Let’s start with what privilege is—not just white privilege or male privilege but privilege generally speaking. There has been discussion about what that is, but still I’ve seen widespread misunderstanding among republicans or similar about what is meant when people say it. And that means that people are REALLY DEFENSIVE when talking about it—they feel like their lives and their personal struggles are being attacked when someone says “privilege.”
I really think the misunderstanding is partly because of “white privilege” being defined apart from the context of what privilege is. Because people on the right don’t really consciously think of the world as consisting of systems of oppression. So even the best attempt to define “white privilege” is going to fall a little short.
I had to learn this—to check myself a bit, and realize that I sounded super condescending when I talked about privilege to people who were first generation college students and abuse survivors or who had grown up poor or who had been in the foster system, et cetera.
Here’s where I think you’d start—start a discussion about fairness. Because fairness isn’t a loaded word in the same way that “privilege” is. Privilege is often seen as very presumptive just because people don’t really know what you mean by that. The first question is, “Well, does the world treat people and judge people fairly, or are there ways in which it’s unfair?”
And it’s very hard not to see that the world is unfair. A person who is born rich has a lot of advantages over someone who is born poor. Someone who has loving, supportive parents has a better chance at being brought up in a way where they can succeed than someone who never had good parental figures. Metaphors about privilege don’t get through to these people because they don’t explain why they apply to the real world. A metaphor about a fence or running a race is just a metaphor. Talk to them (if you’re comfortable with it) about times when you have experienced unfair treatment, or get them to share their own experiences.
The problem you will run into is that people will not see these things as systemic, because the idea of systemic injustice is probably kind of foreign to them. They get really tripped up on the idea that someone can participate in an unjust system without themselves doing unjust things because they already read everything related to these discussions as aggressive and blamey. They probably don’t see examples of racism or sexism as a fundamentally ingrained part of society—they’re the actions of individuals who are wrong, yes, but people tend to see them as isolated incidents.
So provide examples. Lots of examples. Don’t just talk about one axis of oppression (and don’t say axis of oppression because they don’t really know what that means). DO NOT, by any means, assume they have the historical context for these things…because they don’t. American public school history education is propaganda. Have reliable sources on hand for the history of racism and sexism and other prejudices in America because people usually don’t know there has been, for example, really any legal/institutional aspect to racism since the 60’s. American history textbooks stop talking about racism with MLK. Talk about the history. Talk so much about the history. Almost everything I know that convinced me racism was still a real and important threat ingrained into our society I had to research outside of textbooks.
Talk about how the assholes that anyone could identify as racist don’t just “end up” racist. Why are they racist? Maybe they grew up hearing that kind of stuff as a kid. Well, racism being basically normal in a whole group or community is an example of something bigger than individual choices that causes racism. “A person is this way because their parents raised them like that” is the simplest and most accessible way to introduce the idea of actions and beliefs being part of a system.
Don’t talk about privilege about being just in terms of gender or race. Talk about class privilege. Talk about privilege as broad and flexible and a thing that doesn’t fully 100% define an individual person, because “White privilege” refers to something that exists in a whole society, not just “you, a white individual, are privileged for being white, regardless of your individual experiences, and you never struggled.” It’s not an attack and it’s not meant to be a way of broadly simplifying a group’s experiences. The necessity of explaining this isn’t all because of “white fragility,” it’s definitely at least partly because they’ve probably heard very inflammatory and dishonest things about what the Left means by privilege and that has to be dealt with. There is a lot of prejudice and bigotry in our history and there are still ways of thinking and laws and structures that don’t treat people fairly because of qualities they can’t help. And we want to make the world more fair. If they shut down, go back to that—it’s about treating people with fairness.
blakekathryn
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