Confronting privilege can be extremely uncomfortable—a productive and healthy discomfort, to be sure, but discomfort just the same. And once the process of confrontation has begun, it’s difficult to resist what a colleague once called “premature self-congratulation,” the often earnest, if insufferable, proclamations of the newly converted. “Thanks so much for bringing this privilege thing to our attention,” we might be tempted to say. “We’ll take it from here.”
The ability to live with that discomfort and without that preachy self-congratulatory tone is the hallmark of the works we have collected here. It is a struggle, both political and stylistic, and we hope that these essays will prove as unsettling and as discomfiting as they have been for the editors.
After all, we found our way to these essays, and to editing this book together, because we were so unsettled and challenged by confronting our own unearned privilege. The essays in this volume proved both provocative and helpful, not only as we first began to think our way through these issues, but also as we continue the process of confronting privilege today.
A Note to Students
If you are reading this book, odds are your instructors are already themselves engaged in this process. Don’t be afraid to talk about it, and to disagree. The way we’ve organized the book is sort of like peeling back the layers of an onion—the first articles describe the initial shock of realizing that in some way you, too, have experienced both privilege and the absence of privilege. Perhaps you are a working-class student on a scholarship at a private college or university where the students are so wealthy that they often drive nicer cars than the professors. But perhaps you are also white, or straight, or male. But then again, you might be Muslim or Jewish and experience feelings of exclusion around Christmastime. Or an older student, or disabled.
Subsequent sections complicate matters by looking at the ways these different statuses—sexuality, ability, race, class, gender, religion, and the like—each modify and shape the others. Such complication changes the “or” in the preceding paragraph to an “and,” or a “but also”: What if you are black and female? What if you are white but also Jewish? As you’ll see, these statuses sometimes reinforce each other—as in straight, white, Protestant male—and sometimes collide and undercut each other.
Some years ago, the great sociologist Erving Goffman described the ways these statuses all might coalesce into the “perfect” American male—the one who really has all the privilege:
In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. . . . Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself—during moments at least—as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior.aa
This dynamic is critical. Goffman is saying that every single person will, at some point in life, “fail to qualify” and will feel, at least at moments, “unworthy, incomplete, and inferior.” It is those feelings of inadequacy and inferiority that we think often motivate us to resist facing the kinds of privilege we do have, because we are so painfully aware of the places and arenas in which we don’t measure up. Privilege is far less visible to us than its absence; when we are discriminated against, it is much more painfully obvious than when we belong to the groups that benefit from that discrimination.
One of the editors of this book has a friend, “Jane,” who is a black lesbian. Jane says that when she hangs out with a bunch of her black friends, all she can think about is being a lesbian who doesn’t fit in. (That is, because virtually all the black people at her school seem to be straight.) But when Jane hangs out with her lesbian friends, all she can think about is how she’s black and doesn’t fit in (because all the lesbians at her school are white). We see where we don’t fit in far better than where we do.
One more thing: Sometimes confronting privilege can be painful, but it can also be really funny. When you have a spare 2:40, check out this video of the comedian Louis C.K. describing the moment he realized the privilege he gets for being a white man in America (warning: NSFW—or school!): www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqbw4nHrHc0.
Feeling Conscious, Not Guilty
Realizing that you do have privileges—no matter who you are—does not mean feeling miserable and guilty for the rest of your life, just conscious: of both the advantages and the disadvantages that every one of us has because of the statuses we occupy, some by birth and some by choice. Conscious that there simply are no level playing fields anywhere—and that every single arena, whether class or race or gender or sexuality or other social identities, is not just a source of identity but also a site of social inequality that is arbitrary and unfair. Knowing how it feels to experience that inequality in one arena should inspire you to help level the playing fields in all arenas.
But feeling conscious is an ongoing process, not a state of being. Consider this: Following the killing of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, three women of color began the Black Lives Matter movement. Hardly a week goes by that discussion of black men and women who end up dead at the hands of law enforcement fills the news. Similarly the number of racist incidents on college campuses across the country is on the rise. We have also seen more and more white allies standing up for racial justice (for example, check out the websites for the group Showing Up for Racial Justice and for the White Privilege Conference).
However, many white folks report experiencing race fatigue, and their involvement decreases. Many black organizers have pointed out, gently but firmly, that they do not have that luxury, that they can’t “opt out” of thinking about racism. They live in constant fear for their own lives and for those of their children. This is an example of white privilege.
White allies realizing that they have the privilege of opting out of thinking about racism exemplifies the sort of experiences you will have reading this book. Your task is to be as gentle and as firm when explaining privilege to others, and to be open and accountable to accepting the possibility of a different point of view. To facilitate this process, at the end of each section we have provided issues for discussion and activities for you to engage in. Instead of being “busy work” questions to make sure you’re really reading, these are specifically designed to help you engage in the very difficult work of self-examination. Our goal with this volume is not to simply provide you with the latest and most important scholarship on the subject of privilege. Learning about privilege entails examining your own life and experience as well. After all, each one of us has been deeply shaped by the systems and processes examined in these chapters. Understanding privilege is one step in working to dismantle systems of inequality.
This fourth edition of the book incorporates a number of new chapters that provide more recent contributions to the scholarship on privilege, including pieces addressing global, class, transgender, and disability studies perspectives. This was no easy task; the number of publications examining privilege has expanded dramatically since we wrote the first edition of this text and tried to capture the burgeoning new field. Along with this growth has come increased public visibility and debate. We begin the book with a piece attacking the concept of white privilege, written by a Princeton student, that sparked instant and vociferous debate. To capture some of the many responses, we include two here. Our hope is that the remainder of the text will prepare you to contribute to these public discussions with a deeper and more nuanced analysis of the importance of examining privilege if we seek a more socially just and equitable future.
There’s an old saying, attributed to Native Americans, that you can’t really understand another’s experience until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins. (Some college campuses help men do just that by “Walking a Mile in Her Shoes”—an organized activity in which men don high heels and attempt to walk across their own campuses.) Truth is, you can’t walk a mile in everyone’s moccasins; you have to trust people when they tell you about their experiences. But only if you really trust them will they be able, in turn, to really listen to your explanation of what it’s like to live inside your skin.
Acknowledgments
We are so grateful to the authors of the essays in this book for their courage and wisdom. We’re grateful to the instructors who feel they can use this book to challenge themselves and their students to think about these issues, all while maintaining a safe space for doing so. And we’re grateful to all of the students—past, present, and future—who take the risk of confronting privilege with us.
The process of producing a book like this is as much form as it is content, as much practical concerns as it is political engagement, as much technical as theoretical. We’ve had a dedicated staff at Westview Press. Over the years and editions, our editors at Westview have been supportive and enthusiastic, none more so than Leanne Silverman, who embraced the project with open arms! Since then, many people at Westview have helped to bring these many editions to life, and we thank them all. A thank-you is also due to Westview’s reviewers, who provided valuable advice as we shaped this fourth edition.
Abby thanks: the numerous people of color who have graciously served as patient mentors, especially Eddie Moore Jr., Brenda J. Allen, Rodney Coates, and Donald Cunnigen, who have taught me more about my own privilege and the value and necessity of working in multiracial teams than I could ever learn from any book. I am quite fortunate to have found a home in the Department of Sociology, and the Women’s and Ethnic Studies Program (at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs), where this urgent work is truly valued in an increasingly hostile university culture. I want to thank my mentor, Michael Kimmel, whose work has been truly inspirational for me, and whose friendship, support, and collaboration I value more than he can possibly know.
Most important, I want to thank my family. Joel—I am sustained in everything I do by your love, emotional support, and thoughtful care, which have grown exponentially over the years. And Sydney, my daughter and my friend. I am so proud of you, your maturity, your accomplishments, your values, and the adult you have become. You are always more than enough!
Michael thanks: a group of friends (Lillian Rubin, Troy Duster, Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, Angela Harris, Jerry Karabel, and the late and dearly missed Michael Rogin) who began discussing whiteness twenty years ago in a little study group; my longtime friends Harry Brod, Marty Duberman, Michael Kaufman, Mike Messner, and Don Sabo, who have sustained the endless conversation; my European colleagues and friends, notably Chris Beasley, Harry Ferguson, Debra Gimlin, Jeff Hearn, Oystein Holter, Lars Jalmert, and Jorgen Lorentzen; and my friend and co-editor Abby Ferber, for her insightful work and deeply ethical vision; she inspires me constantly. I’m also grateful to my colleagues and students at SUNY Stony Brook, my intellectual home for more than two decades, and to Amy and Zachary, my home forever.
We live in a nation where—despite all ideological assertions about meritocracy, about how individuals are free to rise as high as they can based solely on their individual achievements—race, class, and gender are the best predictors of what we social scientists call “life chances”: your level of wealth, occupation, health, even marital happiness. Ours is a nation where characteristics of your birth are the best predictors of where you will end up at your death. On the other hand, we actually do want to live in a nation in which those ideals of individual achievement are actually realized; where talent, motivation, ambition, and hard work actually do pay off; where race, class, sexuality, and gender predict very little about your economic and social life.
Every single day, we are inspired by all the people who have done so much work already to reveal the workings of oppression; all the scholars, writers, and activists who have struggled to make the unseen visible, teaching the privileged about privilege; those who had virtually no choice but to examine race, class, gender, and sexuality as they daily confronted the effects of inequality based on those experiences.
a Erving Goffman, Stigma (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 128.