Bigotry Doesn’t Care About Your Intentions

Racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, and other forms of discrimination that limit opportunities to people based on some unchangeable fact about themselves don’t care about intentions.

Forms of discrimination have become a very different sort of beast in the current day.  It’s no longer the obvious racism such as the Jim Crow laws.  Racism, sexism, ageism, and much discrimination is now a subtle subconscious mindset that, if one is not paying attention, can be perpetuated unwillingly and unknowingly.  Because of this it is increasingly easy to contribute to these subconscious paradigms unwillingly and accidentally.

There are very obvious sorts of discrimination, but it’s the unconscious reflexive sort of actions that truly contribute to discrimination in our current world.  Actions such as checking one’s wallet when they pass a black person or holding on extra tight to their purse can be the subtle sort of unconscious racism that permeates our culture and constitutes our subconscious racist paradigms.  They are socially constituted and culturally ingrained through stereotypes. Continue reading


Straight White Male Privilege: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi

Straight White Male Privilege: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

This is an excellent article about white privilege and putting it in a way which metaphorically enables straight white men to better understand exactly what people mean by privilege.  I’m a really big fan of the metaphor that he uses, comparing being a straight white male in life to playing a video game on the lowest difficulty setting.  It’s not perfect, nor is anything perfect, but I think it’s one of the best metaphors out there.

As well, as Scalzi points out in his follow up posts, it’s not meant to be perfect.  It’s meant to be a way to better understand a concept that seems to be extremely difficult for men to wrap their minds around.

Please read the whole article for if you don’t you can easily miss the message that he is trying to put forth.  As well there are two follow up posts that he links at the end of the article.  They are super informative and are excellent rebuttals to some of the typically straight white male arguments against the privilege that just about all of them have.