Barriers to Recognizing Privilege
In my professional and personal experience, I’ve found that the toughest audience to bring around to recognize their own privilege is NOT simply white men, or older white men (although let me tell you, they can be a tough audience).
No, the toughest audience are those who, through resilience and grit, have survived hardship and trauma themselves. Basically, people who have suffered. A lesson I’ve learned the hard way is this: if I am engaging a new audience in an effort to help them build their empathy for others, if I do not first acknowledge their own experience with suffering, I’ll get shut out from the start. This goes, especially, for some white audiences. The pro-tip here: I need to avoid the pitfall of seeing them only through the lens of their privilege.
Here are a few examples:
· A friend of mine (white, upper 40s) has had a visual impairment as a result of losing one of his eyes in childhood. He has endured teasing as a kid, stares as an adult, and unwanted inquiries about the nature of his injury throughout his whole life. His dream of joining the armed forces was cut short as a result of losing his eye. He is otherwise able-bodied, but he also has a learning disability which made school challenging for him. Due to these multiple barriers, it can be very difficult to convince him of his “white privilege.” His path in life has felt like an endless uphill battle in many ways.
· A cousin of mine (a white male in his 60s) was abandoned by his father at a young age. His single mother worked multiple jobs to support him while they lived in public housing. Despite this, my cousin managed to work his way up from the factory floor to upper management through a 34-year career at the same company. Asked about his “white privilege,” he would immediately say, “I didn’t feel very privileged growing up.”
· A colleague of mine (white male in his 50s) has a grandmother who had to flee Nazi Germany. He suffers from a degenerative nerve disease that causes him chronic pain and has forced him into early retirement from his lifelong passion of home construction. When he sees the recent emphasis placed on ethnic backgrounds in the spirit of greater representation, he is conflicted. It reminds him of how the labeling of minorities was used as a tool of oppression against them during WWII-era Europe — with devastating consequences. He says to me in genuine confusion, “I thought that labeling people was the opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing. I thought we were supposed to be colorblind.”
What do all these men have in common, aside from being white and male, and yes still experiencing privilege? It is a shared experience of adversity, a deep personal knowledge of suffering and loss. None of them came from affluent backgrounds. In my time knowing them, all three of them have admitted to me a sense of insecurity over their levels of formalized education — college was never a foregone conclusion for any of these men.
One might point out that their other social assets, including their whiteness, allowed them to succeed — despite their adversity. But in my experience, that’s a non-starter. We have to remember, those with privilege — especially white privilege — are often blind to it by default.
I think that is why some of our discussions about privilege get nowhere. Not only is privilege an abstract concept straight out of the ivory tower, but it’s often thrust, almost as an accusation, on white men (and women) who actually have experienced suffering, deprivation, and adversity themselves. When we tell them they are privileged, it doesn’t immediately compute. They likely define themselves by the obstacles they have overcome and not by a sense of entitlement they didn’t perceive themselves as having in the first place.
And yet . . . they are still privileged. But they will never be convinced of that if I don’t first truly see them, and their own, very real, struggles. So, the first step is indeed acknowledging those struggles. In doing this, I’m modeling the open-hearted approach I am hoping they might show, in time, towards their own BIPOC brothers and sisters. Coming alongside them, acknowledging their pain first, this is the true root of compassion, the Latin root, cumpati, “to suffer with.”
It makes obvious sense that compassion is a much better place to start these discissions than a place of discomfort or guilt. That doesn’t mean I always have. Sadly, the opposite has been true. I thought I was supposed to make people uncomfortable, to instill a sense of guilt. This was as misguided as it was unproductive. It said more about my own insecurities and shortcomings than anything else.
Over time, I’ve learned that if I’m asking people to show empathy to others, I ought to show it to them first. Acknowledging the pain and adversity my white friends and/or workshop attendees have experienced simply recognizes their humanity. It doesn’t have to be at the expense of ignoring the pain of my BIPOC brothers and sisters — it’s not a zero-sum game in that sense. Starting from a place of compassion, even for white people, is not giving in to white grievance politics, or a culture of victimhood, as some of my staunchly progressive allies might assert. When I think of my three friends mentioned above, the last thing they want to be labeled as a victim. They do want their challenges acknowledged though, and that is important because a shared experience of overcoming adversity can be a building block of solidarity.
So much of the cable news punditry and social media sphere, pushes us towards hot takes, pot-shots, verbal jabs and jibes, scoring points by arousing the most emotion. Compassion gets lost while we’re screaming at one another, really just in an effort to posture to our own side. That led me to making the wrong choice many times when I first set out upon this work.
So now, whether I am in a workshop or at the table on Thanksgiving and these topics come up, step one is acknowledging the struggles of whomever I am working or talking with. If things go well, step two is to put their adversity in context. That comes with reflections such as, “Consider this, you, as a white man, might have started at a ‘2,’ while many around you started at a ‘5,’ and that definitely felt unfair. On the other hand, had you been black or brown your starting point of a ‘2’ would have been a ‘-3.’”
Resistance to acknowledging privilege is common, even among the progressive minded. I once encountered a tsunami of defensiveness when I pointed out to a black friend that, as someone with a graduate degree, he enjoyed a certain amount of privilege. I stand by that statement because it’s true. When we consider that fewer than seven percent of the global population even has a college degree, those with graduate degrees are especially privileged.[1]
Of course, his strong reaction came from the sense that I wasn’t “seeing” the other types of oppression he has faced in his life as a black man. This is a fair concern. His reaction is illustrative of his pain and the possibility that I was ignoring it.
But, at the risk of setting myself up again for rebuke, I’d also posit that this defensiveness sometimes can come from an inverted hierarchy I’ve seen among my progressive friends. Some have referred to this inverted hierarchy pejoratively as the “oppression Olympics,” where authority, authenticity, the right to speak, or the right to enter a space of protest, is predicated on membership(s) among oppressed communities. Two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have worked to develop some objective scholarship around this phenomenon, labeling it “victimhood culture,” although I’m not sure that that label itself isn’t problematic.
At its worst, this sort of reverse hierarchy can sometimes threaten the intellectual clarity and moral authority of progressive movements. But as a privileged white male myself, I don’t feel able to speak further to it, much less disentangle it. I’ll leave that for the sociologists and BIPOC themselves. After all, they live it and know it better than I.
Another reason I steer clear of disentangling that knot is because I know how the success of BIPOC is often used as a talking point against the clear reality of their oppression. Nowhere is this more effectively deconstructed than in professor Ralina L. Joseph’s book, Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. Professor Joseph uses examples of how poorly informed commentators use the exceptional success of luminaries such as Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, and Oprah as evidence that systemic racism doesn’t exist. (Just in case you are wondering, it does.)
I’ll stick with what I know — and that is white people. The lesson for me has been that no one has a monopoly on suffering. Suffering is universal to the human condition. The fact that more suffering falls upon BIPOC as a result of their skin color is a true injustice. Righting that, is the moral imperative of our time. But before I ask any of my white brothers and sisters to empathize with others’ suffering, I first have to acknowledge their own. There is not harm in recognizing that, quite the opposite, it can be a cornerstone to building understanding.
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Footnote:
[1] http://data.uis.unesco.org/, https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education
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Ted Neill, MPH, is a writer based in Seattle. He has written extensively on HIV/AIDS in Africa and the Greatest Generation. His recent novel, Reaper Moon, examines the intersection of faith, politics, and racism during a global viral pandemic. His YA novel, Zombies, Frat Boys, Monster Flash Mobs does the same . . . except with zombies, frat boys, nerds, and ninjas — something for everyone, right?
