![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Are Christians privileged in the UK?
Jan. 9th, 2008 11:55 pmThere's a discussion about that question attached to a posting from the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
toothycats. One of the toothycats (who are a couple with a shared blog) posted an entry about their Christian beliefs, which promptly exploded into religion_wank (why does that community not exist already?) after lark_ascending turned up, and, angered by a toothcat's oppressive action of posting about an interest of theirs on their blog under a cut, started a huge argument (she later experienced drama remorse and deleted fracking everything, but there's an archive of some of the thread here). I'm unable to resist this sort of thing, so I've stuck my oar in here and there.
I can see the point of these privilege checklists which circulate on the net. You don't know what it's like to be someone else. If you're someone who has it good, you may assume that everyone has it equally good. Checklists are a reminder that this assumption isn't valid.
If you're not careful though, what you can get out of in a discussion of privilege is black and white thinking (if you'll pardon the pun) where you insist that someone must be oppressed because they belong to a group you've identified as under-privileged, regardless of anything that person says about it. This has happened to a couple of LJ friends, but it doesn't happen to me very often, because I'm male, middle-class and white so nobody (except Daily Fail readers) would argue that I'm discriminated against. Nevertheless, I am a non-Christian, and I'm not being oppressed. The situation in the UK isn't like it is in some parts of the USA, so checklists from there aren't portable.
The other thing I didn't like about the list that everyone's been doing as a meme on their blogs lately is that some of it effectively asks "do you come from a healthy culture?" and might, if handled badly, cause people who do to feel bad about that. It's no credit to you where you were born, of course, but neither do you want the situation where you can't say that to be from such a culture is a good thing, worth having. A privilege, in fact.
toothycats. One of the toothycats (who are a couple with a shared blog) posted an entry about their Christian beliefs, which promptly exploded into religion_wank (why does that community not exist already?) after lark_ascending turned up, and, angered by a toothcat's oppressive action of posting about an interest of theirs on their blog under a cut, started a huge argument (she later experienced drama remorse and deleted fracking everything, but there's an archive of some of the thread here). I'm unable to resist this sort of thing, so I've stuck my oar in here and there.I can see the point of these privilege checklists which circulate on the net. You don't know what it's like to be someone else. If you're someone who has it good, you may assume that everyone has it equally good. Checklists are a reminder that this assumption isn't valid.
If you're not careful though, what you can get out of in a discussion of privilege is black and white thinking (if you'll pardon the pun) where you insist that someone must be oppressed because they belong to a group you've identified as under-privileged, regardless of anything that person says about it. This has happened to a couple of LJ friends, but it doesn't happen to me very often, because I'm male, middle-class and white so nobody (except Daily Fail readers) would argue that I'm discriminated against. Nevertheless, I am a non-Christian, and I'm not being oppressed. The situation in the UK isn't like it is in some parts of the USA, so checklists from there aren't portable.
The other thing I didn't like about the list that everyone's been doing as a meme on their blogs lately is that some of it effectively asks "do you come from a healthy culture?" and might, if handled badly, cause people who do to feel bad about that. It's no credit to you where you were born, of course, but neither do you want the situation where you can't say that to be from such a culture is a good thing, worth having. A privilege, in fact.
