Thread by @curtaindsleep

1/ Re: @TTRadioOfficial interview with @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory on #SLANT and the fallout, because I’ve seen lots about how it is impossible for SLANT to be anything other than positive, according to their experiences. But there's more to it than that, as I'll explore here 🧵

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 2/ Paradigms determine the ‘order of the visible and invisible’, but if we don’t interrogate them, things stay invisible. Privilege is one of those things. It determines the ‘order of the invisible’, but it is only *really* invisible to those whom it benefits.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 3/ Peggy McIntosh, working in Women’s Studies, noticed that men were willing to acknowledge privilege in the abstract, but not in their daily lives and practices: “Those men who do grant that male privilege takes institutionalized and embedded forms are still likely to deny…

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 4/ …that male hegemony has opened doors for them personally.”

This is a core distinction / tension with privilege — it's easy enough to affirm in the abstract / metaphorical. But take it to the realm of the personal and it's too much to take.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 5/ People have to be the exception to the norm. There is too much of a constructed self at stake. Multiply this, and you’re not just questioning a self, but a society. Decolonisation is not a metaphor for other things, but this is the easy way out.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 6/ It took McIntosh’s struggles with male privilege to notice how similar logics and frameworks applied to whiteness.

Here one of the core problems is revealed: oppression is not about what one takes from someone, but rather what one refuses to concede.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 7/ It is very easy for me as a man to preach about how I’m privileged, but getting me to give up any of the many aspects of my life that compound or perpetuate that privilege is another matter.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 8/ I can tell myself that my awareness of inequality is enough, but it’s not my fault: the system is rigged, so though I don’t make the rules, I will enjoy them.

How is this relevant to discussions about SLANT? I think a similar split is evident.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 9/ I think that at least almost all of those who defended SLANT on practical everyday terms would also say they believe to at least some extent that they are privileged, whether that’s due to their race, gender, sexuality or any other factor.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 10/ But when a number of people point out the ways in which they feel SLANT contributes towards inequality, shame, fear, control, the defenders of SLANT seem to deny that this could even be possible.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 11/ My issue here is not with SLANT itself, but rather the refusal to even entertain how it might relate to privilege. In their experience, it works: come see it in action in my school, they say. But to say this is privileged in itself.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 12/ Privilege allows one to be selective, to render things visible or invisible. It’s not about taking, but refusing to give ground. What perspectives are silenced when SLANT is defended in practical, daily terms only?

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 13/ A refusal to engage with it on a broader social, personal or cultural level is privilege itself. I’m not talking about the outcome of this engagement, but the engagement itself.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 14/ It might make people uncomfortable to hear the very underpinning of their schools behaviour systems criticised, especially in proximity to words like ‘fascist’.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 15/ But to ignore that, to mock that, to refuse to engage with that even for a minute, is — unknowingly — to do the same to a wealth of scholarship and experience.

Here’s bell hooks, for example: “Knowledge was suddenly about information only.

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 16/ It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us.” (hooks, 1994, p. 3)

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 17/ Stepping away from ‘this works in my school’ is to step away from one’s privilege and towards real equity. What happens from here, in practical terms, you might ask. What alternative methods should I use?

@TTRadioOfficial @PhilBeadle @RogersHistory 18/ That’s not the conversation I’m having — yet, because that would be cart before horse. An awareness of how much space one takes up precedes giving up some of that space: perhaps we start there?

McIntosh's paper: collegeart.org/pdf/diversity/…