Privilege

What is privilege? Who has it? Who doesn’t?

On virtually every campus in the country, students are debating about privilege. We are being asked to “check our privilege,” which often invites a significant amount of self-reflection before speaking—for example, recognizing the specific station from which one speaks.

Privilege is elusive, though, precisely because it is not a thing, not a possession that one “has.” For one thing, privilege is not a singular unit: either you have it or you don’t. There are so many axes of privilege—by race, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion. The list goes on and on.

For another thing, privilege is neither bad nor good. It’s not bad to be privileged. It simply is.

Third, privilege is not like an article of uncomfortable clothing that can simply be discarded once one realizes it’s there. Once you are aware of it, though, you don’t have to feel guilty. It’s like feeling guilty for breathing. But awareness brings responsibility—at least for those who believe, as we, the editors do, that getting an advantage through something other than your own talents and hard work is unfair.

These first readings explore the dimensions of privilege today, making it visible. We start with an effort to deny it, by a white male student at Princeton. In it, he claims that his class background negates all the other ways in which he is privileged: race, gender, able-bodiedness, sexuality, or religion. In this way he reveals something important about how we all navigate the complex world of privilege: that very often what is most visible to us are the ways in which we are not privileged, and what is obscure are those ways in which we are privileged.

It’s as if we live in a culture in which no one wants to be privileged; rather, everyone seems to want to be unprivileged. Partly, this is because we want to believe that whatever we have earned has been the result of our own hard work, overcoming obstacles, applying ourselves. We don’t want to think that we were handed this all on a silver platter. It’s as if we are a medieval society standing on its head: in the medieval era, status was fixed, and members of the hereditary aristocracy knew they were privileged and reveled in it. Peasants could only dream of being lords.

Today, no one wants to claim they are privileged. It’s as if owning your privilege is a badge of dishonor.

The essay by Tal Fortgang, denying his privilege, spurred an enormous reaction, as others replied by examining just what sort of privilege he actually might have and explaining why those dimensions of privilege might not be visible to him. (The articles by Charles Clymer and Daniel Gastfriend are examples of this response.)

Following this dialogue, we turn to Peggy McIntosh’s brilliant essay in which she discusses the way white privilege and male privilege intersect. McIntosh’s pathbreaking discussion of the “invisible knapsack” described and enumerated a wide variety of privileges that white people get, just for being white. White people did nothing to “earn” these; they’re just inherited at birth. In this essay, she uses race to talk about gender. In “The Invisible Crutch” Jessica Shea translates this knapsack into a crutch and enumerates a wide array of benefits one gets just for being able-bodied.

In addition, the empirical article by Angelica Guitierrez and Miguel Unzueta examines the effects of affirmative action compared to “legacy admissions” at certain elite colleges and universities. We present them here as a dialogue: the denial of privilege and the beginnings of understanding how some dimensions of privilege might be invisible to us. Next, Juan Cole gives us a satirical yet poignant examination of how whiteness even provides a level of privilege to terrorists. Finally, Bob Pease examines how privilege is not allotted only by social status, but also by geographical position.

In this edition of the book, we’ve continued to highlight religion as a source of privilege. In 1797, John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, which was ratified unanimously by the Congress. The treaty declared, pretty unequivocally, “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” And from the signing of the Constitution onward, the separation of church and state has been a foundational principle of American democracy, and no one is to be persecuted for practicing their religion.

Yet is there not a certain privilege given to those who are Christian? Is not Christianity so normative that it is difficult for those who are not Christian to practice their religion? Ironically, in recent years, that has been interpreted to mean that if my religion commands that I discriminate against some people, it should be permitted—because the state can’t interfere with the free exercise of religion.