What does privilege feel like? How do we know we have it?
The essays in this section take us deeper inside the actual experience of privilege and try to excavate the experience of the privileged coming to terms with their privilege. For example, Allan Johnson and Michael Messner each begin to unravel the processes in which they “became” straight or white or male—and the consequences for those upon whom their identities were built.
Sonny Nordmarken makes it clear that whether you are male or female, there is a certain privilege that comes from actually being—and feeling yourself to be—one or the other. Sure, it’s true that gender is an axis of privilege, but being within the confines of the binary of male and female is, itself, a comfort to those who feel themselves to fall outside of it.
Woody Doane begins to complicate these axes of privilege by exploring the gradual aging of one who was born privileged (middle class, white, male, heterosexual) through the growing realization that privilege by age is no longer his. This moment of realization can be both the source of Tal Fortgang’s refusal to acknowledge his privilege and a source of empathic understanding of others’ experiences. Both Diana Kendall and Paul Kivel explore the continuing realities of class and religious privilege.
Finally, Cara Liebowitz addresses that question that many of us constantly ask when we first learn about privilege: Are we “wrong” or “bad” just because we’re privileged? Are we supposed to feel guilty? Liebowitz offers an emphatic no—with a caveat that acknowledging that you have received something that is not rightfully yours obligates you to fight for a system in which everyone can, and does, play on an even playing field. Otherwise, it would be like being told the deck was stacked and deciding to play anyway, as if it weren’t.