Intersection of privilege

I have a few kind of disperse things to say, because I have been doing some of my own thinking about the article and the film, but then I started reading everybody's post and started thinking about new things. So...

First of all, Aaron mentioned Tim Wise. If any of you are interested in doing more reading about white privilege, he is one of the big names of white people that talk about white privilege. He has a lot of articles, www.timwise.org, he came to speak at my undergrad college while I was there. Maybe we could try to bring him to Lewis and Clark... Anyways, he talks a lot about the role of the white ally as someone who gets really good at recognizing how white privilege and covert racism manifests itself and then uses his or her own position of privilege to counter it. So as a white person, when you see these types of situations, speak up, because other white people are more likely to question or change their behavior and less likely to get defensive if they are called out by another white person as opposed to a person of color (Tim Wise says it much more eloquently than me so check out the articles). This is way easier said than done sometimes, but I feel like the types of role playing activities that we did in Zalika's class on Monday could be really helpful for brainstorming ways to respond effectively.

Second, when I was watching "Boys of Baraka," I made a list of privileges that I was given by growing up in a white middle class neighborhood as opposed to inner city Baltimore. Here they are...
1. I never heard from a school authority that I probably would not graduate from high school.

2. I did not see police cars constantly driving through my neighborhood.

3. I knew I could walk to the corner store at any time of day without having to worry about witnessing or being a victim of violence.

4. At 12 years old I was not aware of people in my neighborhood dealing or using drugs.

5. My older brother did not have to worry about developing physical strength to defend himself.

6. I never had to go to a prison or jail to visit a loved one.

7. My parents did not have a real fear that I would drop out of school or end up in prison by the time I was a young adult.

So, I was also thinking about the intersection of race and class privilege here and what Zalika said about race and class issues often getting wrapped up together, especially when talking about black people. So which of these are race issues and which are class issues? In this case, I think they're hard to separate. It seems to me that these conditions are related not just to poverty, but also to the militarization of majority black and Latino neighborhoods. So, I guess what I'm trying to say with all of this is that these privileges, identities and power dynamics cannot be seen as just a checklist of haves and have nots and that it's really crucial to examine the way they intersect to really know where somebody is coming from. Relating that back to my own experience, when I was reading Peggy McIntosh's article, I could definitely relate to her list of privileges from a racial perspective. However, I definitely got a lot of no's (without even changing any wording), obviously not as a person of color, but as a queer woman. But of course, that looks way different for me than a queer person of color or a queer person living in poverty. So... all these privileges are really complicated and intersect with each other in all kinds of different ways. In doing anti-bias work, it's really important to remember that people are individuals and to avoid putting people into boxes based on their larger identities.