What this meant was that poor white individuals got to be superior to blacks, but still were not on equal footing with wealthy whites. Similarly, men have social and economic privileges over women.
This is created from a deep rooted patriarchy that prioritizes men over women. We all lose when people are treated unfairly and not on the merit of their person. Ultimately, in order to move from a space of marginalization, people need to confront their privileges and recognize that inequality helps no one. As global citizens, we have the revolutionary ability to transform the political, economic, and social environment by recognizing that injustice creates a societal imbalance that negatively impacts everyone.
One of the best life-lessons my father taught me was that guilt is a useless emotion. Guilt is a feeling that ultimately does nothing in bringing about change. I try to use this concept when I talk to friends about privilege. A lot of time, people will respond with defensives, or guilt.
But what am I going to do? To this I respond with a reminder that each of us is able to undermine the system of oppression by refusing to live with unchecked or unacknowledged privilege. Simply by reflecting and challenging our privileges, and working to change the system of discrimination through direct discussion, we can help to shift the status quo. By framing the dialogue on action, and steps toward liberation, the conversation is more accessible and powerful.
Is it strictly due to demographics, or are those demographics shaped by historical discrimination? For a list of anti-oppression questions, visit Dr. For more actionable change, reach out to like-minded people within your community. I will give a personal example on how addressing my privilege got me involved in grassroots organizing: After a year of working as a social worker, I was dismayed by inequalities within social services.
What privilege does is load the odds one way or the other so that the chance of bad things happening to white people as a category of people is much lower than for everyone else, and the chance of good things happening is much higher. A system of privilege—a family, a workplace, a society—is organized around three basic principles: dominance, identification, and centeredness.
A system of white privilege, for example, is white-dominated, which means the default is for white people to occupy positions of power. When a category of people is named the standard for human beings in general, the path of least resistance is to see them as superior, there being no other reason to make them the standard.
It also encourages whites to be unaware of white privilege. And second, that such a place was one where they could legally enter, learn the language, and acclimate to a society that ultimately allowed them to flourish. It was their privilege to come to a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character. It was my privilege that my grandfather was blessed with resolve and an entrepreneurial spirit, and that he was lucky enough to come to the place where he could realize the dream of giving his children a better life than he had.
Those who came before us suffered for the sake of giving us a better life. My exploration did yield some results. I am privileged that values like faith and education were passed along to me. But that is a legacy I am proud of. He plans to major in either History or Politics. And being perceived as poor and disadvantaged in the classroom can be detrimental to academic achievement.
Scholars at Princeton University and the University of Milano-Bicocca have found that class stereotypes perpetuate academic and societal inequality in several ways.
People attribute well-being, health and intelligence to people with high socioeconomic status, regardless of their own. Wealthy people are stereotyped as more competent than poor people. Experimental studies further confirm that when children from lower-income families are reminded of their socioeconomic status — by reporting parental income or occupation before taking a test — they underperform on tests.
Ironically, a term created for racial justice awareness may perpetuate disadvantages already faced by students of color in academic, economic and social settings. An exercise conducted by Kanakuk Link Year — a Christian program for post-high school students — offers a good example. Before starting, he asks participants to take several steps forward if they meet the criteria of privilege, such as having a father figure at home or access to a private education.
At the end of the exercise, Black students found themselves standing at the back of the queue. Even if the outcome is criticized as unfair, being Black is conflated with reduced privilege on account of economic status.
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