Week 9 Blog - Trenton Guarienti

Trenton Guarienti
Section A02
11/19/2017

A straight joke probably, who knows just start writing

 This article talks extensively about a subject that I've had to think about a lot in somewhat of a different concept. If you think of privilege as a clean-cut concept, as black and white with no grey area, then you fail to understand the underlying societal causes and results of the oppression and power imbalance. Rather than race for me, this issue comes down to sexuality (and I understand that attempting to compare those two issues is falling into the same trap I am about to discuss, and that the struggles of LGBT+ individuals is not only independent and incomparable to those of poc, but also these issues can be compounded onto one another, this is simply where I have experience and can talk about without reaching beyond my scope of knowledge). As a bisexual, cisgendered man, there are levels of privilege I feel over gay, lesbian, or trans individual. It becomes even more difficult to parse when you begin to say that one group is "more" privileged or oppressed than another, because the issues that come up can be completely different. Bisexual erasure exists both outside of and in many LGBT+ circles (Lewis), but that doesn't invalidate or even compare to the systematic killing of gay men, like what is happening in Chechnya (Knight). When you attempt to form a hierarchy of oppression, you degrade the experience of every party involved, only adding to the misinformation about the subject matter and the societal pressure to create rifts and divide peoples who need to stand in solidarity with one another. The issue of race stands in that same position. There is anti-black sentiments in Asian-American circles (Chung), clearly in white circles, and in many other areas, but it is not something you can begin to compare to one another without losing the impact on any area.

Chung, Jezzika. “How Asian Immigrants Learn Anti-Blackness From White Culture, And How To
     Stop It.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Sept. 2017,
     www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-asian-americans-can-stop-contributing-to-anti
     blackness_us_599f0757e4b0cb7715bfd3d4.
Kennedy, Florence. qtd in http://wist.info/topic/oppression/    (had no idea how to cite the image)
Knight, Kyle. “Gay men in Chechnya are being tortured and killed. More will suffer if we don't
     act.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 13 Apr. 2017,
     www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/13/gay-men-targeted-chechnya-russia.
Lewis, Rachael. “On Bisexual Erasure in the Queer Community.” The Huffington Post,
     TheHuffingtonPost.com, 17 May 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com/ravishly/on-bisexual-erasure-in
     th_b_9995418.html.