Arguing against anger
Today someone sarcastically complimented me on being white and privileged (without knowing a shred of my, or my family’s, history), presumably based on his previous observations that I’m intelligent and beautiful (which he said to me) and what many people call accomplished (a useless word I could rant on at length). The good news is, it took me less than an hour to stop being outraged at his fucked up thinking, and now I’m thinking how to think through such situations generally. Because with the impetus provided by him, I can make this situation benefit me, thereby making myself even more objectionable in his book. Ha.
It’s hard to see through anger. It’s why I can’t argue with creationists. Or, if I do, I have to select very tiny, achievable battles on my own turf. They are so, so wrong it swamps my brain with incredulity, anger, not knowing where to begin, wanting to set them straight, knowing it’s not my duty to fix them, wanting to let them screw up their own minds and lives (because honestly, are they going to listen to me? NO.), and being pissed that their irrationality (en masse) makes my life unnecessarily more difficult. What to do??
I had two insights regarding the asshole encounter, and it might help me deal with the general problem. First, I realized that he was damning me for the things he initially valued me for - he was damning his own values. If values are things by which to successfully guide your life, and he willingly holds ones he dislikes, he must not - deep down - want to live. Certainly not to thrive. But to creep along apologetically, eyeballs just barely protruding from the muck of his soul.
Second was how he phrased it: "capitalize on all the advantages which white / moneyed privilege has conferred upon you." Passive. Bingo. Privilege, as a noun and in reality, has no ability to do anything. Privilege is something conferred by someone. Presumably he meant my family, which is certainly where I got my whiteness. It’s just that no matter how much money my parents threw at me (or how blindingly white their genes made me), it doesn’t, on its own, produce who and what I am. In fact, money and achievement are inversely related in the history of moi. The more obstacles you put in my way, the better I do. I latch on like a burr on an unshorn sheep. Clear a path for me, and I have no incentive to do anything - because the prize at the end won’t have been achieved by me, so in every way but a technicality, it’s not mine. Why work for nothing??
Obviously, I made me what I am - I did all the thinking, working, trying, persevering, surviving, aiming for something way out of reach, my way or no way at all. Money doesn’t do that, race certainly doesn’t, nor do parents or indeed any other thing besides me.
Thus, his sentance structure gave away his irrationality as well as the real answer to the problem. And by noticing it, hopefully I can dismantle other speedbumps like him even faster in the future.
There’s just so much else to do.
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