The Pornoization Of Social Justice

Privilege. Consider yours. Some have more, and some have less. However, few who talk about it are without it.

The simple act of being able to talk about privilege indicates the absence of the pressing need to deal with your lack of it, which is of itself a privilege. Worrying about your next meal, medical expenses for your children, your legal status in the state you reside in, etc, tends to tax ones time and emotional resources to the point where the question of privilege is not as important as the urgency of survival. It is from thence that I do stipulate that those who are talking about privilege, in whatever context, are in a position to consider their position rather than worry about survival.

This is not to say there is not a spectrum of privilege along which its belligerents fall and certainly not to say that the majority who experience it who are equally unaware are excused from this discussion. It is simply to say that that spectrum is 50 shades of shit compared to the immediacy of suffering for those unaware and unable to discuss the concept, and because the suffering is immediate, the discussion is wasted if it detracts from addressing what is actually going on.

In fact, it is so wasted that it serves no purpose at all apart from the self gratification of those discussing it. This is strikingly similar to the pass time of so many that also serves no purpose apart from self gratification. Discussion of privilege is masturbation, and continuing to be drawn in to the tempting viral repost fodder of some examination of privilege that stands in for real discussion of social justice is nothing more than the pornoization of the same.

Identifying and deconstructing privilege, and discrediting other people's opinions based on privilege is about as helpful to granting civil rights to those denied them as watching porn is to actually getting laid. People in West Oakland, South Central LA, any number of other urban centers, and even the rural south do not need middle to upper class people, regardless of the lack of privilege from whence they came, engaged in debates about and guilt over privilege. They need higher paying jobs, not higher minimum wage. They need access to education, not more welfare. They need security in the form of equal access to government services, not just greater and increasingly less competent police presence.

Discussing inequality from the comfort of one's own intellectual bedroom, no matter how layered with faux sensitivity, is nothing compared to going out to the club, bar, gym......church, wherever one makes amorous pursuits, of current and immediate human suffering that does not have time to stop and consider how it got to be this way. 



Such discussions are a distraction. Furthermore, they ultimately resolve to nothing more than an anticlimactic encouragement to be aware of such privilege, or, much like masturbation, a sense of guilt in the same.