It’s been quiet around here due to spending more time on my private practice and my teaching, but I’m working on creating some writing discipline for myself, and if I succeed, some of my efforts will show up here.

“Bingo cards” have become a popular way to track and raise awareness about the common phrases and arguments that come up over and over again when certain social justice topics are “discussed” (OK trolled) on the Internet – sexist jokes, feminism, fat people, racism, you get the picture.  There’s even a “discussion of Internet Bingo bingo card.”

At some point a few years back, I was really sick of hearing the same old arguments and de-rails come up every time the subject of cultural appropriation was broached on a particular plus-sized fashion community, so I knocked the above out one evening when I probably should have been studying for the California licensure exam or grading papers or something.

Some years later, I found that my scrapbook hosting company had somehow lost the source file for the image – you could still see the thumbnail but the original had vanished.  So I was very pleased to learn this week that the Native Appropriations blog, which is awesome in and of itself, had put up an article about it a while back, and  still had a good copy of the full-sized image.  Which I guess has made the rounds a few places, including into some college courses even.

Anyway, I’m really pleased that it still has a little online life independent of me, and wanted to give props to Native Appropriations for helping to keep it from vanishing into the ether, and to Jezebel (even if they can be oh-so-problematic at times) for giving it a little life this fall.

On the one hand, I appreciate the benefits that gratitude can bring to our health and overall well-being.  Reflecting on the positive parts of our lives – our successes and good fortune, the support and encouragement we receive from others, the opportunities we have to give back to our community and world, the many privileges most of us enjoy just by virtue of our birth -  gives us a charge of dopamine and other brain-boosting chemicals.  This year, I’m particularly grateful for the support of my friends and family, the health I’ve enjoyed and the medical care I’ve been able to access when I needed it, and the opportunities I’ve had as a teacher and a therapist to contribute to the growth of people around me.

On the other hand, this is also a holiday that is based largely on a whitewashed mythology that, for Native American people, is actually a story about the beginnings of the genocide that nearly wiped them off the continent.  It’s a day for mourning.

It’s also a holiday rife with stereotypes about Native American/First Nations people and full of opportunities for stereotyped images.

Love the leopard-print undies. Leopards, as I’m sure you know Victoria, are from Asia and Africa.

So, whether or not you choose to celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you’ll take this time of year as one in which you cultivate gratitude, and solemnly reflect on the complicated history of life in these United States, and the many opportunities we all have for using whatever privilege we have wisely.

Dr. Loewy has offered a “Fat Acceptance and Health at Every Size” class for the Alliant psychology students about half a dozen times over the past few years, and as far as we know, this is one of the only classes on FA/HAES being taught in graduate mental health training.  So we’ve started interviewing students who’ve been through the class, asking them “what effects has this class had on you?”

This year we’re fortunate to have the chance to present our research, along with a dose of “FA/HAES 101,” at the AAMFT conference, a place where the only talk about weight and body size is usually centered on eating disorders or the “obesity epidemic” and how therapists can help fat children or adults get thin (free hint:  They can’t.)  We were excited to get the opportunity to bring the FA/HAES perspective to AAMFT, and to talk about what our students have told us about how the class affected their lives and work.

You can access the PowerPoint of our presentation here, and if you attended the presentation, give special attention to the “Do No Harm” slides toward the end – PowerPoint skipped them, and we think they’re especially important!

Our handout for the presentation is available for download.

We’d love to hear any thoughts and comments people have.

Our presentation wasn’t comfortable for everyone.  Which we understand: there’s a tremendous personal investment in the weight-loss paradigm, both for ourselves (and our fantasies of being thin) and for our clients who desperately want (themselves, their children, their partners) to be “normal.”  But that’s OK.  Radical paradigm shifts like a weight-neutral approach to health are challenging.  Rejecting the hard sell of the diet and bariatric industries is difficult when we’re inundated with  hundreds of messages a day about “willpower” and “fat = death.”

We agree with Dr. Linda Bacon, who writes:

“The toughest challenge in adopting HAES is to recognize that change has got to come from inside you. You are trying to define your own beauty and value in an environment that doesn’t want you to get away with it. No industry profits from your self-love or from the very simple notion that you’ve already got the tools for fulfillment right there inside you.”

The “war on obesity” is a war on PEOPLE, on fat children and fat adults.  We don’t take care of our bodies if we learn to hate and blame them, and we can’t support people of all sizes if we’re trying to eradicate some of them.

My ancestor George Wythe is somewhere in here. Thanks George!

- Independence from dieting.  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are unique, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.That to secure these rights, women have previously attempted diets with hopes of yielding such results. However, whenever any Form of dieting becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new way of feeding one’s self, laying its foundation on such principles as mindful eating, permission, flexibility, intuition, and the wisdom of the body and choosing foods in a way that to them shall seem most likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.

- Freedom of religion, which means the freedom to “let a hundred churches bloom” thanks to immigration, migration, and religious diversity.  Including freedom to change your mind about how you understand your faith, but not freedom from other people’s existence or freedom to lie about being oppressed (well, you do have that freedom but you probably shouldn’t exercise it) or freedom to demand that your faith be treated one way while everyone else’s be treated another.

- Independence from the myth that America was founded on equality, that everyone has had an equal chance at success, and that slavery and racism is something “in the past” that doesn’t matter to how we live our lives today.

- And of course, freedom from hangovers.  In case you’re feeling too festive to sit through my blog post about alcohol and your body, here’s good advice in easy to consume YouTube format.

Happy 4th!

Instead of fighting gay marriage, I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same.

Yeah, it’s kind of like that.  I’m still… kind of stunned!  But I’ll take it.

He points out that many of the tangible benefits of two-parent families are things like stable housing, greater economic security, and health insurance, slyly implying, I think, that if government really wanted to support children and families, they could go “direct to the source” and just work on equalizing access to these resources instead of focusing on marriage as their proxy.  Why go through a middle man, especially such a fraught and unreliable one as millions of individual couple relationships?

I have to note that, for all the interest in “promoting marriage” that has been spouted about in the past decade or two, rarely has anyone ever asked Marriage and Family Therapists (the marriage experts?) about how to sustain and support existing marriages.  I’ve got a two-part plan for you:

1) National health care
2) Stop excluding couple therapy from health care coverage under the false belief that health care coverage should only treat individual DSM diagnoses using individual therapy methods*

*(There is more than adequate evidence that many “individual” diagnoses are effectively treated with conjoint or family therapy.  And there is more than adequate evidence that couple conflict, parenting problems, etc. are not just “problems in living” germane to the “worried well” but are in fact major stressors that impact both physical and mental health.)

In a nutshell:  make couple/marital therapy affordable so people can have the benefit of relationship counseling before and during marriage.  Evidence based treatments like Emotionally Focused Therapy find that 73% of distressed couples recover (become non-distressed) over the course of therapy, and over 80% improve (the gap between the two numbers is largely accounted for by couples where one or both partners have trauma histories; longer courses of EFT are proving helpful in closing that gap).
Weirdly though, I’ve never seen anyone interested in promoting and preserving marriage actually talk seriously about making it affordable and accessible for married people to get help in sustaining their relationship through difficult times.  Go figure.  Let’s urge people into marriage and then… leave them to flail at it.

(Echoes of the pro-life stance here I feel, where it’s Incredibly Urgent that every pregnancy be carried to term, but Incredibly Unimportant to care for the children who are born as a result.)

And meanwhile in other “What’s really good for children?” news, when anti-same-sex-marriage folks can’t keep claiming that gay and lesbian households are bad for children based on the research (because it doesn’t exist), they lie.  What is this, a day with a “Y” in it?

Chow is a Presbyterian minister with a certain amount of pull in his church, having served a two-year term as Moderator of the general assembly, and a reasonably well-known author and blogger.  He is Asian-American, so he doesn’t benefit from white privilege, but as a man, a heterosexual, a Christian, an educated person, and a person with a fairly large audience, he has both some forms of privilege, and a small amount of power.

The blog I’ve linked to is Reyes-Chow’s effort to address a recent video of an evangelical Christian pastor, Charles Worley, advocating that gays and lesbians should be put in concentration camps and left to die.  (This comes just a few weeks after another evangelical Christian pastor was shown advocating that Christians should punch their young sons if they act gay, and should “reign in” their young daughters if they are “butch” by forcing them into dresses.  He also spouts some lovely anti-trans rhetoric.)

So, Reyes-Chow does three interesting and powerful things with his privilege in this post.

First, he wrote it at all.  He’s a straight man.  This isn’t “his issue.”  He’s not threatened in any way by suggestions that violence and repression should be used to control and subjugate GLB people.  In fact, by talking about violently anti-gay rhetoric from Christians, he in some ways makes himself vulnerable – he loses face with many Christians, including some of those within his own denomination.  He actually undermines some of his own power by even bringing the subject up, and makes himself a target for criticism and ostracism.

He actually identifies the fact that he could afford to not have this conversation if he wanted.  He writes, “I for one don’t care how tired we all get talking about this ‘issue’ because, as long as people are being killed because of their sexuality, those of us who have the privilege of thinking about LGBTQ bothers and sisters as ‘issues’ in the first place, must choose to speak out against the violence or risk continuing being part of it.“  Being able to say “I’m tired of this conversation” and walk away knowing you won’t be harmed by the ongoing fight is a great example of privilege, and Reyes-Chow explicitly rejects that option for himself here.

Second, he identifies himself as speaking from a position of privilege right at the beginning of his essay.  He writes “As a straight, married, Asian American Presbyterian, I agree . . . [the argument over sexual orientation] is getting old. I dread the fact that issues of gender, race, economics and sexuality are still issues that the church must struggle with in order to fully be who I hope the church to be.  And I dread that some of us feel t]he calling to use whatever privilege we may have to keep fighting on behalf of those who are and have been excluded from community and call and subjected to violence in word and action.“  Identifying his own privilege communicates to others “I am more like you than like the people we are discussing.” It serves as a way to both make himself credible to other privileged people (who often are more willing to hear about oppression from members of their own group than from actual oppressed people – frustrating but true!), and to make it clear that this issue still matters to him even though it isn’t “his issue.”

Third, he uses his position as a straight, male Christian to address others like himself, particularly heterosexual Christians.  He writes, among other things, “those of you who continue to give life and validation to anti-homosexuality thinking must know that you have been given the privilege of being thought of as reasonable and faithful. This protection has given you a false security that your words, no matter how diametrically different they may sound from Worley’s, do not lead to violence.

“They do.”

He challenges members of his own faith to see themselves differently.  He privileges the well-being of a marginalized group to which he doesn’t belong, over the comfort of those like himself, and the validation and acceptance they might give him if he would only be silent and “not rock the boat.”

Three things:  speaking up on an issue that is “not yours,” identifying your position(s) of privilege as you frame the conversation, and challenging people like yourself even if it costs you something.  A perfect example of “so I have privilege; now what?” Taking action in this way doesn’t require you to be a well-followed  blogger; it could be as simple as choosing items to re-share on Facebook, or talking to people in your life about a social justice issue that you don’t “own,” or the previously-mentioned “not cool, dude” (or “knock it off” or whatever language you want to use) when someone says something racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

Sounds a bit like that whole “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” thing (whether you attribute it to Finley Peter Dunne or Claire Booth Luce or Mother Jones), which seems to me like a great, pocket-sized answer to that question as well.

People have reprinted Scalzi’s post, and rehashed Scalzi’s post, and interviewed Scalzi, and Scalzi has followed up on his post, and commenters are still proving that it is not necessary to actually read the thing you’re commenting to in order to comment, but if you don’t, you’re going to look like a real jerk.

This is not a post to re-re-re-hash the 101-level topic of “what is privilege?” because there are resources for [making it unnecessary to do] that. (Links kept to four because honestly, I have 141 items on Delicious tagged “privilege” and I am not putting them all in here.)

Of the comments NOT made entirely of fail, one emerging theme is the exasperated, and sometimes derail-worthy “well what do you want me to do about it, sit around and feel guilty?” sometimes expressed as “well you’re not suggesting any SOLUTIONS.”  Elsewhere, conversations have de-railed into absurdities like “well how much of your money will you personally give up to your underpaid female coworker in order to resolve this privilege problem?” in a spectacular display of Missing The Point.

So maybe it would be helpful to try to articulate why individuals can’t “give up” privilege in order to resolve the problems of inequality, and also to try to articulate what people with privilege CAN do if they really want to take the next step beyond “OK so I’m privileged; now what?”

This is my attempt at that post.

The first concept that I think needs to be added to the conversation is that oppression takes place at multiple levels.  Some of those levels are internal (stuff we do to ourselves), personal (stuff we do to other people or allow to happen without intervening), and institutional (stuff that is way bigger and older than any one person.)  I need to give credit to the many, many authors who have written about critical race theory for this framework.  Just today I was introduced by a colleague to Camara Phyllis Jones’ article “Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and A Gardner’s Tale” (.pdf), originally published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2000.  I’m going to quote a couple of pieces of her article, which you really should read in its entirety because it is short, pithy, and straightforward, and I think does a fantastic job of illustrating how these different levels operate.  (She is writing specifically about structures of racism, but similar structures operate when we talk about other dimensions of privilege and oppression, so let’s consider her illustration.)

She tells the story of moving into a home with two flower boxes out front, one full of dirt, one empty.  She filled the empty one with new potting soil, assuming the full box was ready to be planted, and spread flower seeds in both.  But the box with new soil grew healthy, strong flowers, while the box with old soil grew only a few spindly stragglers.  Their basic, initial conditions were unequal, and produced unequal results.  Through no fault of their own, some flowers were planted in bad soil, and through no merit of their own, some were planted in good.

Now she suggests a thought experiment:  imagine a gardener wants to plant both red and pink flower seeds, and she happens to prefer red.  So she plants red seeds in the box with new soil, and pink seeds in the box with old soil.  The flowers grow in these unequal conditions with predictable results, year after year, dropping their seeds at the end of the season to prepare next year’s flowers.  Years pass, and the gardener looks at her crop of abundant red flowers and scraggly pink flowers, which just reinforces her belief that red flowers are better than pink ones to begin with.

Now I’m going to quote Dr. Jones.

This part of the story illustrates some important aspects of institutionalized racism.  There is the initial historical insult of separating the seed into 2 different types of soil; the contemporary structural factors of the flower boxes, which keep the soils separate; and the acts of omission in not addressing the differences between the soils over the years.  The normative aspects of institutionalized racism are illustrated by the initial preference of the gardener for red over pink.  Indeed, her assumption that red is better than pink may contribute to a blindness about the difference between the soils.

Where is the personally mediated racism in the gardener’s tale?  That occurs when the gardener, disdaining the pink flowers because they look so poor and scraggly, plucks the pink blossoms before they can even go to seed.  Or when a seed from a pink flower is blown into the rich soil, and she plucks it out before it can even establish itself.

And where is the internalized racism in the tale?  That occurs when a bee comes along to pollinate the pink flowers and the pink flowers say “Stop!  Don’t bring me any of that pink pollen – I prefer the red!”  The pink flowers have internalized the belief that  red is better than pink, because they look across at the other flower box and see the red flowers strong and flourishing.

So then Dr. Jones asks, what can we do here?  Maybe we can try to make the pink flowers feel better about themselves.  Or maybe we can negotiate with the gardener to knock it off with the way she favors the red flowers with her attentions.  But she writes that this will do nothing to change the unequal conditions that separate the pink from the red flowers.

We have to break down the boxes and mix up the soil, or we can leave the 2 boxes separate but fertilize the poor soil until it is as rich as the fertile soil….  And although the gardener may go to her grave preferring red over pink, the gardener’s children who grow up seeing that pink and red are equally beautiful will be unlikely to develop the same preferences.

So, you may be saying, “I’m not the gardener!  I didn’t put those flowers into their boxes!  I don’t pluck anybody before they can spread their seeds, or yank them out of the better box!  I don’t even see flower color!”

Sit down.

If you have privilege (and pretty much everybody who can read this has some kind of privilege, because,  you know, you are ACCESSING THE INTERNET, hello economic and information privilege), you are not (necessarily) the gardener.  You are not (necessarily) in a position to rearrange the whole garden.  (Though you never know – do you teach? Hire? Evaluate? Control access? Apportion resources? Maybe you have power you don’t realize…)

If you have privilege, YOU ARE THE RED FLOWERS.The red flowers didn’t set up the garden.  Not all red flowers grow tall and strong – some get more light, some get more water, some are in areas that get too damp and get drowned, aphids may gnaw some and not others.

But the red flowers are benefiting nonetheless.  And if you look over at the pink flowers and deny the difference between your conditions?

• If you blame the pink flowers for not trying hard enough?
• If you blame the pink flowers for causing strife by speaking up about the difference in your boxes?
• If you also internalize the preference of the gardener for red over pink flowers?
• If you say “well red and pink flowers are all equal now; that planting stuff, that happened in the past!”?
• If you say “well if gardeners don’t like pink flowers, it’s up to the pink flowers to do something about it”?
• If every time the subject of the boxes comes up you want to change the subject to how your corner of the box doesn’t get as much light as you’d want?
• you are part of the problem.

Structures of power and oppression work at internal, personal, and institutional levels.  Denying the institutional level is a personal act that supports inequity at all 3 levels.  If you have privilege, you can support a system of inequity just by using your privilege to change the subject or make yourself the center of the discussion – a small, personal, but not insignificant act.

So let’s let go of the flower metaphor, and come back to the “But so what am I supposed to DO?” question.

When I worked in Day Treatment with adolescents, staff talked about there being two types of questions:  Information-seeking questions, genuinely asked to get information, and challenging questions, asked to try to challenge or undermine or de-rail the person they’re put to.  So, “Isn’t it time for lunch yet?” might be an information-seeking question from a kid who was just hungry and wanting to know how much longer class lasted.  Or it might be a challenging question, with the subtext “You’re a mean and careless teacher and you guys run this place like a bunch of jerks and you don’t care that I’m hungry so screw you.”

Let’s assume that at least some people asking “So what am I supposed to do?” in this  conversation are asking information-seeking questions.  (I’m fairly sure some are not, but engaging with a challenging question is a fruitless exercise that I leave to those with more patience.)

Stuff you can do if you know you have privilege and you want to do something useful with it instead of harmful.

• practice saying “not cool, dude” when someone says something racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.
• don’t make racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. jokes or comments yourself, even if you’re pretty sure no one from the targeted group is around (especially then).
• when someone says “that thing you said was not cool, dude,” practice the art of the simple, sincere apology regardless of your intent.  “I’m sorry; I’ll do better next time” works pretty well.
• vote for people who will work against structural inequality and improve the lives of marginalized groups.  (Reproductive justice and health care shouldn’t only be voting issues for women.  Same-sex marriage and civil rights shouldn’t only be voting issues for GLB people.  Improving living conditions and schools in communities of color shouldn’t only be voting issues for people of color.  You know?)
• make sure your chores are divided equally if you live with other people (this includes chores they think are important that you don’t care about or even realize are being done.).
• ditto for childcare (if you describe caring for your own children as “babysitting” them?  Step back.)
• make sure work is divided fairly (in terms of quantity, status, reward, etc.) if you work with other people.
• consider devoting some of your time, energy, money, skills, etc. to a group promoting social justice.  Maybe even for a group you don’t belong to, as an “ally.”
• practice collaborating rather than always leading when you’re in a group.
• practice noticing how others different from you are treated in the same situation as you
• listen when marginalized people talk, and practice thinking “what does it mean to me if that’s true?” rather than tensing to react against them or start off by saying “But…”.
• ask people different from you how they’re treated if you don’t notice, in order to build this skill (useful questions: “when do you feel unsafe or targeted in your life?” and “how does your race/gender cause people to react to you?” and “what would you want someone like me to know about living in your skin?”).
• read writing by people from marginalized groups – Geek Feminism, Racialicious, my gosh the options are far too many to even list here, just find something written by someone who isn’t like you, and start reading.  Follow links to blogs and news articles about marginalized people.  Listen to what people are saying about their own lives and concerns, and practice taking it seriously (see above).  Reduce the chance that you’ll say “but why isn’t anyone talking about ____” when plenty of people ARE talking about it; you just don’t notice.
• work on changing how you respond to people with less privilege (talking over women or dismissing their ideas, tensing up around people of color, assuming everyone is heterosexual, buying into stereotypes).
• practice noticing how you have been helped even if your life has been hard.  Consider what your life would be like if everything was the same but you were ALSO without one of your privileged identities.
• use your privilege to increase the volume or platform size of people with less privilege when they speak, and to hold back the tide of privilege-deniers.
• teach those like yourself to see and understand structural inequality, privilege, and oppression.  Use your power for good, not evil.

I welcome additions in comments.

Edited to add:  I appreciate the new visitors to my blog.  I hope some of you will add the RSS feed to your readers – I blog intermittently but I try to be interesting!  In terms of comments, I am not interested in hosting an argument over whether privilege exists, or how women are actually the privileged ones, or whether X group just has more merit or works harder than Y.  The conversation I’m willing to provide space for is exactly what I identified as the purpose of this post:  discussion of what individual responses might be useful when you recognize that you have some degree of privilege.

@bacigalupe (AFTA President-elect) and @drsaddison at the AFTA Special Event

Doing family-therapy-y, social-justice-y stuff all day is hard work!  I’m beat!

Also rumor has it that people keep volunteering me for stuff.  At least at this meeting I remembered to bring a stack of my cards, unlike at last weekend’s meeting of Bay Area Open Minds where I turned up with maybe two cards left.

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting on the “Fat Studies in mental health training” research I’m doing with Dr. Michael Loewy at Alliant International University.  Can I do Fat Studies/Size Acceptance/Health at Every Size 101, plus a summary of his class and our research, in 20 minutes?  We’ll find out!

And how will it go?  Well, last year my “SA/HAES 101″ presentation left people more baffled than anything I think.  This year, well:

I’m Tweeting from the conference when I can – follow @drsaddison if you don’t already!