As part of my school process, I am serving as a peer advisor on the degree committee of another student in my program. A few months back, we had a meeting where issues of language came up, and I have been thinking about these issues quite a lot as I work my way through the delivery portion of my thesis project.
The student whose committee I am on is a feminist who works in a very male-dominated organization in a very male-dominated field. Her commitment to this organization is life-long, and her challenge is to find ways to help that organization recognize and address the dehumanizing aspects of its current hierarchical structure. In order to help her learn to do this more effectively, she specifically chose outside advisors who are male and who have had good experiences with her organization or others like it. This has made for an interesting degree committee, to be certain.
One more piece of background: this graduate program is intentionally designed to give change practitioners a theory base that allows them to understand their work in the context of an entire system (or a system of related systems). This means that it is partly about language. The program knows that language is very powerful, and that the ways we name things matter a great deal.
Anyway, in this degree committee meeting, one of the straight white men on her committee suggested that the language of feminism is “divisive” and needs to be replaced with the “less divisive” language of the program. This is when the meeting began to run off the rails for me. The suggestion here is that what is described by the language of feminism is not worth seeing. Moreover, I heard this comment as suggesting that what the language of feminism sees and says is not acceptable content for discourse in an academic setting.
As a person who has spent the better part of 25 years trying to find and refine languages for describing the world I see, I was unhappy this man could suggest that dropping the language of feminism might not entail a loss, or that the loss might not be a meaningful one.
When I thought about it more, I realized that it’s hard to take seriously someone who holds all available privilege (straight, white, male, educated, financially secure, Christian, …) suggesting that language that calls out that privilege is divisive. In this case, “divisive” sounds like code for “threatening”.
I do not mean to imply that his suggestion was self-serving and disingenuous, at least not consciously. I know this man to be sincere in his belief that he is committed to full equality for all human beings, and yet he acted to silence conversation that was highlighting the ways in which the world currently falls short of that ideal.
It strikes me that this is how privilege works. Very few people consciously choose actions that create a privileged space for themselves, based on their skin color or gender; most of us are too fair-minded to act intentionally against other people. Instead, privilege sustains itself in covert ways, and this exchange about language is an example of one way in which this happens.
I found the suggestion that the student whose committee this is should give up language that allows her to claim what she sees so astonishing that I have made a note to myself to pay attention to times when I discount the language used by someone who lacks privilege I hold: if I can convince myself not to listen to someone who is using language that threatens my privilege, then my privilege can be preserved. That is, if I am privileged to set the terms of the discourse, I need to be particularly careful not to restrict the conversation to language that implicitly favors my worldview, unless I am trying to perpetuate my worldview at all costs.
For me, this is a huge lesson. I spent much of the last school year working on issues of culture and privilege with a year-long project team. One thing this work reminded me is that it is far easier to see privilege when I am on the down-side of a privilege differential than when I am in the privileged position. I am working on using my perspective as a person lacking privilege to help me understand how privilege works, and trying to understand what the lessons are for me person with privilege. In this case, it’s to pay attention to my own tendency to control the language of discourse, particularly when I am in the power position.