Quote:
Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh
What, I would like to ask Miss Kim, is wrong with being English or white? Or a man?
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... well.
(I say this as the person who commented up the original article, so envisage the appropriate shades of grey in my reactions to both this and that.)
As someone who is all three, my understanding is that it has nothing to do with there being 'something wrong' with those things; rather, the problem is with the vast number of people - indeed, the vast swathes of society and culture - which implicitly or explicitly insist that those things are a) better, b) more normal, or c) more important.
So you have cars being crash-tested using dummies designed to model the average human male, making them actively dangerous for shorter women with different average weight distribution. You have facial recognition technology going into wide release when it has a vastly lower accuracy with non-white faces. You have sports divided into 'football' and 'women's football' (which one do they show down the pub?). You have diseases being dismissed as not significant because the tens of thousands of people they're killing are only in China, or Africa, or India - not
here, not in the countries that
matter.
I could go on, probably for years. These things are an embedded problem in our society, and I like to think we're working on them, improving on them. One way we do that is by deliberately highlighting other perspectives, other people who are neglected by the historic view of 'normal' - and when, for example, a white, male, Anglo-Saxon academic gets in a huff because his students aren't treating white-male-Anglo-Saxonism as the standard baseline for opinions that his culture has taught him it Should Be, it's a step - only a small one, but a step - in the wrong direction.
(As I said at the first: the article provides no evidence that Tolkien did anything of the sort. But soooooo many people do.)
hS