The Invisibility of Our Own Privilege

While bodily autonomy and the continuing efforts of certain factions to prevent it are at the top of the news cycle and a driving factor for many of us, particularly in recent months, the purpose of Brass Ovaries is equal rights. That necessarily includes forced birth issues because without bodily autonomy, equal rights are impossible. But right now I would like to turn to privilege.

I am not talking about the privilege of wealth or fame or influence. I am talking about the mundane, the everyday, the privilege we *all* have to one extent or another. White privilege. Male privilege. Cisgender privilege. Hetero privilege. Religious privilege. Socio-economic privilege. Able-bodied privilege. Dominant language speaker privilege. Adult privilege. There are so many kinds of privilege, and by their very nature they are invisible to those who hold them unless those people are actively examining their lives, seeking evidence of it. Even then, we can’t truly understand the magnitude and effect of our privilege because we can’t live the experience of those without it. Peggy McIntosh, Senior Research Scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, wrote a powerful essay that I highly recommend. She elucidates points that I think many of us rarely consider, but that unfortunately support the continued power of dominant groups. An excerpt:

“Through work to bring materials from Women’s Studies into the rest of the curriculum, I have often noticed men’s unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say that they will work to improve women’s status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can’t or won’t support the idea of lessening men’s. Denials which amount to taboos surround the subject of advantages which men gain from women’s disadvantages. These denials protect male privilege from being fully acknowledged, lessened or ended. Thinking through unacknowledged male privilege as a phenomenon, I realized that since hierarchies in our society are interlocking, there was most likely a phenomenon of white privilege which was similarly denied and protected. As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an un-tutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh, Peace and Freedom, July/August 1989

The reason I am bringing this up now is an experience I had recently, involving a man I do not know and who does not know me.

I was holding a sign for a primary candidate outside of a polling place. It was a primary, so everyone there was a member of the same political party. There were two people there holding signs for a different candidate (one of them *was* that candidate – we’ll call him Candidate A for simplicity’s sake) in a different race – not someone opposed to the candidate I was there supporting. Candidate A was talking with voters, as candidates and their surrogates do. Rather than talking up his accomplishments and fitness for the position he seeks, he was talking his primary opponent (Candidate B) and his record down. Personally, I think that’s a bad strategy because the message is not how great you are, but that you think you’re at least better than the person you’re talking down, which I don’t think is much of a recommendation. After a few minutes of this, I made the comment that Candidate B says that the reason he didn’t vote for the bills in question was because he did not believe they went far enough. At that point, the other, much older man came over to yell at me. He demanded that I give him the numbers and details of the bills Candidate B referenced and defend his position. I told him I did not know those details, but that Candidate B says he didn’t vote for the bills in question because they didn’t go far enough, not because “he’s practically a member of the other party”, as he was currently being accused.

Yelling Old Guy refused to leave me alone. He just kept yelling his demands that I provide the same information – over and over. Five times. I told him I had answered him once and the conversation was over. I told him I was not discussing this with him. I told him directly to leave me alone. He refused. He was clearly trying to intimidate me into leaving the polling place to avoid him. Somewhere in there, he identified himself as a senior member of our city government, which I am sure was meant to impress and intimidate me, but just made me even more disgusted by his behavior. He was aggressive, obnoxious, and tone deaf. I cannot imagine him behaving that way if he wasn’t standing on the platform of a lifetime of massive white male privilege. I doubted he would behave that way if I were a man. And, indeed, when Candidate B arrived later, I noticed that both Yelling Old Guy and Candidate A stopped denigrating Candidate B to arriving voters.

While the yelling was going on, I stood there wondering what would be the best way to stop this arrogant, overbearing excuse for a man and decided that there were really only two options: turn my back and ignore him or call the police to come and keep the peace. Now, we were at a polling place. We were ostensibly on the same side, just not supporting the same primary candidates. I did not want to have to call the police. I did not want the incident to grow into something that could create negative press that would harm the larger community and its goals. So I turned my back and engaged the candidate in conversation. Luckily, that helped and Yelling Man (who, it turned out, was Candidate A’s father - how excruciatingly embarrassing for him) moved away.

Candidate A seemed reasonable enough, and we had a nice conversation about his qualifications and positions, which is the way political discourse should work.

My question is this: why is it so common for men who claim the title liberal, or feminist, or ally, to refuse to recognize that they *themselves* have any privilege? Why is it normal for them to dismiss or even attack women? I’m not saying every man is like that, but this is a very common problem. Just look at Chris Matthews joking about sexual assault and harassment or Piers Morgan, who is/was (who knows at the moment?) a Conservative but claimed repeatedly to be supportive of transgender persons, all the while misgendering Robin Mock and being otherwise insensitive and offensive and then doubling down when called out on it?

I suspect the answer is in Peggy McIntosh’s essay. We are all so trained into believing our privilege is the natural, normal way of things, or, even worse, that we *earned* it, that we have a hard time accepting that privilege is conferred, not earned, and that not only are many of our successes in life based upon privilege, but that others’ failures are based in lack of privilege and access to the benefits that our privilege confers.

No one is a success alone. No one succeeds solely on the basis of their own hard work. Millions of people work hard all of their lives and still suffer and die in poverty. We, as a community, as a nation, are failing them. If we are ever to have anything even approximating equality in our country, we have to recognize our privilege and work – and vote – to uplift our brothers and sisters who lack certain privileges so they can have the same opportunities the more privileged among us have.

Please. Inform yourself and vote. Volunteer for a cause or a candidate you care about. Volunteer at the polls. Democracy only works if we participate, and participate knowledgeably.