The other day, a friend posted a link to an interesting article about privilege, or more correctly a chronological list of the racial crud that this author has dealt with over the years. In the ensuing conversation, one person pushed back hard against the concept of “privilege” and this was my response.
Privilege is an odd concept because everyone has certain advantages and disadvantages in life due to family circumstances, luck, health, etc. Further confounding the discussion, people who talk about privilege often focus on their single variable and don’t acknowledge the holistic circumstance that surrounds each individual’s upbringing.
However, it is still true that being white affords someone more advantages than disadvantages. A single racial advantage will not counterbalance all the other disadvantages one race is granted at birth or the winds of fate, but to say that race is not a factor in society is being willfully blind.
Even apart from outright racial discrimination, there is a lot of mental drag that one deals solely because that person is a minority. I’m not saying some other white guy’s life was automatically easier, but on this particular issue they didn’t have to deal with the constant feeling of “otherness” and “not belonging” solely because of their skin color. This is white privilege.
To be clear, I think we call it “white” privilege because people of European descent are the dominant race in our country. I suspect other nations of have similar dynamics with different skin colors or using other criteria altogether. This is a societal issue, and each of us needs to do our part as individual actors to push this society forward, and acknowledging the problem is the first step.