Religion as an Introduction to Privilege

This is another of the sessions from FtBCon3. Lyz Liddell of the Secular Student Alliance gives a great primer here on privilege, and she does it in a context that movement atheists should generally be able to understand. The talk is titled, “Identifying and Addressing Christian Privilege in Intersectional Spaces”.

I think it’s not a coincidence that just a couple months later, the SSA announced it was working to address privilege more generally. If you’d like more information on where their focus will be and how they mean to get there, I interviewed August Brunsman on Atheists Talk on that topic a few weeks ago.

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Religion as an Introduction to Privilege
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3 thoughts on “Religion as an Introduction to Privilege

  1. 1

    Thanks for posting this. Lots of good/helpful stuff. I’ve definitely found that using a 3rd party or 2nd party (the person you are talking to) example for whatever facet of privilege you are discussing, works much better than one that is centered around your interest group (which the 2nd party may or not care about.)

  2. 2

    I really liked this talk, especially the use of diagrams. I’ve been using venn diagrams in my own projects more and more. It’s nice to know that I seem to get the general concepts.

    There is an angle to this that I am trying to get better at and that is, what does a person who has some skill at social conflict do with respect to how this issue is portrayed in this talk? What I mean by that is on a human level I seem to be naturally tuned to pick up on and use the sorts of mental rules (and their associated instincts and emotions) that come into play when things get more intense. For example fallacious reasoning and other similar sorts of behavior. It’s an unexpected and complicated side benefit of tourette’s syndrome.

    The problem is that for most people when I go in “guns blazing” the greatest value that I can hope for is any audience that is present and what they will take from it. Normally the person I am arguing with is just not going to be conceivable when that sort of motivated reasoning kicks in (but some people are still receptive). Depending on the social dynamics where I am arguing I try to always set a situation up such that it’s the other person that chooses the fight and they can change their behavior if they choose, but I’ve been wanting to get better at deescalation and having more options to prevent a fight.

    Any thoughts?

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