Millari suggested to me that maybe your point is simply that the act of disregarding the racial metaphors and enjoying what I like about the story is, itself, an act of white privilege.
Yes, that. For the record, I don't know the movie, I don't know much about the whole privilege debate and I wouldn't recognize the white myth that this movie may or may not be exploring for the life of it, if I watched the movie. Which I may still do, as my colleagues tell me it's a good movie. Even the POC amongst them.
What I know is though that you can hardly claim that you have chosen your POV because you like the New Criticism (whatever that is, if we have it here, we don't call it that). It implies that other (non-privileged) people could have made that choice too when clearly they couldn't have. Saying, "Who cares about racism, it's a great movie" is one thing. Saying, "I choose not to look at it like that because I'm from this other school of thought" is slightly insulting because you're arguing from a standpoint that the "This is racist!" faction simply cannot take. Calling the whole business "true democracy" afterwards... well.
Last Christmas, when my family still hadn't quite learned to deal with my being gay, we watched the movie "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry" together which is about two straights who pretend to be a gay couple. Adam Sandler movie, not my kind of thing in the first place. I wasn't in the best of moods and the movie annoyed me. I made a couple of comments of choice about how this movie doesn't do shit to promote gay rights, as it just explores the new setting from a straight POV. This annoyed my family who just wanted to enjoy a good comedy, advising me I should stop looking at the greater picture. Long story short, this resulted in a big fight and it ended with me getting the hell out of that house.
If there were no people on this planet thinking what you're thinking (about homophobia instead of racism), I would never have to have those fights. That's my reality.
Anyway, my two cents.
The privilege comes in when one insists that one’s personal experience is better than others, or that someone else’s objections don’t matter.
But that's wrong. Privilege is about the freedom to ignore that which you want to ignore. It's about choice. There's nothing wrong with exploring that freedom if you have it but it's another thing to act like it's a matter of academic preferences to do so. The former is just rude (and god knows I choose to be rude on all kinds of topics all the time) but the latter is dismissive. Also, untrue. Or so it seems to me. Hence, my original comment.
Re: "That's a case of what's called white privilege though, isn't it?"
Yes, that. For the record, I don't know the movie, I don't know much about the whole privilege debate and I wouldn't recognize the white myth that this movie may or may not be exploring for the life of it, if I watched the movie. Which I may still do, as my colleagues tell me it's a good movie. Even the POC amongst them.
What I know is though that you can hardly claim that you have chosen your POV because you like the New Criticism (whatever that is, if we have it here, we don't call it that). It implies that other (non-privileged) people could have made that choice too when clearly they couldn't have. Saying, "Who cares about racism, it's a great movie" is one thing. Saying, "I choose not to look at it like that because I'm from this other school of thought" is slightly insulting because you're arguing from a standpoint that the "This is racist!" faction simply cannot take. Calling the whole business "true democracy" afterwards... well.
Last Christmas, when my family still hadn't quite learned to deal with my being gay, we watched the movie "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry" together which is about two straights who pretend to be a gay couple. Adam Sandler movie, not my kind of thing in the first place. I wasn't in the best of moods and the movie annoyed me. I made a couple of comments of choice about how this movie doesn't do shit to promote gay rights, as it just explores the new setting from a straight POV. This annoyed my family who just wanted to enjoy a good comedy, advising me I should stop looking at the greater picture. Long story short, this resulted in a big fight and it ended with me getting the hell out of that house.
If there were no people on this planet thinking what you're thinking (about homophobia instead of racism), I would never have to have those fights. That's my reality.
Anyway, my two cents.
The privilege comes in when one insists that one’s personal experience is better than others, or that someone else’s objections don’t matter.
But that's wrong. Privilege is about the freedom to ignore that which you want to ignore. It's about choice. There's nothing wrong with exploring that freedom if you have it but it's another thing to act like it's a matter of academic preferences to do so. The former is just rude (and god knows I choose to be rude on all kinds of topics all the time) but the latter is dismissive. Also, untrue. Or so it seems to me. Hence, my original comment.