Prejudice: Privilege

Privilege has become a dirty word, used to imply that being privileged is something to be ashamed of.

In turn, being disadvantaged has become a badge of honour. I hear people say, “I wasn’t privileged,” to add weight to their argument and cut privileged people out of the conversation. Worse still, it pushes home the idea that some people are privileged and others are not.

We can’t understand how privilege works without comparing everyone’s perspective. If we want a meaningful debate we need input from all parts of society.

We must move this awkward conversation out the way and embrace the fact: everyone is privileged.


Anecdote

On my first day at senior school my mom gave me a pep talk before leaving home.

“I won’t demand that you pass exams or get good grades," she said, "the only thing I ask is that you stay in school. Don’t go off playing truant with the naughty kids. Stay in school. Get an education.”

Truancy was rife at my school. Most truants slipped out through a hole in the fence after morning assembly. However, one lad in my form group rarely bothered turning up for registration, let alone lessons. We’d see him maybe once a month.

On one occasion, surprised to see him return, someone jibed, “Fucking hell, Chris, I thought you’d left!”
“Nah, still here,” Chris replied in a nonchalant manner.
The way he cut the conversation off made his reply sound callous. I marked him out as one of those rogues who didn’t care what others thought about his behaviour.

Near the end of second year Chris started turning up regularly at school and hanging out in my group of friends.
I asked a friend, “Do we want Chris hanging out with us? He’s a wrong-un. He rarely comes into school.”
My friend replied, “Well, his mom died last week.”

I took this to mean: Go easy on him, his mom died last week. Give the guy a break.
But what my friend meant was: He’s coming into school because his mom died last week. His mom was dying of cancer, he had to stay at home and care for her. Now she’s dead he can come to school.

Wooosh, that went over my head - it missed me by a country mile. In my world my parents looked after me. My dad went out to work, my mom cooked my meals and washed my clothes. This is how the world works, no?

Everybody has a different experience of life. Everybody thinks their own experience is normal, humble and far from extravagant. Only a small amount of curiosity and interest in other people is required to notice others who are less fortunate.

Some privileged people deny their privilege. They say all children get to go to school. It’s not a privilege, it’s a right given to every child. The first step is to accept that not all children get the school privilege.


Discussion

Common thinking: poverty is a sliding scale

Many people refer to privilege like it’s a binary state. The haves and the have nots. You are either privileged or not privileged.

Other people see a linear scale of privilege, possibly born from the classic linear representation of class: working poor, working class, middle class, upper class. However, this is still too simplistic.

At my primary school I had friends whose parents couldn’t afford food. My friend Robert had his free school meal at lunch time, stole some crisps from the shop on their way home and came into school hungry the next morning.

Robert got to attend school but went hungry.
Chris was fed but was mostly out of school to act as a child carer.

If poverty is a linear scale, how can you place these two people above or below each other? They had different experiences growing up; neither can be “graded” above the other.

Reality: many types of poverty and privilege

The reality is that privilege is a messy network of bubbles rippling through society.

We can plot these bubbles on a map. The map still has a y-axis, where higher privileges are above the more basic. Related privileges are placed in columns, similar to the common perception diagram we saw earlier. However, most privileges are unrelated and get imparted independently. These privileges sit side-by-side, across the x-axis.

In this way it should be possible to draw a meandering line across the diagram to delineate the privileges you had and didn’t have when growing up.

Privilege is a far too complex topic to fully explore and map on one diagram. What we have here is a simplified map of common privileges. Many more privileges exist than shown here.
E.g. you could place clean water at the bottom and disabilities such as impaired sight or hearing to the side.

The important takeaway from this diagram is how variable privilege can be. You may have not been to private school or had private tuition, but your parents did pay for your driving lessons and buy you a car. You can be very privileged in one column (one aspect of life) yet underprivileged in other ways.

Everyone has been privileged in some way from their parents’ investment in them - whether that be money, time, love or a combination of the three. If we have achieved more, it is by standing on the shoulders of our parents.

Attacking privilege and using poverty as a badge of honour is a distraction from the real issues. We achieve nothing by pointing the finger at those who are more privileged. The goal must be to raise the baseline to improve the lives of people missing the most basic necessities.