Checking my privilege
Our society confers implicit and explicit privileges upon all sorts of groups — celebrities, athletes, musicians, Bushes and Kennedys. This seems so obvious as to defy argument. But when we get to other groups who would also seem to be privileged in our society, we tend to lose our consensus over what’s obvious. It seems clear to me, for instance, that men are privileged in our society. Men dominate our corporate and political spheres. Men earn more in virtually every field. Men benefit from women maintaining traditional roles in the family. Men’s reproductive rights are not under assault. In North America, one-third of women have suffered physical or sexual violence at the hands of men.[1] When the data is right in front of us, why is this so hotly debated?
This is not to say that men don’t have their problems, but I would argue that these problems are independent of male privilege not because of it. If anything, the relationship arises from the failure of men to acknowledge their privilege and the effect it has on them. Some men’s rights groups have declared that men are in fact the victims in the advancement of women’s issues. Psychotherapist Andrew Horning recalls hearing a workshop facilitator express it this way, “You know you have privilege when equity feels like discrimination.” Horning believes white men need to grapple with their identity and their privilege to show up better in the world or risk becoming actual victims of progress.[2]
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At my son’s college graduation, the class-elected student speaker Papa Anderson asked: “What kind of privilege made it possible for you to get into and graduate from Williams [College]?” More pointedly, he noted, “not all of our success can be attributed to hard work!” Perhaps ironically, the question was being posed by a Black international student from Ghana. In a world where “a third of the world population is being threatened by malnutrition and hunger, and over two billion individuals do not have access to clean water,” he observed, “our privilege calls us to a greater responsibility.”
Anderson’s speech was most successful when he got the most personal. While not offering too many details about his own upbringing, he credited his family and their resources for enabling his journey to the United States, “one privilege reinforcing another.” This is how privilege works.
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He, of course, got me thinking about my own privilege. As I was entering high school, my parents bought a house in a new suburban planned community. It seemed like a dream to us. Our neighborhood had a lake and a clubhouse with a swimming pool and tennis courts.
My parents used to call us middle class. I assured them they were in fact upper middle class; not rich, but in the top 20 percent of earners at the time. You don’t need to have all the advantages of wealth, status, and class to be privileged. Our brand new, beautiful high school was almost immediately overcrowded with half a dozen classroom trailers to accommodate the population boom. But my brother and I had our own rooms. Our basement had a pool table. My father had a 1968 Corvette in the garage that no one was allowed to drive. I was able to finish high school with my parents’ marriage still intact.
As our neighborhood began to appeal to Black families, whites began to leave. My parents moved to Florida by 1990. Most of their friends had also moved to other, whiter neighborhoods north and east of Atlanta. According to Zillow, our home, which my parents bought for around $70,000 in 1978, sold for $32,000 in 2011. Racial tipping most deeply affects those who are accepting of the most integration, usually those are the Black families. If you get out early, you can salvage your investment; if you wait too long, your equity is gone. This is white privilege.
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Privilege provides a leitmotif for Bo Burnham’s brilliant, masterfully-executed comedy special Bo Burnham: Inside. Filming himself making a film, Burnham walks a line between performance art and documentary, simultaneously performative yet deeply self-aware. In The New York Times, Jason Zinoman captures Burnham’s attempts at self-reflection when he writes that Burnham “skewers himself as a virtue-signaling ally with a white-savior complex, a bully and an egoist who draws a Venn diagram and locates himself in the overlap between Weird Al and Malcolm X.”[3] At one point, Burnham declares, “Self-awareness does not absolve anyone of anything.”
Self-awareness is a cornerstone of emotional intelligence, enabling a person to see themselves as they truly are, identifying their personal strengths as well as their flaws, unlocking a pathway to genuine empathy. It’s a fundamental trait I’ve always looked for in my most important relationships. That being said, what we do with that self-awareness makes all the difference. Self-awareness enables us to examine ourselves critically, to ask difficult questions that are uncomfortable to consider.
One criticism directed at Burnham’s piece is that while he’s identified the hypocritical feedback loop engulfing media, commercialism, politics, and privilege, he hasn’t gone beyond identifying the problem; he hasn’t advanced past the first step in his twelve-step journey. While I don’t personally subscribe to all twelve steps in the self-improvement program, there are several steps that seem essential to battling demons and making ourselves better people. One of my favorites is making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.[4] Once you recognize your privilege, you can use it to benefit those who aren’t.
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We can’t change history. This is true. But we don’t need executive orders to ban the teaching of critical race theory or state laws to promote patriotic education.
Slavery happened.
Dred Scott happened.
Tulsa’s Black Wall Street happened.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study happened.
Emmett Till happened.
Jim Crow happened.
We can’t change these events; we can, however, confront them honestly. We must acknowledge the legacy of these shameful events on our lives today. When we take an oath in court, we swear to “tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” but when it comes to history, we haven’t learned the whole truth and we don’t want to. What are we afraid of?
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[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/violence-against-women-femicide-census/
[2] Brownlee, Dana, “This Therapist’s Message To White Men: Become An Agent Of Change Or A Victim Of Progress” Forbes, May 12, 2021.
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/arts/television/bo-burnham-inside-comedy.html
