Core Concepts #1 – Addressing Privilege

I’m going to start this blog off with a series of posts on certain core concepts in progressive politics. Some of these are going to be tough to write, some are going to be tough to read, and some might end up being controversial. Stick with it, though.

I want to start these posts with a caveat — I’m not an expert. I’m not a professional politician or philosopher or anti-oppression trainer or anything like that. What I am is a large white cis-gendered LGBTQ man who’s spent more than twenty years as an activist trying to negotiate very diverse spaces and relationships in a respectful manner.. and let me be clear: I have not always done so successfully, but I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by people who have recognized that I’m making the effort and made allowances for my shortcomings… while simultaneously refusing to let me get away with them.

You see, the way our society is set up, I’m in a position that gives me lot of privilege. A lot. I’m white, which places me in a position of racial privilege. I’m male, so there’s sexual privilege. I’m a cis-male, so there’s gender-identity privilege. I’m educated and more importantly I sound educated to the western ear, I don’t have an accent, so I’m avoiding anti-immigrant prejudice. I’m able-bodied (mostly) so I’ve got that going for me. And so on and so forth. Even as an LGBTQ person I’ve got privilege: I’m bisexual, so some of my relationships are seen as more “hetero” than others (they aren’t, but that’s a whole can of worms worth its own blog post later on.)

The point I’m trying to make is that I was born with a number of significant advantages in this world through no real effort of my own.

I didn’t understand that when I was young. I was born and raised in deepest, darkest rural Ontario, I lived in a small, exclusively white community, I went through the separate school system and I never even met a person of colour until I was in college. Imagine that: for the first half of my life I wasn’t exposed to non-white people except on TV. I’d never met a Jew or a Muslim. LGBTQ people were a curiosity and at times a frightening aberration and certainly didn’t exist openly in my world… which caused me no end of emotional distress and isolation during my teen years (but once again, that’s a different post.)

Through a fluke of geography and demographics I was raised lived in a world where there was not a lot of difference. My parents and educators did their best and I was surrounded by well-intentioned people who certainly didn’t consider themselves racist or prejudiced in any way, shape or form… but that wasn’t really tested, was it? Diversity was entirely theoretical for me until I left my small rural Ontario hometown and went out into the world.

By contrast, I look at my three-year-old niece when I pick her up from daycare; her classmates are from a very broad set of racial and cultural backgrounds. One of her teachers and several of her classmates wear hijab, for example. She has Sikh classmates and Muslim classmates and Catholic classmates and so on and it’s completely normal for her in a way that simply didn’t exist for me when I was a kids. Once again, not through any deliberate malice, but because of that very white, very rural background. She’s going to grow up with diversity and multiculturalism as a foundational feature of her life in a way that we didn’t have when we were growing up. And that, let me be extremely clear, is a very good thing.

I’ve gotten off on a bit of a tangent here about the value of diversity to the next generation, so to return to my core point: I enjoy a lot of privilege because of who I am and where I was born and because the world is as it is, and I wasn’t raised in circumstances where it would even occur to me to question that set of circumstances because there was nothing to contrast them with.

The next point I want to make is that I didn’t earn that privilege. That’s the thing about privilege: it’s just a thing that’s given to you. You don’t earn it or deserve it and you often benefit from it without even realizing that you do. The flip side of that is that your privilege isn’t your fault, either. You didn’t ask for it, and having that privilege doesn’t make you a bad person… or at least not necessarily.

Because here’s the thing about having privilege — it’s a social construct. It hasn’t just happened because that’s the natural way of things: Male privilege exists because our society has decided that male voices are prioritized over female ones. White privilege exists because our society places more value on white lives than those of people of colour. And on and on. I could literally fill pages with specific examples of privilege, but I don’t have time to do so. I strongly encourage you to educate yourself on how privilege works. Google search it. Learn it. It’s an important lesson, and it’s going to change your life and the lives of people around you for the better.

The first step in addressing privilege is acknowledging it, which is what I’ve been trying to do in this post so far. I possess all sorts of privilege: white privilege, male privilege, economic privilege, and so on; by contrast, there are many people in this world who do not enjoy those privileges. They’ve inherited injustices; racial injustice, gendered injustice, etc.

Also, quick aside: It’s important to note that while you might have privilege in one sphere, you might be disadvantaged in another — being an LGBTQ white man is a pretty good example. Being disadvantaged in one sphere doesn’t excuse you from doing the work addressing your privilege in another. (This is an aspect of intersectionality, which I’ll be addressing in another post.)

Having acknowledged the existence of your privilege, the second step in addressing your privilege: Consciously examining it. It’s not enough to say “I have white privilege,” you have to do the work to understand how that impacts you and others. I can walk down to the corner store, as a white man, with a blithe unconcern that a cop or security guard or self-appointed vigilante is going to harass or arrest me simply for being in a neighbourhood… or shoot me, for that matter. As a white man, it’s not enough for me to say “I have the privilege of not being shot for the colour of my skin”, I must then seek to understand why I have that privilege, and why a black man or a latino man or a native man doesn’t. I have to learn — we have to learn the social and historical context that grants us that privilege.

This is not easy. I get that. This is where the genuinely hard work of being a progressive comes in. You have to educate yourself — and as a quick aside, let me emphasize that word yourself. It is emphatically not the duty of oppressed minorities to take time out of their struggle and give a white man a primer on how not to be a shitty, oppressive person. If they choose take that time, then be grateful, but ultimately it’s on us to change how we interact with others. But however hard it’s going to be it’s on us.

(I have a theory that racists and fascists and nazis are racists and fascists and nazis at least partly because they lack the moral courage and personal fortitude to do that very hard work of self-examination and self-transformation. They’d rather double-down on the ignorance than make the tough effort to improve themselves as people. But that’s another blog post.)

In the broadest strokes, the understanding of the roots of my privilege is actually rather easy: For a long time white men were on top, they built a system that massively advantaged them and disadvantaged women and people of colour, and that is the foundation of the system that we live in today. The finer details of our unjust and unequal system — and they are innumerable — can occupy a lifetime of study. And once you’ve committed to learning about them, they probably will.

But — and let me say this as a good anarchist — theory isn’t much use without praxis. Which brings us to the third step of addressing our privilege: Doing something about it. Yes, I have privilege; yes, I’m making the effort to understand the roots of that privilege and how it effects others; now how do I change those circumstances? Now that I talk the talk, how do I walk the walk?

And let me be clear, I’m talking about real, substantive, practical change, not wild-eyed theories or pointless gestures. If you’ve got economic privilege I’m not saying you need to give away your bank account or burn down your house… but are you paying your employees a living wage? Are you donating to charity? Are you paying your fair share in taxes? Are you giving back to the broader community?

If you have racial privilege, are you working to support people of colour? Are you donating time or money to help with their causes? Are you calling out racist statements online and in person? Are you supporting pro-equity hiring and educational policies? Are you voting against racist politicians? Are you taking out your iPhone and getting video when white cops arrest black or native men?

If you have straight privilege are you supporting LGBTQ people? Are you supporting trans people? Are you calling out religious communities that oppress LGBTQ people? Are you making safe spaces for queer youth? Are you confronting your coworker who asks why “those people” deserve a parade?

If you’re a man, are you supporting womens’ reproductive rights? Or equal pay regardless of gender? Or equal representation in the arts, in academia, in the workplace, in government? Are you standing up to other men who make women unsafe or uncomfortable?

There’s a lot of work to get done to address privilege and the inequality that comes with it. Some of it is the big stuff like getting laws changed so that LGBTQ people can marry… or resisting the rollback of previous civil rights victories. Some of it is more subtle stuff, but just as important as the big stuff… if somewhat more difficult.

Let me explain with an example from my own life. It’s easy to share a meme or sign a petition or go out to a protest. One of the most difficult things I found when I first began to understand not only my personal privilege but the pervasive nature of it… was simply to shut up in meetings and classrooms and let women and people of colour speak.

As a white man I was used to simply being able to speak my mind, to participate to a discussion and have my opinions heard. Hell, what I was doing was valuable, I was contributing, right? And as far as that goes it was true: I was contributing. But what I was also doing without realizing it, was taking up all the air in the room. I’m smart, I’m educated, and I’m articulate… and because I was conditioned as a white man never to question whether or not I should participate, I would unintentionally dominate the discussion. Every time I took control of the conversation, I was — however unintentionally — sidelining the voices of others, particularly women and people of colour who have likewise been conditioned to defer to the authority and importance of a white man talking.

I didn’t intend to do it, but I did it. And when a very intelligent friend took me aside and pointed out that’s what I was doing, I was appalled. And offended. And hurt. And fortunately for me, she wouldn’t let me follow my first instinct, which was to storm off in a huff at how I’d been called out for nothing and convince myself it was all bullshit, that I was the victim here.

Because it’s not nothing. And it’s not bullshit. And I was not being victimized for being called out for my white male privilege in action.

The existence of white privilege doesn’t mean I, as a white man, should be deprived of the right to participate. Acknowledging my privilege doesn’t negate my voice. But with the acknowledgement that my voice is a privileged one, and with the understanding that women and people of colour are disadvantaged by the same system and assumptions that empowers me, I came to the understanding that addressing my privilege meant making a deliberate effort to allow other voices to speak.

Having come to that determination, I began making a conscious effort to notice how I, and many other white men, unconsciously dismissed the voices of others. I began to recognize that a lot of times that white male activists would simply charge into a discussion without thought, where women and POC would hesitate… and then they wouldn’t challenge a white man when they were talking, because that’s how they’d been socialized. And realizing that, I modified my own behaviour to try and stop contributing to that problem. It was on me to make that change, and I tried my best.

That’s not to say that my behaviour changed instantly, or even quickly. Especially if it was a discussion I was passionate about it was easy to fall back into the bad old habit of relying on my privilege to get my opinions in. Hell, twenty years later it’s still easy to do that. But with some effort I found myself not only changing my behaviour and supporting the rights of others to express themselves, but becoming educated and experienced enough to go to other men who hadn’t learned that lesson and quietly working to bring them to the same awareness. (Not, I have to say, publicly calling them out. There are a huge set of problems with left-wing “call-out culture” and its often toxic and counterproductive manifestations in activist circles… but that’s another blog post entirely.)

This post ended up being longer than I originally intended (although it’s just scratching the surface of this issue) so I’m going to wrap this one up with a summary: First, you have to acknowledge that you have privilege; Second, you have to educate yourself on the roots of that privilege and how it effects others; and Third you have to work to correct the systemic flaws from which that privilege stems.

And most importantly, you have to keep doing the work. It’s hard work, and it requires honesty and courage. But it’s an effort worth making.