‘Privilege’ is a really popular buzzword that you’ll hear thrown around a lot when people are talking about social justice issues but what does it really even mean? The concept of privilege is difficult for some people to understand, especially those that are seriously benefitting from their privilege, but maybe I can shed some light on why privilege is such an important thing to understand.
To start off, let’s define privilege as unearned social benefits that are given to people based on the groups they identify with or are born into. Of course, there’s no one easy way to define privilege because it works on so many different levels like race, sex, sexuality, gender, able-bodiedness, financial status, and there are so many more different intersections! This just shows that privilege isn’t something easily defined, someone that’s oppressed in one way can easily be very privileged in a different way.
Honestly, the easiest way to define privilege is that it’s the exact opposite of oppression. People often only see newspaper headlines saying things like “another trans person was murdered” but often times no one sees the other side to this. Why was another trans person murdered? Because they didn’t fit the social model, they didn’t conform to the gender/sex they were assigned at birth. People that grow up and continue to identify with the gender they were assigned to at birth don’t face this constant fear of not being accepted, of being hurt or killed for not conforming, THIS is an example of privilege.
Buzzfeed made a video specifically about the issues of privilege and how the most privileged people tend to be the most clueless about their privilege because their environment isn’t constantly pushing them down, over and over again. VIDEO In the video you can see that the only people that even talked about privilege at all were the people in the back rows, the least privileged people, while the students in the front stayed quiet because all they could see was that 10 feet between them and their goal. The video ends on the note of recognizing how you are privileged over others and using your privilege to help the people that aren’t as privileged.
The other issue with privilege is that it means that the privileged definitely have power over the unprivileged groups. Privilege doesn’t work on individual experiences at all. The whole idea of privilege is that it’s institutionalized, which means that women, people of color, people with disabilities, etc can’t have institutional power. Let’s take women’s suffrage as an example. Sure, great women were given the right to vote, but who gave them that right? White men. It’s important to ask the question of why were white men in a position to be handing out rights to women? Why were white men in a position where they chose when and how to give women the right to vote? This shows how institutional power works. Sure, I might have the right to vote (when I turn 18) but who gave me those rights? White men.
As Phoenix Calida(a sex worker from Chicago) wrote:
“Privilege simply means that under the exact same set of circumstances you’re in, life would be harder without your privilege. Being poor is hard. Being poor and disabled is harder. Being a woman is hard. Being a trans woman is harder. Being a white woman is hard, being a woman of color is harder. Being a black man is hard, being a gay black man is harder.”
Instead of just recognizing the ways in which you are oppressed it’s important to recognize the ways in which you are privileged, that’s what it means when people tell you to “please check your privilege” because, like for me, even though I am a woman of color, I’m a straight, cis, financially stable, able-bodied, woman of color which puts me in a place of privilege. Now it’s just a question of how I’m planning to use that privilege.
This blog post wasn’t an attempt to make anyone feel guilty, of course not, rather it was an attempt to get you to recognize what privilege you have and use that privilege to help fight the structures that uphold oppression. No one chooses to be born into privilege but all of us can choose to fight back against the system that allows privilege to exist because just like I didn’t choose to be born into privilege, other people didn’t choose to be born into a world where they have no privilege.
Teri Deewani 