15 Understanding, Recognizing and Addressing Privilege
Understanding, Recognizing and Addressing Privilege
Understanding, recognizing, and addressing privilege can be an uncomfortable, intimidating, and interrogative experience.
Understanding, recognizing, and addressing privilege can be an uncomfortable, intimidating, and interrogative experience.
However, these are necessary steps to not only understanding how racism and discrimination exist in the world, but how you may be unconsciously or unconsciously upholding it. Recognize that privilege is not necessarily something we actively seek out to acquire; often, privileges are things that you are born into, such as whiteness, middle-class status, or social mobility. However, it is important to note that while you may not have “asked” for these things, aspects of your privilege afford you advantages and opportunities on a societal level. To your advantage, other people are actively disadvantaged, marginalized, silenced, or forced to make space for you and your identity. Levelling these power dynamics includes actively taking steps to educate yourself about privilege, share your privilege, and advocate for the rights of others. Here are some tools to begin that journey and create stepping stones to anti-racism and critical allyship.
We also encourage you to check out these resources:
Strategies and Tools for Reflection
Reading
Beginning by understanding the “social matrix” we live within is a great way to understanding your privilege and the social dynamics and rules that contribute to racism and discrimination. Reading literature, blogs, books, zines or even listening to podcasts, youtube videos, and other social media outlets informed by critical insights and people of colour can assist in developing a knowledge around racism and discrimination that you may not have known about, due to your privilege and social location. Reading about racism and how you may be complicit in it is a necessary education step to being able to explore social location and identity. Some suggested resources to read are located in the resource tab on this page.
Exploring social location and identity
Often, people think that social location and identity are a list of your demographic and physical identity markers. However, social location and social identity are both tangible/seen and intangible/not seen. Social location and identity can encapsulate your racial and ethnic identity, gender, creed, sexuality and sexual orientation, (dis)ability, experiences with mental health, and socioeconomic factors such as housing, education, political positioning, class, and immigration, among others. While it is important to have an awareness about the different things that make you who you are and shape your experiences, it is even more important to understand where this positions you in the “societal matrix.”
Social location and identity are almost like chess; certain aspects of your identity that you hold automatically award you status/hierarchy/considerations/opportunities in comparison to others. This inherently shapes your day-to-day interactions, success, mobility, access, and opportunity, whether you choose to acknowledge this or not. That is the locational aspect of your identity: how aspects of your identity influence your placement on the “chessboard,” or what is better known as the societal matrix. How does it shape your place in hierarchies of school, work, day-to-day interactions, conversations, and reflections in dominant media?
The societal matrix is an insidious force that is informed by societal rules, messaging, stereotypes and scripts, and binary social constructs, such as race and gender. Depending on your placement in the matrix, which is typically informed by your social location, you can be afforded opportunities, accolades, and experiences that other folks, in lower positions on the matrix or hierarchy, are excluded, rejected, and withheld from. Intersectionality, or the intersections of your social locations and identities, converge, compound, and connect to determine your placement in the societal matrix. This placement can be unconsciously and consciously known.
Here’s an example:
Again, you did not necessarily ask for these social identity markers, but a knowledge of these privileges and your social location supports you in unpacking how you may be upholding and contributing racist and discriminatory policies/procedures/discussions consciously and unconsciously, what to do about it in reflection and social actions, and sites where advocacy and change are needed.
Intention Exploration
A necessary step in your anti-racism and critical allyship journey is understanding your own and their impacts on people of colour. Sometimes, our intentions, no matter how pure and good, do not always align with what we say or do and can impact how other people perceive our communication and actions. Understanding that we may fumble, a reflection on your intention before speaking up and acting is a great tool to inform and strategize the safest and most equitable ways in communicating your idea, vision, or intention. Often, white folks who want to advocate for racialized persons have genuine intentions that, at times, become a bit muddled; in reflecting on your critical allyship, interrogating the intention behind it is integral to ensure safer advocacy.
The intentionality behind advocacy:
- for personal gain, recognition, or praise,
- without knowledge or research on the topic,
- for the sake of appearing “anti-racist” without fully understanding what that entails,
- to join the bandwagon of posting and discussing “hot topics” and sociopolitical events,
- to sympathize with specific people or populations, and/or
- to merely avoid being attacked, judged, or called racist
can actually be more self-serving to you than it is helpful to people of colour. If your intentions are rooted in places that absolve you of guilt, blame, and shame and to make you look good, simply put, is harmful, unsafe, and unproductive. Reflect on: why do I want to take this social issue on? What might it cost me and am I comfortable with that? How will I mediate my feelings in the process if I don’t agree or if I’m challenged? What power am I willing to give away? Do I understand the issue I am advocating for? Is this in line with what the community I wish to help wants? Where did I acquire this knowledge/idea? You can begin to unpack the intention behind your advocacy, speech, communication, and action in hopes of safeguarding the impact.
However, it is important to consider, even with the purest intentions, that the impact may not align with what we wanted. Often, the style of communication that we have learned to use, down to language, word choice, the context in which we’re communicating, and semantics, is reflective of othering language or pejorative phrasing. For example, many common phrases that we continue to use on an everyday basis have racist origins, and popular social media apps (like TikTok and Twitter) have resulted in increased public attention to white folks’ appropriation of AAVE/BVE (African American Vernacular English or Black Vernacular English). We have been socialized to communicate, unfortunately, a bit microaggressively. Unpacking this, alongside the intention, can assist us in working toward a safer impact. Don’t let this discourage you or cause you to feel like a “bad” ally; reflect and learn from these experiences and keep going!
Some tips are:
- Remember that you cannot dictate how someone may react to your response. You may have great intentions, but recognizing and remembering that we all come from different backgrounds and experiences that may impact how we hear, see, perceive, and receive things is important. Reflecting on how past negative experiences that people of colour may have had and how these build up over time and cause greater impact may be a good, initial consideration
- Sincerely apologize, forgive yourself, and move forward. A sincere apology shows that you are willing to understand that you may be in the wrong, misinformed, or poorly communicating your ideas. However, it also shows that you are willing to learn if you face the discomfort, acknowledge that you may make more mistakes, and agree that you are willing to learn. Seek to learn, look for clarification, and continuously reflect on and refashion your approaches
- Understand that it is not the responsibility of racialized folks to absolve you of your guilt or forgive you for missteps. Part of critical allyship is understanding that racialized folks do not need to befriend, praise, or reward you for your anti-racism or accept your apologies on behalf of a group of people. While an apology for missteps is important, don’t do it because you’re looking for support, approval, or reward; do it because you mean it.
- Learn about structural racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of discrimination. Sometimes your language is harmful because you just don’t know; increasing your knowledge can assist with acquiring newer and safer language
- Ask for clarification or repeat what you heard before responding
- Recognize that you are in control of your own emotions. While uncomfortable impacts may be stressful when you recognize that you perpetrated, whether intentionally or unintentionally, you can control your own defensiveness, guilt, and other presentations of emotions to not cause further harm. If doing that means saying sorry and extending the conversation another time to give yourself a breather, in the long run, that is safer for everyone.
- Find support from someone or a group of people that you trust to share your experiences with who are comfortable challenging some of your ideologies for the greater good. Make sure you ask people to chat before you start talking about these things. Avoid shifting these responsibilities onto people or groups of colour; acquire the knowledge and reflect on these experiences without the uncompensated labour of people of colour.
Capacity to Advocate Assessment
If you are still exploring your intentions and capabilities, assessing your capacity to advocate and be an ally is also a useful tool on this journey. Reflecting as asking yourself these questions can assess your readiness to do the work and some areas that may need more reflection and/or education before beginning (Caroline Belden, The Buzz):
- Who am I? How do my cultural identities impact what I value?
- Which of my identities are most salient for me in daily life?
- What is the history of this group’s struggle for equity?
- What is the history of this group of people in my own community?
- What language has this group of people asked us to use in discussing who they are and what they need?
- Have I allowed people to name themselves or am I naming people without knowing them?
- Where have I, perhaps unintentionally, negatively impacted someone in this community?
- How can I make amends that acknowledge more than just my intent?
- Where am I on my journey to living as an Ally?
- What circle of whiteness might I occupy?
- Where can I use my power to elevate the voices of this community?
- Where do I hear and see bias in my own community?
- How can I disrupt these narratives or norms with the knowledge I have gained?
- Where and from whom did I acquire this knowledge and are the sources reflective of the community I aim to be an ally to?
Tackling White Fragility
A lot of the knowledge, discussion, and reflection needed in developing an anti-racist lens and critical allyship is frankly, uncomfortable. It can feel like an interrogation, it can feel hopeless like there is nothing you can do, and it can feel guilt or rage-inducing. Think of racism and discrimination as this behemoth that you were born into. It can feel a bit sticky to feel responsible or to be held accountable for something you had “no hand in creating in the first place.” However, it is important to understand that, while you may not have created it, you may be upholding it.
The concepts of white fragility and white rage have become terminology in the world of anti-racism work.
Often, when people of colour or other counterparts teach, speak, and discuss the roots of racism, white supremacy, and the ongoing impacts of racism and discrimination, white folks get mad or sad, they cry and feel “unnecessary guilt,” or they are, simply, in disbelief. A statement like, “well I am not responsible for slavery,” “I am not a racist,” “I feel like you are attacking me,” “I feel so bad; I did not realize all of this was going on,” and “this isn’t my fault” are common responses that white folks often invoke to absolve themselves or manage their negative feelings.
This is normal! It’s because this discussion may or may not be interrogative and disrupting everything that you hold as “truth.” That can be scary; your thoughts then may cascade into a realm that feels like you need to withdraw from the subject matter and discussion because of your discomfort and overall lack of understanding. However, this process reinforces racism! It is a bit self-serving to stop there and centre your emotions over the lifetime of cyclical harmful experiences that your BIPOC friends, schoolmates, colleagues, partners, etc. deal with daily. Your momentary discomfort is a BREAKTHROUGH; it’s rewriting the discriminatory and racist ideologies that you formally held as truth based on what you were taught and what you absorbed.
It is important to externalize this process, but not onto people of colour. It is not the responsibility of people of colour to answer your questions, coddle or soothe you, address what you feel are tensions, or provide examples when you are experiencing white fragility or white rage. Exploring these topics at a systemic, societal, and discourse-level can help remind you that there is a much larger machine keeping discrimination and racism alive that trickles down into interpersonal interactions. We encourage you to talk these feelings and emotions out with other allies to strategize how to combat and move forward, rather than “blaming the messenger”/ racialized people.
Check these videos on white fragility to begin unpacking and understanding: