Privilege
One morning, around the time I was deciding where to attend university, I found myself momentarily puzzled by a segment on the morning news. A group of delegates was accompanying the Liberian President en route to a press conference denouncing a recent string of violent crime. Or so the news anchor told me. I couldn’t pick out the president from the group, but I also wasn’t very vested in the story. Violence in Liberia didn’t really concern me. It was too far away to matter. I ate my cereal and didn’t give it much thought.
I ended up attending two universities during my undergrad, one in North America and the other in Europe. While I was there, the European school began a campaign to raise awareness around the theme of ‘Privilege’. Posters in bathrooms reminded us how few people around the world have access to toilets. Or running water. Or soap to wash their hands. #Privileged. It was a private university in a country where higher education is predominately free, attended by children the nation’s wealthiest magnates. The campaign was well meaning, despite its ostentatious sounding slogan.
Privilege is all around us, simultaneously envied by those without it and misunderstood by those who deny they have it. I experience privilege in nearly every aspect of my life: white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, class privilege. You name it, I have it. Nothing serves as a greater testament to this more than the fact that I am occasionally unhappy I was born so privileged.
My own acceptance of this is relatively new, however. For a long time, I refused to believe it. We’re not in the 60s anymore. Jim Crow is dead, and Alice Paul has long since won. The days are gone where white men sit uncontested on the thrones of Washington and Wall Street. Obama was president. Ginsburg served on the Supreme Court. Ellen was an icon. Jenner taught the world that it was okay to be who you really are. Examples were everywhere of the oppressed reaching peaks that historically only the privileged could even dream of summiting. I didn’t think I needed to recognize my privilege because I didn’t think it mattered anymore.
My mind changed that morning when I was watching the news and deciding where to attend university. I figured out who the Liberian President was. It turns out that she was centred in the camera frame the whole time, where my mind expected to see a leader, but instead saw a black woman. I began to wonder how many silent judgements have paved the path to where I am today. Probably more than I could ever know. #Priviledged.
