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People with privilege - white people, men, cis people, straight people, wealthy people - don’t appreciate that others will pre-judge them based on their appearance or identity. One of the benefits of privilege is having the ability - and the responsibility - of being able to assume to the best about others.
This is an aspect of social power. It hurts many men, especially cis men, that women are skeptical of them, that they don’t trust them. Men will say, “but I trust her,” but being able to trust without verification or hesitation is an element of power. It is a privilege. The same is true for white people, wealthy people straight people, and so on.
The more of these privileged positions one inherits - because they’re (almost never) earned positions, and so not the ‘fault’ of anyone - the more one can defend goodwill, politeness, trust as inherant parts of the social contract. But trust is derived from a lack of concern for injury, either to one’s feelings or their material condition. History and the current state of affairs show, demonstrably, that trust is abused and power is taken advantage of, so the more marginalized someone is within society, the fewer privileges that are based around material power structures that operate automatically on behalf of someone, the less reason they have to trust, to be polite, to extend goodwill.
Among people who operate almost entirely within their own circles of privilege, extending trust and politeness, letting people ‘in,’ is a sign of magnanimity. It provides a kind of social lubricant that allows the society they operate within to function. However, it’s pretty easy to judge how far that goodwill truly extends when it isn’t automatically reciprocated by someone who lacks a position of power. The privileged party that responds with violence, rhetorically, systemically, was never really showing good will in the first place. They were actually attempting to get something, and they have found it denied, and their immediate recourse is often to violence which simply shows why the person who was in a position with less power was correct to withhold that trust in the first place.
This is an aspect of social power. It hurts many men, especially cis men, that women are skeptical of them, that they don’t trust them. Men will say, “but I trust her,” but being able to trust without verification or hesitation is an element of power. It is a privilege. The same is true for white people, wealthy people straight people, and so on.
The more of these privileged positions one inherits - because they’re (almost never) earned positions, and so not the ‘fault’ of anyone - the more one can defend goodwill, politeness, trust as inherant parts of the social contract. But trust is derived from a lack of concern for injury, either to one’s feelings or their material condition. History and the current state of affairs show, demonstrably, that trust is abused and power is taken advantage of, so the more marginalized someone is within society, the fewer privileges that are based around material power structures that operate automatically on behalf of someone, the less reason they have to trust, to be polite, to extend goodwill.
Among people who operate almost entirely within their own circles of privilege, extending trust and politeness, letting people ‘in,’ is a sign of magnanimity. It provides a kind of social lubricant that allows the society they operate within to function. However, it’s pretty easy to judge how far that goodwill truly extends when it isn’t automatically reciprocated by someone who lacks a position of power. The privileged party that responds with violence, rhetorically, systemically, was never really showing good will in the first place. They were actually attempting to get something, and they have found it denied, and their immediate recourse is often to violence which simply shows why the person who was in a position with less power was correct to withhold that trust in the first place.