On the Limits of Privilege

Privilege

Amongst people privileged enough to have discussions on social media about abstract concepts, discussions of privilege is a la mode. A quick rifle through its usages on today’s Twitter, turns up the following (spelling and punctuation retained as originally posted):

• a Latina woman complaining about the colourism of “white/light latinxs” within Latin communities:

“they chose tha privilege they live with instead of bein part of our community” [150 likes, 75 retweets]

• a white person sarcastically complaining that white people can’t do anything without a black person calling them out for racism:

‘So one of my coworkers got up and apparently went crying to the principal about me. Why? Because I took a can of coke out of the fridge before she could get to it. She said I made her uncomfortable & embarrassed with my blatant white privilege’ [46 likes, 13 retweets]

Reflections on A Sivanandan’s ‘All that Melts into the Air is Solid’

I have recently started up Hotchpotch again, as part of the Extra Pages project. It’s ‘an intellectual night for non-academics’ – a participatory evening of discussion, debate, bring-and-share readings, presentation from an activist/community group and also a lecture by a layperson on a text that they have found interesting. Last Monday I did the first one, on A. Sivanandan’s 1990 essay. I had picked up ‘Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles’ in an English language bookshop in Budapest. I have found it fascinating. Siv, born into a Tamil family in Northern Sri Lanka (Ceylon as it then was), left for Britain after the inter-ethnic riots between Sinhalese and Tamil and “walked straight into the ‘riots’ in Notting Hill”. In England “I knew then I was black. I could no longer stand on the sidelines; race was a problem that affected me directly. … I had to find a way of making some sort of contribution to the improvement of scoiety, to bring about a society where human beings could be human.” (The Heart is Where the Battle is; Verso, 1990) Starting as a tea boy in a public library, he qualified as a librarian, going on to work in the library of the Institute of Race Relations, which he and other members took over, with Siv becoming director. From an Establishment body, “controlled and in part financed by big business [which] spoke to government concerns”, Siv and the others made it “a think-in-order-to-do tank, for black and Third World Peoples.”

Discretion

“Yes sir, well it seems you only have
one outward bound ticket for these two journeys.
May I see the appropriate section
of this second ticket please?”