All Privilege Is Not Created Equal

I recently wasted some time on an Internet quiz and revealed to myself that I have very little privilege. As a white lady, I thought I was pretty well off in those terms, but I’d forgotten about a big part of my life. Because bi-poly-pagan.

I haven’t been able to exercise my religion, relationships, or sexuality openly without ostracism, mockery or engendering distrust. I’m on lists and it could affect my ability to earn a living. About 75 percent of my life is off limits at any given moment, in a way it isn’t for many other people. I don’t go around hating straight monogamous Christians. I have much more creative reasons to be a hater.

I also don’t think I’m more equal than you, have better taste in shoes, am entitled to full and unquestioning forgiveness when I don’t replace the empty toilet paper roll, or should have a Lifetime Movie Network opus made about me. I didn’t work hard to get my less-privileged status. My ancestors didn’t work and slave to ensure that I would be a many-lovin’ witchypoo and therefore have to play social dodgeball at the office party forevermore. I just came that way (so to speak). And you simply may have more or less privilege than I do, through the same lack of design and foresight.

If we both become and remain aware of our privileges, we can live our lives on more of a foundation of reality. This is the motivation behind the phrase “Check your privilege,” although I’m also willing to admit it might be pressed into service as a passive-aggressive shiv as often as not, and as social weapons go, it’s a pretty useful tool, especially in a college classroom. That doesn’t mean “checking one’s privilege” is not a valuable activity nonetheless.

I never thought I’d hear the privilege concept being bandied about so often, and apparently neither did a lot of other people. Exhibit A is a butthurt Princeton guy who wrote an editorial in an obscure campus newspaper, the Daily DB or similar. The editorial somehow got picked up by Time magazine (privilege?), and since then there’s been quite the tempest at the tea dance. I’m not even in the mood to link to it here; Google can do that job.

His piece sparked massive agreement with his assertion that just because you’re a rich white male doesn’t mean you have any privilege. His evidence: his grandparents were Holocaust survivors, his family worked hard to get rich, and he studies.

Those are facts, certainly, and more or less horrible or wonderful. They don’t change the other fact that, honey, you’re still a white guy. And that means you have privilege.

One of the major elements of privilege in the sense the young folks use it today is that it’s unearned. This puts the boys commenting on the Internets into a tizzy. I made this, I earned this, they say. I say: You may have earned a great many things, but you did not earn your pigmentation, nor your balls. And both can certainly be a source of discontent from time to time. None of us is immune from assholes deciding erroneous things about us at a single look or a word. What we have here, though, is a failure to discern the difference between privilege and prejudice. Paging the Queen of Swords!

And if you’d like to assert that you earned all the advantages that come with these — such as getting paid more than I do for the same work, or being able to drive blithely about the city without getting pulled over — you might want to think about that. Are you saying that there’s a big white boy conspiracy team that met and decided what advantages they were going to engineer from society? And not only that, but that the toll and toil and hard, backbreaking work involved in this conspiracy is such that you therefore earned every instance of privilege you have for your skin color? Actually, I’ll bite. Sounds as reasonable as anything else coming out of FOX nowadays.

Anyway, this was one of the best rebuttals I’ve seen so far: “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White Person,” by Gina Crosley-Corcoran:

Folks steeped in poverty rarely see a life past working at the gas station, making the rent on their trailer, and self-medicating with cigarettes and prescription drugs until they die of a heart attack. (I’ve just described one whole side of my family and the life I assumed I’d be living before I lucked out of it.)

I, maybe more than most people, can completely understand why broke white folks get pissed when the word “privilege” is thrown around. As a child I was constantly discriminated against because of my poverty, and those wounds still run very deep. But luckily my college education introduced me to a more nuanced concept of privilege: the term “intersectionality.”

The concept of intersectionality recognizes that people can be privileged in some ways and definitely not privileged in others. There are many different types of privilege, not just skin-color privilege, that impact the way people can move through the world or are discriminated against. These are all things you are born into, not things you earned, that afford you opportunities that others may not have.

For example: belonging to one or more category of privilege, especially being a straight, white, middle-class, able-bodied male, can be like winning a lottery you didn’t even know you were playing. But this is not to imply that any form of privilege is exactly the same as another, or that people lacking in one area of privilege understand what it’s like to be lacking in other areas. Race discrimination is not equal to sex discrimination and so forth.

And listen: Recognizing privilege doesn’t mean suffering guilt or shame for your lot in life. Nobody’s saying that straight, white, middle-class, able-bodied males are all a bunch of assholes who don’t work hard for what they have. Recognizing privilege simply means being aware that some people have to work much harder just to experience the things you take for granted (if they ever can experience them at all).

I think cultivating this kind of awareness is at least as rewarding as cultivating other kinds. To read more about the adventure it can be to turn life into such a test lab, check out Journals of a Polyamorous Triad, where Russell Mickler has been occasionally chronicling his experiences with male privilege. Here, he sees that while it’s hard for him sometimes to let the lady partners pay for things when they go out together, it seems to be even harder for other people to do it, to the point that they seem to think his lady partners are invisible.

But sometimes it would be preferable to be invisible. Relationship privilege can be as simple as being able to have a relationship that doesn’t make news on several continents, as has the marriage of a lesbian triad in Massachusetts. I’ll let one of America’s premier newsmen tell it, and let me assure you it’s worth sitting through the ads. Let’s hear it for “fivenication!”

Finally, here is another funny response, which I will include here as being related to polyamory and relationships because it’s got a dick joke in it. Take it away, Alexandra Petri of The Washington Post:

“Check your privilege,” people told this fine lad (any Princeton lad is a fine lad), and instead of rearing up to his full height, shaking forth his leonine mane of yacht-ready hair, and bellowing, “I HAVE INDEED CHECKED MY PRIVILEGE AND FOUND IT AMPLE AND MAGNIFICENT, LIKE MY PERSONAL ENDOWMENT! (read: trust fund… ladieees) CAN YOU SAY THE SAME OF YOURS?,” he tried to object that, in fact, his ancestors had to work hard to get him where he was. As though, somehow, that was something to boast of! As though he admitted the idea that too much privilege might leave one unfit to converse on a given subject!

It seems that Tal may have mistaken the origin of this phrase, as though being told to Check Your Privilege meant “apologize for or explain away the advantages you’ve had” rather than “consider the perspective from which you come before you enter a conversation.” This seems a minor inconvenience at best, like being given the keys to someone else’s custom Maserati instead of your own.

Well, not having to ever worry about that kind of inconvenience is my great privilege.

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