“It Looks Ugly On Me”

My friend Christina posted a link to a blog entry a few days ago that introduced a somewhat flippant but easily interpreted approach to understanding heterosexual, male, and white privilege:

Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This got me to thinking about how I understand my own privilege as I, as many regular readers might know, identify as Scalzi’s target audience, a straight white male.

Firstly though, I think I’d like to touch on why so many straight white men resent or get their back up when that dreaded word “privilege” comes up. It is easy to interpret the discussion of privilege as blame thrown at straight white men, crediting them for all the social injustices that take place in the Western world. These men become defensive because they didn’t create the rules to the game or select their role any more than Scalzi’s Hardcore mode players, gay minority females, did.

“Spoons”

There’s a kid living on our street who I call Spoons. There’s nothing strange about the way he looks. In every aspect, he looks just like a regular kid. He’s that 10 or 11 year old boy we’ve all met that never managed to fully lose his baby fat. The one with the messy brown hair and the scared round eyes.

We live in what I guess you could call a poor neighborhood. It has all the clarifiers anyway. There’s people living in rooms overtopr people living in rooms down the road, plenty of trash lining the gutters, and plenty of people to encounter awkwardly to remind you of how fortunate you actually are.

Spoons is one of those people. He lives in a suite with his mother and his younger sister. Their place is the top floor of a house right next to mine and their front door is a stone’s throw from my bedroom. In the summer, when being outside is tolerable, there are nights when the mother sits on the stairs and weeps. Or she screams into her cellular phone. When this goes on, I find myself lying awake in my bed and wondering how Spoons is dealing with all of this.