By Chris Satullo
I am, it is said, one of those people who “needs to contemplate their privilege.”
I also, it is often said, need to “check” said privilege, or in fact “renounce” it.
My life, I freely confess, has been shaped by many unearned blessings – e.g. good parents, the opportunity to attend great public schools for free and an elite college without bankrupting my parents or myself, and a skein of decent summer jobs thanks to my dad’s political connections.
I’ve also enjoyed some earned blessings – promotions, raises, awards – when my hard work was rewarded. And even there, I was blessed in that my work was not dismissed or minimized because of the neighborhood I happened to grow up in or the size of my nose (which is, by the way, considerable).
Meanwhile, pondering how the systems of American life have treated me, I acknowledge I’ve never been harassed in a store as a potential thief because of my looks, never been denied a bank loan because of the amount of pigment in my skin, never been pulled over for driving on a sunny day because an irritable cop wanted to feel better about himself by giving me a hard time for being Italian-American, never been subjected to a daily bombardment of messages, both subtle and overt, that I was somehow “less than,” somehow not a real American.
I’m also aware that the dumbest, most infuriating question a white American can ask about life in these United States is: “Why are they so angry?”
Each day, I say a simple prayer to the Good Lord, asking for help in maintaining an attitude of gratitude for the myriad blessings of my life, paired with a firm resolve to be kind, generous and imaginatively empathetic towards every person I encounter, including those who, frankly, piss me off. (Not that I always live up to that prayer, but that’s my intent.)
Yet, these days, when you look like I do – unquestionably male, irrevocably white, noticeably gray and clearly comfortable financially – you are going to be subjected, in the media and sometimes in person, to regular, condescending lectures about your cluelessness and selfishness when it comes to race, justice and the true story of America.
Even so, let me risk talking a little about privilege – and whether the concept is anywhere near as helpful in addressing real injustice, in building genuine equity, as a horde of diversity trainers and young Twitter scolds seem to think it is.
I have three problems with how privilege gets framed and wielded as a weapon in the current, necessary and overdue dialogue about equity:
1) From my observation, an unrelenting focus on one’s own privilege doesn’t seem all that effective at inspiring genuinely helpful actions in the real world. It seems as likely to foster self-flagellation that leads to pained paralysis and self-silencing or, worse, a penchant for self-righteous sermonizing, denunciation and virtue-signaling that substitutes for any study of how useful change actually happens in the real world.
2) The rhetorical apparatus around privilege seems designed to enrage and alienate the very white folks who most need to be reached: the ones who are not hopelessly racist but who do need to bone up on some grim realities of American history and to gain more of a clue about what it means, day by day, to be a person of color in our lamentably imperfect society.
The way the term privilege sometimes gets bandied about resembles the kind of loose, pejorative generalization about a mass of people, each with their own complicated stories, that is a cardinal sin of prejudice. It implies – and, in the hands of some particularly egregious “trainers,” even insists – that if your skin is a certain color, nothing that you have or have achieved is earned. It’s all the ill-gotten, culpable fruit of systemic racism.
This rhetoric tells people that none of the challenges, hurts, disappointments, griefs or tragedies of their lives count for much. What matters most is the color of their skin (or their gender). For those unpardonable sins of DNA, they must embark on a journey of self-abasing atonement with no obvious goal or endpoint. And we wonder why people say, “Hell, no, I won’t go.”
Might I suggest that invitations to imaginative empathy will do much more to open people’s eyes and hearts than lectures about privilege will? Invite folks to tell their story and acknowledge the truth of the hurts, disappoints and injustices they’ve suffered in their lives. Then ask them to imagine: “Think about how lousy that felt, still feels in fact, and imagine what it would be like if the world around you was engineered to produce that kind of hurt and insult for you every month, every week, even every day. How would that feel? How much anger would that build up? How hard would it be to trust that your hard work would be recognized and rewarded? How hard it would be just to get out of bed and face another day of that grief?”
That seems a much likelier path to the Beloved Community than being told by a trainer at a workplace, “Take one step forward if you’ve never gone to bed hungry.” Shaming, any psychologist who knows anything will tell you, is more likely to create defensiveness and doubling down than epiphany and behavior change.
3) My final and perhaps freshest offering on this topic: Much rhetoric around privilege – particularly the riff about renouncing one’s privilege – misses a key point: Privilege comes in multiple forms and is not always a zero-sum game.
Here’s one of the “privileges” I unquestionably enjoy compared to my Black fellow citizens: I am decidedly more likely to have upheld my constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure, false accusation and wrongful imprisonment. But I do not have to give up the privilege of living under the full protection of the Bill of Rights for people of color at long last to gain that which should also be their right. My renouncing of that privilege would do nothing to achieve that end, indeed might make it less attainable.
On a humbler level, I enjoy the privilege of strolling the aisles at Target without being hassled as a suspected shoplifter. But I don’t have to give up that small boon so that fellow citizens of darker pigmentation might be spared galling indignity. What I must do, instead, is to speak up consistently and effectively when I see everyday injustice happening, to defend out loud my Black and brown neighbors’ right to shop without suspicion or harassment.
The dialogue around privilege too often misses this point: Many of the most important forms of what is now called “privilege” do not need to be “given up.” They simply need to be shared equally.
Do the privileged need to give up or change some things? Sure.
We should never blind ourselves with clueless fairy tales about America’s history and its current level of systemic racism. (Which is, by the way, nowhere near as bad as it once was, but nowhere near where it needs to be i.e. zero). We need to be more vigilant to notice and oppose injustices big and small in whatever ways we can, wielding our votes, voices and wallets consistently on the side of justice.
Should I renounce any expectation that I should get the big promotion and the seat at the table where my voice is heard first? Well, yeah, of course. But I do bristle at the assumption that I ever thought that. Sure, being ambitious and wanting to do work that had impact, I often sought to be at the table. But I was denied advances in my career as often as I got them; I can tell you honestly that the occasions when the person who did get the job was a woman or person of color stung less, not more, because at least it felt like some justice was being done.
What about my nice condo in Center City, my new hybrid car, my healthy pension? Does “renouncing” my privilege mean I should simply give up those things and live as though poor? Is that what woke Twitter expects? (It may well be what Jesus of Nazareth expects, which poses a much harder internal reflection.) Do I see any of the young people who lecture people like me about our comfortable, white, graying maleness renouncing all material goods and abandoning all career ambition?
Understand that I’m objecting only to absolutist, sloppy rhetoric around privilege, not the obvious point that it is morally incumbent upon me, given my blessings, to deploy my bank account and my time to support equity and justice. We all need to be more thoughtful about what we do on the ground in our communities and on the national level. We need to think hard about how we donate to and vote for the politicians who make the laws, appoint the judges and decide the budgets.
I do give of my time and treasure, not as generously as some, not as much as I probably could and should, but not trivially either. I need to do better, because my country needs me to do better so it can do better at living up to its noble ideals.
But, sad to say, one thing that surely won’t inspire me to do better is a smug lecture from someone who was not yet born when I was spending my days exposing the inequities of school funding or risking my job to turn my newspaper into the first mainstream news outlet in America to come out in favor of reparations for slavery.
I’m for the cause, truly, but some of the rhetoric advanced on its behalf is enough to make one scream.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia