Thinking about Privilege

As someone who works in a lived experience role, I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about privilege. Often, it’s from the standpoint of helping others understand how we think about experiences of mental distress or highlighting the ways that sneaky and pervasive messages of prejudice, self-stigma, and discrimination impact individuals, whānau, and society. These harmful messages tend to communicate that people with experiences of mental distress are “less” - less capable, less contributing, less worthy. I’m looking forward to writing more about how these messages impact all of us. Today however I wanted to share some of the ways that I have come to think about privilege in general.

Silver spoons and private schools

Hearing the word privilege might invoke thoughts of people born with the proverbial silver spoon in their mouths; children who go to exclusive schools, are supported to do extra-curricular activities, and generally have the best of everything. They have money available to meet all their health needs, wear designer labels and when it comes time for them to graduate from university, (because of course they go to university) their social and family contacts provide them with multiple opportunities to climb the career ladder.

Sounds pretty nice huh? Privilege is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.” Many of us look at our own lives and don’t see that we’ve been given any special advantages. In fact, we can see quite clearly the ways in which we were not! In the societal sense however, often the special right, advantage, or immunity is simply in having life experiences that are viewed as normal, natural and desirable regardless of how statistically common these circumstances are locally or internationally.

Financial or social “success” in our society can be viewed as a complex card game where each of us has been dealt own unique hand. This card game is akin to President and A##holes; for our marginalised communities, every time you lose the round your negative position is further cemented as your best cards are taken away. For those with considerable privilege, their advantage increases. Though how we play matters, getting ahead in the game is considerably easier when the first rounds you must play don’t include facing racism, poverty, trauma, illness or disability.

One of the privileges that is usually invisible to others is the quality of our early childhood experiences. There is ample evidence that the way our early environment and experiences interacts with our unique personalities and abilities to set in motion patterns in our brain and body that continue to impact us throughout our lifetime. ?So, our hypothetical person above going to the “best schools” may concurrently be experiencing disadvantage even though they were dealt cards to give them considerable economic or social privilege. After all, we know nothing about their other identities and journey through the world. Maybe they experience disability, are part of the rainbow community, experience violence at home, come from a non-white culture etc, etc. ?Luckily for them however, the privilege they do experience will make more options available to them when they do need wellbeing support.

This scenario highlights that privilege isn't an either-or situation. Wealth doesn't make someone immune to racism, yet nor does the experience of racism erase the privilege of wealth. Privilege, like disadvantage or oppression is intersectional; our many identities and experiences play out together in unique ways and our experiences in society are best understood by considering as many of these identities and experiences as possible. ?In practical terms, we can all agree that immigrating to a new country can be very stressful and involve for some a sense of dislocation and frequently loneliness. However, there are layers to this experience for immigrants to Aotearoa who have English as a second language. There are additional layers playing out for those that have brown skin or different cultural norms or religious practices. There are further layers of disadvantage and stress for refugees who have survived trauma and lost family and their world before arriving here or are living with disability or illness. And then this experience is itself gendered and impacted by age. The human journey may always include struggle; but our journeys take place within a societal context which cannot help but colour our experiences and make some more experiences even more challenging than others.

This sounds like being a victim to me… (“Pull yourself up by the bootstraps!”)

We often hear an either-or dichotomy suggesting people are either the full captains of their fate or simply “leaves blown by the wind” who wind up in rough places but it’s no fault of their own.?Neither is particularly accurate. We all experience some privilege and some disadvantage, and sometimes additional privileges and disadvantages within specific sub-cultures or groups. As social creatures our experiences of privilege and disadvantage have an interplay with our choices and situations that tends to increase or decrease the quality of our opportunities over time. ?Privilege is like being given a really flash electric 4WD truck to drive. You still choose your direction and destination, and it is still possible to crash the 4WD - you might be a shocking driver with a long history of accidents and near misses - but compared to those driving a rusty Daihatsu hatchback you can travel much faster over terrain that others can’t. ?It also means, that as petrol prices rise, the relative advantage of this vehicle compounds and you remain safer, richer, and faster over time. Compounding disadvantage and compounding advantage can set up situations where individuals who have overcome challenges point with pride to their overcoming, and suggest it is an individual lack that others cannot do the same. A victim mentality suggests we have no accountability for our choices or direction forward; in contrast a mindset that incorporates societal disadvantage and privilege can support us to take reasonable, and not undue, responsibility for where we and our family currently are. In my experience, a greater awareness of the way the things we could control have interplayed with the things we couldn’t control, supports people to have both greater self-compassion and compassion for others.

Privilege is like Perfume.

When you put on perfume or cologne, you can smell it. You sniff it as you splash or dab it on and, hopefully, appreciate the scent. Once you have been wearing it a little while, the fragrance is no longer really picked up by your nose. Yes, it fades a little, but more than that - your brain is no longer picking up the smell as anything worth noticing.

Privilege is like this; it’s most noticeable when it’s new or different to our past experiences or expectations. When we are surrounded by the same smell day after day it becomes invisible. If we were born into it, if our family or community all has it, then we tend to notice it only when it is taken away, or we have the “shock” of experiencing the world for a moment through someone else’s eyes. Think about your day yesterday; how many times did your privilege of literacy act for you? If you couldn’t read, what would you have had to do differently? If were transported back to the age of 15 and not been able to read, how might your life have played out differently? ??An event that highlighted this for me recently was when someone I was organising a domestic flight for, queried whether they would need a passport for their first trip to Wellington… I could not even begin to peel apart the many experiences I had been privy to in life that had taught me about travel, flights, passports, and a lot more.

Akin to the literacy example, one of the ways I experience privilege that I couldn’t previously “smell” is that my natural learning style fits really well with the way most schools have traditionally done learning. I like to read, it works for me to have things shown on a board, and when discussions happen, I easily have things to contribute and enjoy the interaction. Over my years in the education system, this privilege has supported a fundamentally positive experience. It is when I have been taught practical steps, like being shown a chord progression on a guitar or being asked to copy a dance step, that I realise how immense this privilege is. I’m being shown what to do, but almost immediately I find myself protesting, “Stop! Write it down. Go slower - I can’t keep up. I haven’t got it” And I notice how quickly I start to think, “I’m terrible at this. I can’t do this.”

My privilege has been acting daily to create an experience learning that is quite different to the one I’d have in a society where hands-on learning was dominant in education. This is how privilege and disadvantage often work; through hundreds of interactions that are mostly invisible to the group that receives benefits.

I wonder how my other experiences in life might have played out if I didn’t respond so well to the classroom environment. How might my wider experiences of privilege and disadvantage have been meditated if I had thought of myself as “dumb” and hadn’t had so many positive experiences in the classroom? What job would I have been doing now? How would my relationships be different? How might the whole shape of my life?

Feeling uncomfortable with privilege

If you live in Aotearoa, you already have immense privilege in clean water, voting rights, and a country free from war. You have privilege in the literacy to read this article and the information technology to access it. You will also have experiences of disadvantage.

I think sometimes people are frightened of the word privilege; for those of us who long for an egalitarian world it can feel uncomfortable to connect to how lucky we are. As a friend pointed out to me – even the space to learn about power dynamics and privilege is, in itself, a privilege! People can also be uncomfortable about privilege because they haven’t been supported to explore how racism plays out in our society and feel really confronted by the term “white privilege”. If this is you, I really encourage you to do some googling on the topic of implicit bias. It’s important to understand that if we are white, we gain privilege from racist ideas woven into how our society and it’s institutions are structured. We do not stop benefiting from this white privilege just because our own values are not racist. We cannot simply remove ourselves from the influence of Eurocentric and white supremacy ideas; we need to actively work on an individual and societal level to learn different ways of thinking.

Another reason that people may feel uncomfortable about privilege is if they are currently really struggling or have really struggled in the past. Acknowledging privilege may feel invalidating of our pain and struggle. This is understandable given that there are large parts of our society that do not understand the importance of listening to and taking emotional distress seriously; I believe if we could all get more skilled at this, our mental health statistics would look much better!

All of us need to take ourselves and our pain seriously. We should celebrate where we overcome obstacles and disadvantages. We also shouldn’t fool ourselves that we are somehow the one person within human history that is fully autonomous …our success has taken place within society, and where we have been able to take advantage of opportunities this has been due to a beautiful mix of personal qualities, what we’ve learned from our time in the world, and the messages and relationships that have been available to us.

This is why some of the work of promoting societal equity is about making more opportunities, positive relationships and celebratory messages available to groups experiencing disadvantage. Personally, to carry the card game analogy further, I like to think of our experiences of societal disadvantage, life challenge or of being different as jokers in the pack – cards that when played well are potentially the most powerful ones in our hand - but that’s another article.

Using Privilege

It’s a privilege to have privilege! Much of it we had no or little choice about, like our skin colour, or whether our identities and experiences are valued or deemed normal or acceptable within the social structures around us. In the lived experience world, we work to use our experiences of challenge, disadvantage, and growth to support better practices and a better world. Yet the opportunity to be employed, supported, and connected with others with similar experiences is itself a huge privilege.

We can use our privilege to make space for those that have less space offered to them. For me, this is the appropriate use of privilege. ?We can make space to listen, and perspective take. To recognise and validate.?We can use our voice to support other voices to be heard, to challenge structures that maintain the status quo. We can ally with others fighting inequity to make more opportunities available to all.

If you haven’t seen it before, Toby Morris has a great cartoon on privilege This Simple Comic Perfectly Explains Privilege | Bored Panda