Yesterday afternoon for an hour and a half I attended a “group supe” meeting for my county’s CASA organization on the subject of privilege.  It was hosted by two white women in their late twenties to early thirties or so who both were quite prompt in speaking about their own sense of privilege in having been able to, in one case, graduate from college without any student debt (a privilege that makes me somewhat envious given my own crushing student debt burden) and in the other case, to have one’s paternal family pay for the price of a house so that she could could profit from the opportunity of purchasing a foreclosed property on the cheap (another privilege I do not happen to have).  Yet while among the rules of the discussion were for us to talk about our own privileges and not the privileges of others, it seems that at least some of the women there (including one of the speakers) could not help but engage in some white male bashing of the sort that I tend to take particularly personally, having been one of the few white men there at the meeting, it being pretty rare for men to volunteer for causes involving the well-being of children in the foster care system for one reason or another.

Although I was a bit more subdued than my usual vocal self in such a meeting, it was not because I in any way have a hard time talking about matters of privilege.  Like most people, though I am far more sensitive to the sorts of privileges that I am denied than to those I possess.  This is, I believe, a profoundly normal aspect of human nature.  I am sure that throughout my life I have regularly profited from being an articulate white man who was born an American citizen and whose family, although never wealthy or even middle class, has valued education, high moral and ethical standards, and has viewed travel as a very high priority.  Yet like most people, I have often been far more quick to notice those privileges I have been denied for one reason or another.  I can remember the lack of opportunity to apply for a great many scholarships for people of low economic status because they were set aside for minority students far more than the ways that being a white male has kept trouble from happening that I have never even noticed, with security guards or police officers who might otherwise find me a potential threat.

Among the more unusual sources of privilege that I have noticed is the privilege of being right-handed.  Of course, most of the world, being right-handed, does not recognize the privilege of being able to sit at a table and not be concerned about elbowing people, or being able to open doors naturally, to be able to sit down at a desk and have one’s arm supported, to have computers set up conveniently, to be able to write or draw without having to worry about smudging, and even to open doors easily with one’s dominant hand.  As a left-handed person, I have witnessed the many subtle ways that a world designed by and for right-handed people conspires to make you feel more clumsy and awkward than you already are, and forces you to have to deal with a thousand petty inconveniences, such as the inability to find good scissors, that other people often do not notice because such inconveniences do not exist for them.  As is the case with privileges in general, this is only visible to me because it is a privilege I am denied.  We do not notice the water in which we swim, only the ways in which we swim against the current.

One of the other privileges I have noticed that seldom is acknowledged is the privilege of having a worldview similarity with those around you.  I have spent most of my life being very much out of step with those around me.  In fact, I highly doubt that there is a place in existence in this world where I would feel entirely in step with those around me in terms of religion and politics and related issues.  In the vast majority of historical regimes, my life expectancy would have been rather short as I would have been an obvious candidate for exile, imprisonment, or execution because of my religious and political beliefs.  Nor are all of the countries in our contemporary world all that friendly to me and my views, even if I have no particular great interest in violent overthrow of even the most corrupt of this world’s many corrupt regimes.  Those who use social media and have mainstream leftist views have a great deal of privilege that they do not recognize, the privilege of not having their posts censored and their accounts tampered with by leftist goons.  Likewise, those whose politics and sensibilities are entirely in line with the rural south will not have to undergo the sorts of occasionally violent opposition that is dealt to those who are bookish and intellectual and obviously not from around there, a fate that is not dissimilar from that directed at people of different political worldviews in violently political cities like Portland and others.  It is a privilege to blend in, and that is a privilege that some of us have never and are likely never to know.

I do not say this to complain.  What I do say this for is to note that for me, just as is the case for you and for everyone else, it is the privileges that we do not have and are unlikely ever to have that burn the most in our consciousness.  I have no doubt that there are women who could tell me of the privilege it is not to have auto mechanics continually try to rip you off because they assume you are clueless about mechanical matters, or how much of a privilege it is to be able to walk alone at night without fear of violence because you do not look like an easy target, or the privilege it is not to have to worry about monthly (or irregular) periods or menopause or the fear of pregnancy.  And, truth be told, I do not think about these privileges much because I do not have to.  It is also likely that readers with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds would be able to write eloquently and at length about the privileges they are denied because of their backgrounds that I blissfully enjoy without thinking much about it.  Moreover, they may see such privileges as they possess as being merely just attempts to balance the scales, even if those are privileges that I and others like me are quick to resent.  What looks like justice to us looks like privilege to others, and our attempts to attack the privileges that others have only causes them to resentfully bring to our attention privileges we have that we take for granted.  In such a world, we ought to be charitable to the privileges of others in light of those we possess, but we live in a world where charity is in all too short of a supply.