“When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression”
From “War on cars” to “wokeness”, efforts at making the world fairer often get turned on their head by those who benefit from the status quo
I was watching a Not Just Bikes video on YouTube recently (strongly recommend this channel, by the way for its humorous, thoughtful takes on all things urban planning, transit, etc. from an expat Canadian who moved his family to Amsterdam for the child- and bike-friendly city living), and heard this: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Indeed, this expresses very well something I have thought many times recently across a number of contexts where the loudest complaining, victim-like voices are those of the already empowered. The video was about a campaign to remove parking spaces in Amsterdam. This is one small move in a decades-long project of converting back from a car-centric design to a more people-centric one. Given the overwhelming resources in infrastructure, land, and maintenance that was devoted solely to cars before, this could fairly be called an effort to restore a bit of fairness or equality among various modes of transport. But many opponents referred to it instead as a “war on cars”!
It got me thinking how similar this is to other issues where there is some form of dominance, even in places that claim to value equality, yet efforts to help bring about a fairer system are themselves labeled as oppressive. And those criticizing such efforts as unfair typically see themselves as neutral or objective, with their opponents derided as “social justice warriors” or “overly sensitive” or “playing the race card”. Cries of “class warfare”, for example, are frequently heard when any proposal to make the tax system more progressive is proposed. Meanwhile, the constant efforts at lobbying by the upper class to maintain their dominance are almost never referred to as class warfare, even if they are the successful, and dominant side in that conflict.
Another analogous phenomenon is the way terms like “woke” or “politically correct” get turned on their heads. “Woke”, for instance, got transformed from a positive term referring to growing awareness of deep, systemic inequality that makes our society unfair into a term of derision. It did this by using as straw men some of the less substantive, more superficial examples of insensitivity toward marginalized groups such as language used or Halloween costumes worn. So instead of being “woke” because one understands how redlining and other housing policies acted as a successful affirmative action program for white people while almost completely excluding people of color and forcing them into poor, public housing ghettoes, one is “woke” for wanting to fire people for using the wrong words.1 A similar thing happened earlier with the term “politically correct”, which I remember starting as a kind of inside joke among progressives to identify those who seemed to be aligned on issues that seemed obvious if one was aware of how unjust the system was. Again, this got converted by those actually in positions of power into a term of derision that made it seem as if the marginalized somehow had the power over the actually powerful to keep them from speaking or acting to maintain the unequal system. Actual political incorrectness would be to explicitly oppose our current system, for example, by pointing out the incompatibility of capitalism with democracy or environmental sustainability or decent health care. Malcolm X showed he already was familiar with this use of power to turn things on their head when he said:
“When you begin to analyze the real condition of the Black man in America, instead of the American white man eliminating the causes that create that condition, he tries to cover it up by accusing his accusers of teaching hate. But actually, they are just exposing him for being responsible for what exists.”
Today, we often hear white people respond, when potential instances of racism come up, by accusing the victims of “playing the race card”. Of course it is possible to disagree or be wrong about what might or might not be attributable to racism. But rather than defer to people who are actually experiencing it, those who have never experienced it often presume to somehow know better. There is also a strong, but unacknowledged bias in favor of the justness of the status quo when one attributes one’s own success solely to merit. It takes conscious effort to see obstacles to others when one is not at all affected by them.
A far more trivial example is the so-called “war on Christmas”, that gets trotted out every year by those who seem offended by even the acknowledgement that not everyone celebrates Christmas. When a department store, for example, asks its employees to greet customers with “happy holidays” rather than “merry Christmas”, this causes outrage among those claiming this somehow constitutes a “war” on Christmas! I suppose if one is used to not having to think at all, even for a second, about people who don’t celebrate Christmas, this might feel as if something is being taken away.2 And something is! If we care even a little bit about living in a kinder, more caring, more equal world, it will inconvenience us at times, especially if we previously had all the power on our side. Advocacy for equality, justice, and dignity for those who don’t currently have it only sounds as if it is an attack “on our way of life” or “family values”, etc. if one is oblivious to the injustice structured into the status quo. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly easy to be oblivious, especially if one benefits from the current arrangements.
The creation of middle-class, white-only suburbs with government programs such as FHA- and VA- backed mortgages only available to segregated white developments is also related to our current car-centric reality (leading to the “war on cars” claims when we now try to make it less so). The federal and state highway-building programs funneled trillions of tax dollars into making our spread out, car-commuting-dependent, white suburban way of life possible, meanwhile not only failing to provide good public transit, but also building highways right through cities, destroying neighborhoods and the chance for people of color who mostly lived there to live decently.
I, as a non-celebrator of Christmas, love seeing people’s homes all decorated for Christmas, and enjoy wishing people a merry Christmas when I know they celebrate it. It’s the presumption that everyone celebrates it (at least they do if they’re real Americans!) that I find off-putting.