his
own PI business in Southern California. He remembers going to bed hungry. His
father was shot and killed by a cop.

Angie, a former Ph.D. candidate in biology and the
abused, runaway wife of a Silicon Valley tycoon, is about to hang out her shingle
as a vet for the homeless. She lived on the streets when she met Ryn. She
shares an affinity with Elijah and Beau for 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles. She
also understands classism from the perspective of a trophy wife to a toothless
bag lady.

These are a few of my regular characters in the series.
I’ve not killed any of them and don’t see that happening in the next book at
least. Instead, I look forward to exploring greed, lust, and power as the
primary reason for murder—and maybe for most of society’s woes.


***  AB Plum
lives, walks, and writes in the heart of Silicon Valley. No Little Lies, her third book in the Ryn Davis Mystery Series hits
Amazon on July 6. Preorder here.  
























Radical Self Love and Pride

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by J.M. Phillippe

I first became an activist in 2008, when, on the night of Barack Obama’s historic win of the presidential election, Proposition 8 passed in California, my home state, voters declaring that same-sex couples shouldn’t have the right to marry. I happened to be watching the results with a good friend and her girlfriend, on the day of my friend’s birthday. Her tears moved me to action, and when she looked for ways to get involved and protest Prop 8, I went with her.

That was also the first year I went to the Pride Parade in Los Angeles. It was the first time I became fully aware of the multitude of rights LGBTQ folks were being denied because of the bigotry of others. And it was the first time I understood what an ally was — and started the long process of learning to be one while confronting my own privilege.

A lot has changed for me since 2008, including earning a masters degree in social work, and working in the field for almost five years post-graduation. My understanding of privilege and being an ally has continued to evolve. It has not been an easy process, and in fact, I often find myself frustrated both with the multitude of battles for equality that still need to be fought, and the various ways I have, both specifically and generically as a white woman, been called out. I am reminded daily that I need to  be called out in order to grow — and that it is up to me to work through my frustration in order to be an effective ally.

June is Pride month in many places across the US, including NY (where I am now). It has also been a very challenging month. It was the one-month anniversary of the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. It had the devastating results of the case against the officer who shot and killed Philando Castile (acquittal). It was yet another month full of terrorist attacks against Muslims, both here in the US and abroad. My social media feeds continue to be filled with heartbreaking story after story. Most of us are still reeling from the reality of living in a post-Trump world, and all the hatred that has emerged with it.
I am back to wondering what it is to be an ally, and what it means to make space for pride in my life, not just as someone who feels more queer than straight (though isn’t sure how to identify as queer without a strict label to go with it), but as someone who constantly spends time with others who take pride in the very identities that they are prosecuted and attacked for. Pride is a radical act of defiance in the face of oppression. Pride is about daring to celebrate, even in the midst of all the reasons to mourn. Pride is about radical self-love, and radically loving others.
So I am sharing with folks several websites that have become my go-to spaces for helping me grow as an ally, and celebrate the concept of radical love and pride all year long:
The Body is Not an Apology: founded by Sonya Renee Taylor, the mission of the website is to “foster global, radical, unapologetic self love which translates to radical human love and action in service toward a more just, equitable and compassionate world.”
Everyday Feminism: founded by Sandra Kim, the mission is “to help people dismantle everyday violence, discrimination, and marginalization through applied intersectional feminism and to create a world where self-determination and loving communities are social norms through compassionate activism.”
Wear Your Voice Magazine: is an intersectional feminist magazine “run by women and femmes of color who are trying to make more room for marginalized voices away from the white, cis-centric, heteronormative, patriarchal gaze.” 
PEN America: part of PEN International, it is an community that works together to “ensure that people everywhere have the freedom to create literature, to convey information and ideas, to express their views, and to make it possible for everyone to access the views, ideas, and literatures of others” with a specific focus on “the intersection of literature and human rights.”
And finally:
Pajiba: a community of movie and pop culture reviewers and commenters that is my favorite corner of the Internet, and who I have been reading for so long, I have added all the writers as social media friends because I feel like I know them that well. Radical self-love is also about connecting with community, and I have been part of this online community (if often as a lurker) for as long as I can remember. 
***
J.M. Phillippe is the author of Perfect Likeness and the short story The Sight. She has lived in the deserts of California, the suburbs of Seattle, and the mad rush of New York City. She works as a family therapist in Brooklyn, New York and spends her free-time decorating her tiny apartment to her cat Oscar Wilde’s liking, drinking cider at her favorite British-style pub, and training to be the next Karate Kid, one wax-on at a time.

Relatively Speaking

/in /by
by J.M. Phillippe
I have been thinking a lot about relative experience.
“Relatively speaking” is a phrase we toss around casually,
an improvised rescaling of any given comparison. Hidden in the phrase is an
acknowledgement that the scale of comparison has been significantly reduced to
include a limited range of possible experiences or perceptions of reality, and
that range is defined by a supposedly shared context—both speaker and audience
must acknowledge some general truths about the things being compared.  But it can also be a catch all, a brief
acknowledgement that the context is not the same from one person to the next,
that “the worst day ever!” in one life cannot be appropriately compared to the
“worst day ever!” in another.
In my relatively limited (there’s that word
again!) understanding of economics, I am able to grasp at least this concept:
an apple does not cost the same to everyone who buys it. While the price of the
apple may be fixed, the cost of that apple relative to the income of the
individual buying it is not. Things can get more complicated when you don’t
just compare income (we each make the same amount of money, so the apple should
cost the same to both of us) but expenses as well: if we each make the same
income, but your rent is higher than mine, that apple will be a greater
percentage of your food allowance than it will be of mine. In that way, the
apple could relatively cost you more. 
This sort of relative cost idea can be translated to
experience as well, so that any given experience can cost or benefit any
individual relative to the other experiences in their life — everything needs
context. A fender bender on a day where everything else is going well most
likely won’t be perceived as negatively as if it happened on a day when several
things seem to be going wrong. However, the context that a person operates in
is not daily, but cumulative: even if nothing else is going wrong today, things
have been going wrong all week, all month, all year, for the past decade. Any
new experience is measured against previous experiences in order to determine
its particular impact, positive or negative.
And yet, “nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Without this comparison, any given experience could theoretically stand on its
own. It wouldn’t be good or bad, relatively speaking, but simply good or bad,
inherently. Or, in what I imagine as Buddhist thinking, neither good nor bad,
but simply existing, ideally without impact, without contributing to some
greater context, acknowledged and let go. If we could escape our contexts,
maybe we could escape relative thinking. In theory, that is how to escape
suffering.
Except an apple doesn’t cost the same to everyone.
“Expensive” is a relative concept. So is safe, and healthy, and successful, and
all the things we end up having to measure for ourselves, individually. I read
in Loneliness (Cacioppo and Patrick, 2008) that people even have a biological
set point for their need for social connection, varying from one person to
another. Even our biology forces relativity on us.
So we seek out contexts similar to our own, or as close as
possible. We look for people with similar experiences, similar perspectives,
similar measurement scales. This is how I make sense of a world where otherwise nice-seeming people don’t seem to grasp the pain and suffering of others. Their experiences are so far removed from those different than them that they have no reference point of comparison. For example, a white person living in an all-white community may not have had any direct experience with seeing a friend or loved one deal with racism and have trouble believing either that it exists or that it is as systemic as it is. It’s the way that many men don’t seem to get sexism until it impacts their daughters. If we are all stuck comparing everyone else’s experiences to our own, relatively speaking, we all start to think that apples cost the same to everyone, and that other people are just complaining for no reason — or are incapable of understanding the true value of an apple. It takes concerted effort to try to see the world through someone else’s lens, and to understand how their cumulative experiences shape any given moment in their lives, to understand, for example, the anger that seems to come out of nowhere but is for that person the result of the straw that broke the camels back. 

Our internal scales can be powerful forces. But we can change those scales, and alter what we
measure all of our experiences against; change the thinking, change the
comparison, build compassion. In the meantime, if we resize our experiences, as
Munroe said, to fit the scales in our head, it might be worth noting that other people have their own scales, too. And that we can’t erase someone else’s experiences just because we have no reference point to compare them to. We’re not all buying the same apples with the same money, and we aren’t all carrying the same straws on our backs. For those of us with privilege, the apples are always going to cost a little less, and we’re going to start off with less straws to carry. For those without relative privilege, apples will always cost more, and their camels have been pre-loaded with burdens. 
It really is all relative. And context is everything. 
***
J.M. Phillippe is the author of Perfect Likeness and the short story The Sight. She has lived in the deserts of California, the suburbs of Seattle, and the mad rush of New York City. She works as a family therapist in Brooklyn, New York and spends her free-time decorating her tiny apartment to her cat Oscar Wilde’s liking, drinking cider at her favorite British-style pub, and training to be the next Karate Kid, one wax-on at a time.