Leaning In To My White Privilege
I’m white. Apparently that gives me automatic privilege to be in the world without my intelligence, my worth, the space that I can hold, or, anything else about me really, being questioned, undermined, or otherwise devalued. Except that I am female and have a visible mobility disability. Those are two not-so-insignificant strikes against me. However, depending on who is assessing me in that moment, my white card has the potential to trump all the other cards.
Years ago, a friend was completing their Ph.D. studying privilege and I was one of the subjects to whom he was posing questions. That word, privilege, didn’t sit well with me and I realize now why it didn’t. It is because that word feels too small, not enough, to fully capture the systemic, structural and entrenched injustices and biases of our world. So at that time, I responded that I thought the notion of privilege was a questionable, slippery slope; that, yes, there were imbalances and inequalities but someone thinking, ‘well, I can never remove myself from __________ or I can never achieve because I don’t have the same privileges as ____________’, can be reductionist at best and a recipe for learned helplessness at worst.
There are plenty of people, myself included, who are not exactly privileged by conventional standards, but, we have enough buffers against our perceived lack of privilege that we can…
