Conversation

Aella
@Aella_Girl
1/Men tend to be more systems-oriented, women more social-oriented. This is very general, and useful for understanding large populations. While it's fine to make general assumptions about people early on, the issue is when general information supersedes individual information.
15
441
Aella
@Aella_Girl
2/If you assume a woman is socially-oriented despite evidence that she's system-oriented, you're letting general information supersede individual information. It's important to use information at the level the information was collected, and not change levels (general to specific)
2
183
Aella
@Aella_Girl
3/This is one issue I have with discourse around privilege. Privilege is information about the general level - e.g. white people *tend* to have more money, more opportunities, than black people in the US. This is true. But I very often see people eagerly insist upon using-
1
116
Aella
@Aella_Girl
4/general information when individual information should be superceding; for example a poor white person addicted to opiates in an old forgotten mining town is as much privileged due to his race as an analytical woman is a social butterfly because of her sex.
3
130
Aella
@Aella_Girl
5/The lens of privilege is not a bad lens, it's simply not a very good one for understanding the life of the poor white opiate addict. The lens is a concept designed for large-scale, and using it for individual analysis just warps things and angers everybody.
10
167
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
Aella
@Aella_Girl
I think because it's often used in the wrong context or frame. Very often *individuals* are referred to through a group lens; this causes pushback in the same way saying "you, woman, are social and emotional because you're a woman" - and rightly so!
3
Likes
Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
I think to talk about privilege productively, white people want acknowledgement that sometimes privilege is not the most useful lens to understand their experiences through. After that then you can use it to help understand the experiences they've had that *do* apply.
1
3
Aella
@Aella_Girl
Replying to
@Aella_Girl
For example, saying "I acknowledge that you as a woman are not necessarily social and emotional! But there's likely at least some amount of experiences in your life that have been informed by the general experiences of womanhood, and I want to talk about those."
2