Privilege

One of the things about privilege is how so much reinforces it. Images of those less privileged reinforce the selves of those of us who are fortunate, advantaged. A white male professor or professional can imagine himself as more virile when impersonating a worker. Hands no longer soft, somewhat hardened by some labor, he can think of himself as more authentic. He doesn't have to back down on the sidewalk or in the bar. A white southern woman can be more southern and more woman by imagining herself as big momma, as a big, strong, black woman, as someone who says 'girl' and 'talk to the hand,' as someone offering strength and blessings, as someone invulnerable, always strong, always loving.

But these images are fantasies for the privileged and prisons for others, preventing those of us who find ourselves seeing with them from seeing Real people. We deflect our strength and ability onto others, refusing to take accountability for what we have and what we do, refusing to recognize alternative forms of strength and real existing structures of exploitation and oppression.

Comments

[Charles R]

When does impersonation of a person become being and doing the life of that person?

[Jodi]

I love that question. Perhaps one might begin approaching it by recognizing that what is being impersonated is an image, a fantasy, and not an actual person.

[Charles R]

How would you compare this to how Žižek discusses and uses "Concentration Camp Ehrhardt", where the caricature we expect is not different from the reality of the person? I think one can take the original point of the movie to be that Hitler (or whichever Nazi) is a caricature of himself (highlighting just how it can be that 'the Nazi' is so openly applicable an expression), but Žižek sometimes seems to use the example to show that there is a difference between the caricature and the person who fills that role, with the minimal difference separating them being what makes the difference between a believer who subjectively takes up the belief and the disinterested party who judges things on how they appear from the position of disinterest.

I'm being a little defensive, I'll admit to it, because although I'm pursuing a PhD and am concerned with intellectual things, I also work fulltime a fairly blue collar job and have worked many blue collar jobs to support being an academic. And, honestly, being a sweating worker has shaped and changed how I view the relationship of the theory I'd like to cultivate and the political practice I try to live. But, I also can't shake the feeling that I think you are right to acknowledge: the claim to authenticity on behalf of the privileged being able to (con)descend to the level of the imprisoned is a false claim; false in the sense that the descent is towards an illusion of what it is to be authentic, strong, potent.

But could the concentration camp phenomenon work to make a poor person take on the image, for themselves, of poverty? And when it does, how to go about disentangling the image from the real, if this is something to be done at all?

[Jodi]

Charles, I don't think the Zizek example applies because he has in mind the figure of an actual person, not simply a stereotype. To my mind, the point I'm trying to make does not involve or include working to support oneself, or even working as a hobby. Many academics I know have struggled through a variety of difficult, highly physical, jobs. This is not the same as adopting an image that protects oneself from confronting the work of that image.

[hum]

Who has not, at some moment, been guilty of introjective fantasy? Isn't there a distinction to be made between projecting an image or facade, and a more reflective introjection, however still visceral? In terms of sensitivity and the decentering acquired through reading novels, just for example.

[Matt]

I've often been conscious of a kind of wariness toward over-easy appropriation or mimetic contagion on the part of those for whom I've sometimes worked in a seasonal capacity. One has to be careful not to make like one belongs too much, as a fisherman for example (or recalling, again, Lacan's famous storytelling...)

Romanticization is often subtle, and perhaps even inevitable. But there are varying degrees of mimetic violence or premature self-foreclosure. Genuinely invested cultural-crossover seems pretty rare these days. One need only isolate an "authentic" "folk" or "working-man's" culture as an object of study, or mistake one's enthusiasm and curiosity for a Cause...to forget the fact that memory must be earned, or the hubris of speaking for a people, as if they were--more than exemplary, perhaps--chosen.

Part Three Chapter One of Anna Karenina also comes to mind.

http://tinyurl.com/d4vmh

Sorry to carry on; but I liked this post.

[Charles R]

Jodi, I appreciate the absolution for my distresses. My thought in relating your thinking to the portrayal of Ehrhardt is that we are presented the caricature of a Nazi concentration camp official before we get the person of Ehrhardt, and that is how the joke is set up and operates. It wouldn't be the satirical and dry humor it is if it happened in reverse. That initial caricature, though, only works because of the images that worked, and still work, for 1940s US. The caricature, though, was not just a caricature, but actually how Ehrhardt acted...

In this respect, the caricature of the poor, that image passed on to both the privileged professor and the day laborer, comes before (does it?) the presentation of the laborer. I'm thinking of how, in Lacan, the space which we come to occupy is already carved out for us even before we are born. If it is possible to put this in a larger, social frame in the way Žižek does, is there something taking place through these images (and also through the symbols) analogous with respect to our social positions? The more the impersonation is successful, the more we want to say the professor is further removed from the laborer's 'really existing struggles'. But what about the laborer? How much of the image of poverty, from the moral condemnation of having to do hard work (the poor have some moral culpability in the conditions which lead to their poverty) to the glorifying of hard work (doing hard work is morally better than doing no work and receiving benefits or committing crime despite the larger payoff), has affected—will have effected—the sort of person a person in an impoverished situation becomes?

On the one hand, I think you are right on with using these images, from the position of privilege, as a way to maintain that position and lend it an illusory, but inwardly persuasive, air of authenticity, ignoring the barring effects such illusions have upon reality. On the other hand, if the person who is actually in the impoverished situation takes up the caricature and identifies with it, well, don't we have then something like a person who openly calls himself "Queer" and wears ridiculous outfits as provocation to people who would derisively use the caricature?

Maybe I'm not being as clear as I would like, but there's always been, with me, something about adopting a caricature as a means of defusing it, revealing a new form of strength. (Maybe it has something to do with growing up as the disjoint minority and being picked on...) If, though, the caricature works to generate strength for someone who already has power, is this strength or power parasitic on the strength and power they already have, or is this the power that comes from identification itself?

I think there are critical reasons why we want to say that the power of the image is already there in the person appropriating the images (as fantasy), but there also seem to be liberatory reasons to pursue the power as residing in identification. Perhaps some strong theory will motivate reasons along both.

[chris robinson]

Privilege blinds too. I was at a meeting recently on promoting diversity on campus. We're a rural, and predominantly white, tech-oriented university. A very bright white student complained loudly that "'they' (students of color) won't meet us halfway. They eat alone, socialize together ..." Most of our students of color come from urban areas, high schools where they were in the majority, and they travel far from home to join us. The complaining student could not see that she had been met far more than halfway. Making lines rendered invisible by privilege is becoming a big part of my job (and for my own sake).

[Jodi]

Charles, I want to say that adopting the images gives more strength to the person in power, more with respect to what they had before and more than adopting the image does for the person without power. This doesn't mean that the person without power (and of course these terms are too simple but I'm trying to present this schematically at this point for the sake of clarity) cannot adopt the image in subversive ways, that they can't work within it or redeploy it, but it reminds us that such strategies are difficult, dangerous, and frought in ways that they are not for the people with power.

An example: a southern white woman adopts the personae of black big momma (a version of mammy, already highly criticized by black feminists/womanists). What does this adoption do? It provides a model of strenght that is hard to find in images of white southern womanhood. But, there is an obscenity here because the image of the weak southern white woman, the woman on a pedestal, is a ruse, a masquerade. This seems an instance of what Matt called 'mimetic violence.'

When we think of young black southern women, are they made stronger by adopting the mammy or big momma image as their own? Or, does this limit them? Is it accidental that Martin Lawrence plays big Momma rather than, say, Queen Latifah?