Within any community of marginalized people it seems like there are going to be some people whose experience of discrimination was dominated by hostility (”we don’t serve people like you here” “if you’re gay I’m kicking you out of the house” “he’s retarded, he doesn’t even know that we’re making fun of him”), people whose experience of discrimination was dominated by internalized negative stereotypes (”I thought people like me were burdens on their families” ”I felt like if I didn’t marry a man and have kids, there was no other way I could lead a valuable live” “I thought that people like me having sexual desire was gross and disgusting”) and people whose experience of discrimination was dominated by invalidation (”you’re not gay, honey, it’s a phase” “you saying you’re mentally ill is insulting to people with real illnesses” “you’re really white for a black person”)
And obviously lots of people get all three heaped on them, or different things for different axes of marginalization, but I think that a lot of community discussions I’ve seen have broken down along the fault lines of people having experienced fundamentally different forms of discrimination.
And that’s how you get “who is more privileged” debates – is invalidation less oppressive than internalized self-hatred? If you haven’t experienced hostility, are you really oppressed? It’s also how you get the “oh, we’ve solved that” flavor of cluelessness – hostility is easier to see than invalidation and internalized negative stereotypes, and so once hostility has been made socially unacceptable some people might think the space has been successfully cleansed of bigotry.
Also, some solutions can be very frustrating if they’re for the wrong problem – for example, if you think someone’s problem is internalized self-hatred so you tell them “it’s not true that the other kids don’t like you! people won’t see you any differently for who you really are!” when, in fact, they’re dealing with hostility because yeah, the other kids are in fact bullying them for who they are.
I guess the only remedy I have to propose is to keep in mind that another person’s experience of discrimination may be really different than yours, and don’t immediately try to put it on a spectrum as “worse” (and so I should feel guilty over my relative privilege) or “better” (and so I need to defend my place of relative disprivilege). It’s a multi-dimensional space we’re working in.