The following story recently cropped up on my Facebook feed (see the full comic):
I do appreciate the point that the comic makes, but there are two problems that I think are important (enough to compel me to blog about it).
Firstly, it's a work of art with an agenda to express and inspire a particular emotion/reaction. It has a clear protagonist, and focuses on detailing her life experience to the exclusion of the other life experiences in the story. This isn't to say that the message is unimportant—but it's not the whole story. The 'antagonist' is, quite frankly, monstrous; his own humanity and feelings have been removed from him. The comic is highlighting a particular inequality between the two
characters, but relies on equivocation/elision to do so. The situation it depicts does not objectively exist in the real world; there is no such thing as an antagonist, and there is no such thing as an uncomplicated or single-faceted human. Manufacturing one certainly strengthens the artist's argument, but it also strengthens a culture of comparison and disrespect for the Other. And, it's the kind of artificial tug-at-your-empathy story that feels morally right, and as such becomes cultural currency that informs how we feel it's appropriate to treat others.
Secondly, the comic's side-by-side comparative depiction goes against every anti-inequality fiber inside me, and upsets me on a fundamental level. The insinuation is that people's feelings matter in comparison to other people's feelings (or are irrelevant/unimportant by the same token). That some people's lives, troubles, triumphs, experiences, paths, and feelings are more precious and worthy than those of others. Why can't they matter in their own right, on their own merit? Why create antagonism and resentment? And why, for god's sake, are the antagonist's feelings and hard work illegitimate? (And don't make the mistake of believing the one-dimensional portrayal of his life as perfect and free of hardship.) It's nothing short of a fallacy.
Privilege is an ugly thing when it comes into focus. Nobody likes a privileged person if they flaunt that privilege gracelessly. But how often do we even realize how visible our privileges are to others?
White privilege. Thin privilege. Pretty privilege. Rich privilege. Gender privilege. Maternal privilege. Age privilege. Social privilege.
Popular privilege. Academic privilege. Athletic privilege. Opportunity privilege. Language privilege. Emotional
privilege. Peace privilege. Religious privilege. Connection privilege. Relationship privilege. Health privilege. Geographic privilege. Occupation privilege. Privileges we don't even think of as privileges unless we don't have them.
Nobody has a monopoly on privilege, or on hardship, or on virtue. There's not some limited reservoir of compassion, where it's necessary to divert the flow of compassion away from one person in order to receive a portion for yourself. Compassion can only come by recognizing how very similar we are to each other, and how every struggle is real in its own right. Carving out victims and antagonists is destructive rather than productive.
Holding a person's privileges against them is akin to the thin-bashing that undermined Dove's Real Beauty movement, which manufactured its own curvy-love legitimacy by belittling skinny women as unattractive. Isn't this the nature of bullying? To gain your own sense of worth through diminishing someone else's? To measure something via comparison and establishing a hierarchy or spectrum?
The truth is, we all have some kind of privilege, and privilege by its very nature sits in our blind spot when we possess it. It's easy to see other people's privileges, and difficult to recognize our own, or its impact on our lives. We resent people who have certain things—things we want—"handed to them on a silver platter." But we don't acknowledge the things we ourselves have had handed to us, and these can take many forms (see my examples of privileges above, which excludes the ones I'm blind to myself). None of us is an island, and we are all who we are through the actions and help of other people: family, friends, strangers, predecessors, ancestors, passersby.
We all exist in our own bubbles of world-view and experience that begin to grow from the moment we're born. A lot goes into the bubble, and it informs the way we relate to the world outside for the rest of our lives. It's hard to see outside the bubble, and harder to see that other people have bubbles of their own—but they're there nonetheless. Like everyone else, I'm woefully inadequate in this respect. But human experience is one of few true passions in my life, and reading the world as if it were a textual artifact is the most important thing I gained from my brief years in academia.
What's the solution? You can change your own reactions, but you can't really change other people. It's demoralizing to cling to ideas of emotional equality when the world loves to pick sides. Ask yourself: what are my privileges? Those are the areas where you should be particularly compassionate towards others. Toward the people you resent: realize that they are human at the core, that they are just like you, that they have fears and troubles and dreams and triumphs, and that those are just as beautiful and mysterious as your own. Don't measure yourself against others; and don't measure others against yourself. Yes, recognize privilege and talk about how it affects others; but don't deny the humanity inside every person.
