One of the main tenets of feminism, and many parallel movements, is "privilege" (such as male privilege. Yet I've been struggling with the concept of "privilege" recently. I understand it on an intellectual level but that is not enough for me. Discussing it on a regular basis, as I do on my own blog (where I've also cross-posted this), seems to me to require a fuller understanding than mere understanding. The path leading up to my ideological beliefs has always been an inseparable collusion between my heart and my head, but the concept of "privilege" is still something that I struggle to carry with me.
So I've been wondering what, exactly, "privilege" means to me. I've been wondering whether or not it is an idea that can truly find its way into my worldview. Maybe there is some aspect of the box it represents that won't ever find its way into my heart and therefore renders it too foreign.
"Privilege", as I've come to know it, creates a binary world - there are those with privilege, and those without. Even if we take into consideration the multitude of aspects that provide or deprive a person of privilege, there are still only those with privilege and those without.
But I don't like such polarization. I don't trust it. There are too many situations where there are more than two choices but we are blind to them because of a black-and-white view that's been imposed on us by our parents and culture. It is too easy to start a war, to entrench oneself in one side and focus single-mindedly on bombarding the other.
Even a black-and-white view, though, allows shades of grey; we simply must allow ourselves to see them.
And so I find the idea of privilege flawed.
(Which doesn't mean that it isn't a good starting point. It is. It is hard enough to get even the most thoughtful person to truly examine the status quo and see the great faults in it. With a concept like privilege leading us, we assuage our fears. Like a horse's blinders, privilege allows movement while it prevents spooking. But at some point, we have to take the blinders off and take a good look around.)
Or maybe it's not flawed so much as incomplete. The lack of privilege is commonly shown as suffering and injustice, with the privilege itself being full of ease and fairness. Yet it isn't as neat as that. My life as a woman hasn't been all suffering and injustice. Being poor was not all suffering and injustice. There are very good aspects about both that I wouldn't give up for the world, and saying that I lack privilege because of them seems to erase those good things. Simultaneously, my current position in the privileged American middle class doesn't preclude any negative events in my life. There are certain things that I can be fairly sure I won't experience because of it, but I still face trials.
So while privilege depends upon - assumes, even, since "privileges" are extras - a standard of suffering and injustice, suffering and injustice are not standard in everyone's life. Nor are they present in everyone's life.
This creates three simultaneous problems. First, those without privilege are basically framed as pathetic - which is patronizing and ridiculous. Second, those with privilege are basically framed as living idyllic lives - which is dismissive and ridiculous. And third, this separation into "one" or "the other" sparks tug-of-wars between those with privilege, those without privilege, and those with different privileges. This is where "oppression olympics" start (google it if you don't know what I'm talking about - it's far too easy to find).
The simplified concept of privilege also makes minorities who haven't experienced or noticed a lot of their trait-based mistreatment seem like peculiar anomalies. Yet no one ever has the same experiences as everyone else, even if they share skin color or economic class or weight or any of the other number of factors that can give or deny a person privilege. For example, Maya Angelou and Condoleeza Rice are lumped together under the concept of "privilege" (specifically, for a lack of pale skin privilege), and yet we can clearly see how very different their different lives have effected them.
What I see, when I think long and hard about these differences like I have been for the past two weeks, is not privilege/lack of privilege but an assumption of personal default.
By "personal default", I mean a belief that we are the standard and everyone else is different somehow. A belief that the way we think and act and see the world is how everyone else does - or should. We humans have big brains that do lots of fancy computing and yet we are still confined to our own bodies, not just physically but mentally. We can't know what a person on the other side of the world - or even just the other side of the room - feels like; we can't grok. We have to communicate, in our flawed medium of words and (if we're lucky) body language. But those processes can both fail, and fail miserably. Perhaps there are no words for what we want to say, or each person understands the same word differently, or the inflection wasn't just right, or the body language was confusing, etc. Even when they don't fail, understanding between two people can be incomplete.
And the biggest failure of all, in my experience, is our preconceived notions of each other. It can be difficult, in the silence of our own heads, to realize when we are not allowing room for another person to show us their full self in that moment. Especially if they bear one of the constructs that society lays so much weight on, especially if they can be grouped into any of those collections of people who are underrepresented in our media and marginalized by our culture. Most modern racists, for instance, don't necessarily outright hate black people, but also can't see past their preconception of what black people should be like to see the real person standing before them.
It is as if we are all looking through telescopes, looking at different distances and heights and angles, and we can align our views as closely as possible to another person's view but somehow can't take our eyes away from the telescope altogether. There are an infinite number of possible sights, and yet we can't manage to take a full look at our companions or their views.
Can such a concept replace "privilege"? I'm not sure. Perhaps what I'm talking about really is what is called "privilege". Perhaps the real flaw of "privilege" is simply that it's been boiled down into one single word, with all of the social justice context hiding in the lengthy explanation and deep thought. Perhaps what I've really done here is attempt to insulate myself from the idea of privilege in an effort to avoid having to face it.
What do you think?
Feminisms is a series of sort-of-weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.
Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we may share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.