No buddy, you are.

It would be easy for me to become the characteristic mustache - twirling white oppressor you guys seem hung up on. I choose not too. It's not so much that I expect to be lionized for being respectful and inclusive, because from my perspective, I'm just doing the right thing, to the extent that I know how. I'm sure I'm guilty of microaggressions and prejudices and the like, but I try to mitigate them. I strike a fairly intimidating figure, actually, and I spend all sorts of effort trying to make others comfortable.

But that is not enough for people like you. You see that I have the option or choice of exercising my privileges and you seem upset that others don't have access to them. From my perspective, that's a good thing. You see the product of exercising privilege and instead of aiming for mitigating it for everyone, you seem to want to co-opt it. It's not enough that people with access to unearned authority not exercise it, you want to wrestle the authority away and make use of it to correct everything you think is wrong with social order.

But as an example, I was listening to a tech podcast this weekend. The topic was Google's invasion of our privacy. The panel was all white men. The privacy advocate was backed in a corner in the discussion, which can happen, and stated "hey, we're forgetting we are privileged white males." in order to win his privacy argument, a white guy was invoking privilege.

Setting aside that Google invasiveness is a first world problem, the host was floored. I had become upset at him because he had bought into the "Gamers are terrible sexists" meme. He's a liberal who grew up in the San Francisco area. It was ridiculous to him that another white dude would involve privilege to win an argument. It seemed to click; like a patient person he let that comment float past and then became hostile toward the guy's argument.

So, I can tell you that people calling white guys the devil doesn't shake my beliefs in being respectful and inclusive toward everyone I can, but it is really aggressive. There is a part of me that resents it. The thing is that I have spent a lifetime mitigating resentments of all kinds. You take a sheltered white boy and throw that kind of aggression toward him, how can you expect him to do anything other than resent what it is you claim to represent?

So, people in oppressed positions can choose to express themselves as they see fit, and I am in no position to criticize, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't respond to crap like this. I get the sneaking suspicion that these aggressive overtones are coming from the moderately oppressed. From those merely inconvenienced by the patriarchy, not those abused by it. Their willingness to resort to aggression shifts the focus from the truly oppressed to the oppression tourists and it creates resentment and aggression on all sides.

Still, I could even live with all that. Because everyone has the right to express their political beliefs as they see fit, the biggest problem I have is with the censorship. Because right now while the oppression tourists control so much of the Internet media, it might serve to quiet truly heinous expression. It's overuse leads to martyrdom. And we are not guaranteed that Kotaku and Gawker and Co. might not be purchased by a true member of the patriarchy. If and when that day comes, there will be nobody left to defend the rights of the oppressed to express themselves because the oppression tourists couldn't restrain themselves when they were in charge.