Nope, apparently we have not.

This is just incredibly fucking privileged. It’s something privileged people do sometimes: they put on the appearance of being part of an oppressed group so they can wring their hands about how awful it is! They never realized! Now other people (meaning privileged people) can understand better, because this (privileged) person has shown them the light!

It’s privileged behavior on the part of the person who does it, because it’s appropriative; because it is not believing the word of disprivileged people who tell them this happens; and because it’s treating the identity or characteristics of oppressed people as something that can be put on and off so easily, and assuming that trying it on for a little while actually tells them much about the reality of oppressed people’s lives.

It’s also really privileged behavior on the part of all the people who then applaud the first person for doing it, for being so brave and so understanding, for teaching them about it. These people, too, are failing to take the word of actual oppressed people, only accepting instances of oppression as real when a privileged person attests to them, because obviously an actual oppressed person is too biased to know when it’s actually oppression. They’re too sensitive to know when it’s really discrimination. And these people are encouraging other privileged people to fake being disprivileged, too, by lauding it.

The whole thing is massively fucked up.

There’s a lot more that can be said about it. I can’t say it right now, though. Other people, many smarter and more eloquent than I, have written about this before, and will again. It’s not just fat suits, although those are distressingly common. It’s white people putting on blackface, not for the purposes of entertainment, but for the reasons Tyra Banks put on a fat suit. Look up a book called Black Like Me for an example. It’s straight people pretending to be queer, or men making women’s profiles on dating sites. It’s a white Christian girl putting on a hijab to go to the mall to see if her friend really gets that many dirty looks and nasty comments. The list goes on and on and on. These are just ones I’ve seen personally that I can think of off the top of my head. And reams have been written about the problems with these things.

There are a lot of places where any one oppression parallels others, and a lot of places where any one oppression is very very different from others. Here on TITP, a lot of the things we talk about have parallels with other forms of oppression, and we don’t actually talk about those a lot, sometimes even when we should, because this blog is about a specific thing. But this thing right here has become so common for privileged people to do that I could not help but generalize it.

-MG

rebloggable by request