The Privilege of Agreeing to Disagree

Just what does it mean, to agree to disagree?

Yesterday I sketched out a few salient aspects of the disagreement between churchgoers (at least, those in the United Methodist Church) over the issue of homosexuality. The differences are fairly stark and passionately held; indeed, my own overview of the two sides slanted considerably to the side I personally support (i.e., inclusivity).

I've had occasion to see this debate played out in literal terms both at Annual Conferences and General Conferences (that is, state-level and national/international-level legislative gatherings of the UMC). Inevitably, after various advocates of both sides have made impassioned pleas to the body as a whole, someone else stands up and requests (generally in an exasperated tone) that the whole issue just be dropped, that it's decisive and distracting, and that most of the church is simply uninterested in this quagmire of an debate. Let's just agree to disagree, in other words.

While I appreciate the irenic, can't-we-all-just-get-along intentions of such a sentiment, I can't help but suspect some deeper motives at work in these kind of requests. Basically: conflict makes me uncomfortable. So does homosexuality. Let's drop it.

I can relate; conflict makes me uncomfortable, too. On stage or on screen it's the heart of the Western-European dramatic tradition. In life it can be plain awkward and misery-inducing.

And I can understand that a red-hot issue like GLBT behaviors and identities can also make people uncomfortable, partially because it's foreign and vaguely threatening to many people and partially because, in a UMC Conference setting, it signals--you guessed it--conflict.

My sympathy with the let's-just-avoid-it question has limits, though. Part of what I teach my students in coursework about gender and sexuality is that differences in human identity nearly always get arranged into privileged and no-so-privileged categories. The privileged categories currently include white (rather than non-white), male (rather than non-male), well-off (rather than not-so-well-off), educated (rather than not), heterosexual, and non-disabled. Now, at this point, my white-male-straight-etc. students often get a little antsy, feeling like they've been cast as the villain in some melodrama of social justice. If left unaddressed, antsy-ness can morph into defensiveness.

The remedy involves specifying what privilege is--or, rather, what it's not. Privilege is not, first off, the same thing as active prejudice or bigotry. Nor is it the same as personal responsibility for others' oppression. As a white male, I have a degree of privilege due to my gender and my skin color. This is not to say, however, that I am consciously, intentionally involved in an agenda to keep down non-white and non-male people.

What does privilege mean? Well, answering that question fully would fill up a book (at least). A few key aspects of privilege I point out to students, though: for one thing, I enjoy (as a white male) the privilege of default status. When there is talk of "a person" in general, with no identifying features, most likely image most people imagine (or the image the talk intends people to imagine) looks more or less like me. If it were otherwise, the "person" would need some qualifiers to be distinguished from the white-male default. "A police officer came to the door," for example, is generally taken to describe a white, male police officer. Of course, this is not universally true; it's a general tendency rather than an always-everywhere certainty.

Another privilege I enjoy is visibility. I don't have to flip around TV for long to find a show that features a cast of people predominantly my race, my gender, and speaking my language. The most popular and prevalent characters in TV and movies are white. Exceptions of course exist, but they are, well, exceptional. That there needs to be a channel for black people (BET), for Latino/a people (Univision), for women (Lifetime), or for GLBT people (Logo) points to the fact that most channels are for "everyone"--meaning the generic "everyone," i.e., white males.

Neither default status nor high-visibility are indications of personal prejudice. I didn't choose to be white and male; I didn't play a personal part in the historical and cultural processes that made those identities privileged. These are for that reason often described as unearned privileges. But I recognize that, regardless of my personal causative role (or lack thereof) in their creation, these realities exist.

A vital aspect of privilege, though, involves the privilege of non-awareness. It's a mark of unearned privilege that those who hold it can go through life oblivious to the fact that they enjoy those privileges as such--and that other people don't enjoy that privilege. I can, as a white male, for the most part go through my life without having to think actively or critically about race or gender status. I can enter just about any store in this nation (with some obvious exceptions, of course) without having once to think of how my skin color might make me seem dangerous or dishonest to those in charge. I can walk across campus without having to worry that I might be sexually assaulted. I can apply for a loan without having to worry about "sounding white" for the bank teller. And most of all, I can do all of those things without ever viewing them as special or unique to people like me. It's just The Way Things Are.

Indeed, the only times I would really have to think about the issue would be when someone from an unprivileged status makes the privilege deficit an issue. If someone accuses me of hoarding all the visibility on TV shows, I have to suddenly look at my default status and greater visibility as contingent--changeable--rather than Just The Way Things Are. Moreover, I have to consider that The Way Things Are might be wrong or unfair, that I may actually have to share or (more likely) give up some degree of default status or visibility in order to equalize statuses between myself and others.

In other words, awareness is disturbing because it leads to responsibility. As soon as I become aware that I enjoy unearned privileges over others, I become responsible for how those privileges play out. It becomes my problem that women aren't hired for X job at equal rates to men, my problem that black people have a harder time getting good loans than white people, my problem that a taxi will stop for me rather than for the Latina standing next to me. Again, responsibility isn't the same as fault. I didn't personally cause those situations. But it does behoove me to do what I can to remedy them. Otherwise, if I sink back into willful non-awareness, I do more than enjoy unearned privileges; I perpetuate them.

For this reason, I tell my students, we have to be very careful when we assert that the proper course of action in a particular situation is to "agree to disagree" or stop arguing or "be neutral." We have to be careful that the peaceful status quo we seek to restore or preserve isn't just a way to keep ourselves safely unaware of the unearned privileges we hold (and therefore ignorant of the unearned deprivations that others suffer). After all, to silence debate about a privilege issue is primarily to ask those who suffer to shut up and accept their lot in life.

Now--to what extent does this privilege reflection bear on the GLBT debate in the UMC and the desire to "agree to disagree" or stop talking about it? This very question, it turns out, forms part of the debate itself.

More tomorrow,

JF