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[–]anfd 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I think privilege talk and naming the oppressor definetely has merit. It's not hard to agree with that. But whether it works equally well for both clarifying things to yourself and among your peers and for communicating things to outside people whose help you are likely to need is another question.

Here's another link to an article on the "privilege topic" I read some time ago and found useful, by Cedric Johnson (it's really long, sorry!):

The Wages of Roediger: Why Three Decades of Whiteness Studies Has Not Produced the Left We Need

His point:

"Whiteness studies has produced a form of anti-racist politics focused on public therapy rather than public policy, a politics that actually detracts from building social bonds and solidarity in the context of actual organizing campaigns, everyday life, and purposive political action. This political problem is not strictly Roediger’s, but is one that besets the contemporary left more generally and is derived from the cultural turn within Western academe and the U.S. Left since the sixties, the rejection of modernist political projects as irredeemably tarnished by histories of racism and imperialism, and a resulting deep, pervasive suspicion of constituted power." [...]

"Contemporary white self-flagellation over being a “good ally” [...] [imposes] a social hierarchy on political life based on identity claims rather than demonstrated commitment, political acumen, organizing skills and capacity or other criteria that should matter."

Johnson along with Adolph Reed have been said by some to be guilty of class reductionism and thus playing down the effect of racism in the US. I haven't looked into it enough to say whether or not that is the case (I don't live in the US).