Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via creator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.”
Today’s prompt: PRIVILEGE
My attempt to mitigate the fact that I have been accorded all kinds of white privilege throughout my lifetime is imperfect at best.
I am pretty sure, though, that it isn’t supposed to be played out in my choice of when to see a particular movie.
I went down the Twitter rabbit hole today (I’m on Twitter throughout the day, for work and for “fun”) and saw one person tell me I should wait a week to see Black Panther:
WHITE PEOPLE BLACK PANTHER RULES
Do not see the movie in first week so that PoC have a chance to see it first.
If you’ve already bought tickets, give them to a PoC.
Post a positive review at Rotten Tomatoes. Do not wait to see the movie first.
(My reaction to this one ^^^ “Who would post a positive review without seeing a movie? There are other ways to support the movie and encourage attendance than publishing a positive review that is false because it is based on a pretense.)
Sit in the back of the theater.
I don’t see (at all) how following these “rules” does anything to help black people and white people (and …. just people ….) understand each other any better. I don’t.
But then when I was looking for the above tweet prior to writing this post, I found this tweet:
Oh Twitter, if there had been a moment tonight when I was feeling good about humanity and race relations, that tweet (and the comments) reversed it. Easily.
***
The situation reminded me of the day after the Women’s March last January, when friends/acquaintances asked me if there were pro-life women there.
[end of five minutes …. still writing]
“Of course there were!” I responded. I checked with people who had been in DC (rather than Tallahassee). They confirmed their march was accepting.
I have to say in my heart of hearts, though, I don’t think my pro-life friends would have felt welcomed at the march I attended. It was a women’s march, but given the philosophical leanings that drove many of us there, my pro-life friends would not have felt comfortable.
Feeling comfortable — now THAT is a privilege.
Honestly, I think the most comfortable thing I could do about Black Panther is go with a PoC friend the first week, second week or 50th week. And we would both sit wherever we please. Together.
This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday linkup.
Wife of one, Mom of two, Friend of many. My pronouns are she/her/hers.
I found this to be a very thought provoking post. Thanks for sharing.
It was thought-provoking to write too. Thanks for visiting and reading.
Twitter – the home of brilliance and horrifying ignorance. 🙂 Thanks for sharing this perspective. I was thinking about the idea of “inclusion” earlier today and realized that often we consider inclusive to mean accepting of the previously excluded, but sometimes we do that by purposefully excluding those who were previously included. It is complicated and really difficult to be truly inclusive of all…
SO complicated. So complicated. Thanks for your thoughts.
Privilege, hmmm. Too often we define it by how much money someone has, what schools they attended. I believe God gave all of us a gift that would define each of us as “privileged.” And we need to see that in each other.
Privilege is so complex for sure.
And one of the reasons I am not on Twitter often…wow…
In this circumstance, I am 100% with you (except that it is valuable to me to know what people are saying, even if it is painful/disturbing/frustrating to read).
Thank you.
<3
Wow. How fascinating—I’d love to hear from minorities what they think—and then I realize that our community doesn’t have many.
I would too. Maybe I’ll seek some feedback along those lines (but not via a general Twitter question because I think THAT could backfire!).
Grrr! Twitter can be such a gift, but at the next turn, it’s just awful. I want to go see it with a friend of color together….yes!
ME TOO! I hardly get to movies anyway but this one sounds good!
I wish that race wasn’t such an issue. Every body is a unique individual no matter the color. I wish we could just get along. Great job with your prompt!
I wish the same, Rena.