https://www.macleans.ca/society/what-my-dissident-dad-taught-me-about-privilege/
"What my dissident dad taught me about privilege
A young woman and her father clash over what it means to fight the powers that be—and correct injustice
"As a woman, I became especially attuned to the ways in which females were portrayed as lesser because of their roles in the home. How were women supposed to climb the corporate ladder, or any ladder, if they were so busy doing the taxing, often thankless, work of looking after the family? And why did we have to climb ladders in order to prove our worth? I’m embarrassed to say it took me so long to come to these epiphanies; I cringe now to think of the ways I reprimanded, even mocked, my mother for complaining of being tired as a stay-at-home mom, for having the gall to say that she worked as hard, if not harder, than my father at times, which, of course, she did.
Everything was illuminated for me during that time of un-learning, and on trips home I began to pick up on things I hadn’t noticed before. The way my father waited for dinner to be served, for example. Or how rarely he did his own laundry. Little things like crossing the street without looking, or butting lines in traffic, irritated me. What I once saw as a willful disobedience, a sticking it to The Man, now seemed a display of privilege; he didn’t have to worry about following the rules because he, a well-to-do white man, had never had to worry about them. I became sharp and contrarian in response to just about anything he said. We got into deadlocks often in our conversations, both refusing to acquiesce to the other person’s point on view. He thought I was being too sensitive. I thought he was being too flippant.
We were usually able to find common ground sooner or later. When the Black Lives Matter campaign swept the world and my dad informed me that he, like so many of his kind, believed all lives matter, we had a discussion that could be described at the very least as heated. “We know that white lives matter,” I said to him. “What we don’t know is that Black Lives Matter. If you want all lives to matter, then we need to support black lives first.” It was the same line of logic I used when he bucked against the term feminism. “I’d be happy to use the term humanism when woman are equal to men,” I told him over dinner. After both conversations, he apologized to me the next day, saying he thought about it and decided I might be right after all.
Which is why when I showed him my “Smash the Patriarchy” plate in my apartment in Vancouver some months later, I thought he might get a kick out of my millennial version of idealism. After all, this is the man who taught me to rail against hegemony, to step outside the flow of normalcy. This was the man whose final thesis in school was that all history was a story.
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"What my dissident dad taught me about privilege
A young woman and her father clash over what it means to fight the powers that be—and correct injustice
"As a woman, I became especially attuned to the ways in which females were portrayed as lesser because of their roles in the home. How were women supposed to climb the corporate ladder, or any ladder, if they were so busy doing the taxing, often thankless, work of looking after the family? And why did we have to climb ladders in order to prove our worth? I’m embarrassed to say it took me so long to come to these epiphanies; I cringe now to think of the ways I reprimanded, even mocked, my mother for complaining of being tired as a stay-at-home mom, for having the gall to say that she worked as hard, if not harder, than my father at times, which, of course, she did.
Everything was illuminated for me during that time of un-learning, and on trips home I began to pick up on things I hadn’t noticed before. The way my father waited for dinner to be served, for example. Or how rarely he did his own laundry. Little things like crossing the street without looking, or butting lines in traffic, irritated me. What I once saw as a willful disobedience, a sticking it to The Man, now seemed a display of privilege; he didn’t have to worry about following the rules because he, a well-to-do white man, had never had to worry about them. I became sharp and contrarian in response to just about anything he said. We got into deadlocks often in our conversations, both refusing to acquiesce to the other person’s point on view. He thought I was being too sensitive. I thought he was being too flippant.
We were usually able to find common ground sooner or later. When the Black Lives Matter campaign swept the world and my dad informed me that he, like so many of his kind, believed all lives matter, we had a discussion that could be described at the very least as heated. “We know that white lives matter,” I said to him. “What we don’t know is that Black Lives Matter. If you want all lives to matter, then we need to support black lives first.” It was the same line of logic I used when he bucked against the term feminism. “I’d be happy to use the term humanism when woman are equal to men,” I told him over dinner. After both conversations, he apologized to me the next day, saying he thought about it and decided I might be right after all.
Which is why when I showed him my “Smash the Patriarchy” plate in my apartment in Vancouver some months later, I thought he might get a kick out of my millennial version of idealism. After all, this is the man who taught me to rail against hegemony, to step outside the flow of normalcy. This was the man whose final thesis in school was that all history was a story.
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▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter
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