What privilege isn’t

Wow, doesn’t pointing out privilege make people squirm. Whenever I try to approach it with people who have it—including myself—there’s an awful lot of wriggling. “But…but…but…”

So for starters, let’s talk about what having privilege isn’t.

1. Having privilege isn’t some great big cosmic get-out-of-jail-free card.
2. It doesn’t mean your life is perfect.
3. It doesn’t mean you are a bad person.
4. It doesn’t mean you haven’t worked hard.
5. It doesn’t mean you don’t deserve what you have.
6. It doesn’t mean nothing bad has ever happened to you.

Okay? Can we move on? If you start squirming as you’re reading this, come back and read that list again.

How to deal with accusations of privilege
The thing that’s least useful when someone tries to talk to you about privilege is to get defensive and start trotting out all kinds of inane, poorly-thought-out excuses and reasons why you don’t really have privilege, why it doesn’t work the way they’re telling you it does, why they should feel sorry for you instead of being so mean, look at all you’ve suffered and how hard you’ve worked, etc. etc.

What is privilege?
Privilege, and oppression, are words that refer to systems. Privilege is conferred systematically, by virtue of membership (or perceived membership) in a particular class of people—likewise, people are oppressed as classes. Oppression requires a social structure of some kind which limits or coerces the choices of people based on class membership.

There is almost always someone in a discussion of white privilege, for example, who will say, “But my aunt/sister/cousin is white, and she is poor/got thrown out of college/broke a nail.” Privilege is an idea that is based on observing the behaviors of groups, on an understanding of how power works and flows in this hierarchical social structure we call heteropatriarchy. As such, any description or example is never going to apply perfectly to everybody’s personal life. In this rabidly individualist culture, we’re not used to reasoning across groups—-we’re likely to think that finding the exception disproves the rule. Of course, not all white people have fantastic amazing lives—but when bad things happen to them, it’s not because they’re white; it’s for some other reason not having to do with the color of their skin. Just because someone can dredge up an anecdote about his brother-in-law’s third-cousin’s daughter’s hairdresser and how her life doesn’t fit the model doesn’t mean the model doesn’t make sense in the broader, class application.

Just like the fact that smokers are more likely to die of lung cancer doesn’t mean that every smoker will die of lung cancer, white privilege (or any other kind) doesn’t mean that nothing terrible ever happens to white people. It doesn’t mean white people don’t suffer. It doesn’t mean that people with white skin aren’t subject to other kinds of oppression–like sexism, ableism, classism, what have you. It simply means that having white skin, in this culture, is always and forever a check in the plus column.

To read more about this, check out Peggy McIntosh’s really brilliant article, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. (There are a lot of typos, I know. It’s still worth reading.)

Filed under: white privilege by Amy's Brain Today