WHAT’S YOUR PRIVILEGE?

“I get it anyway, so why should I care?” “I think I am too privileged to understand it” “Privilege? Is that even a thing?”

Sounds familiar? Yes, we all come across people who have said these at least once in our lives. In fact, this can even be you! It’s time for a change to what you say on Privilege and here’s why.

Now as we know, privilege is a term often used to refer to the advantaged over the disadvantaged. Well this can be a little uncomfortable to talk about, since it feels quite personal and attacking, right? Well it is sometimes important to feel uncomfortable to take a step and start a talk about it and I will tell you why.

Privilege is something quite invisible. It is unearned and inherited in most cases, which means if we have it, we have it right from our birth. When we talk about it, it often feels like we are being pointed fingers at for having been born with privilege like it is our fault, but it’s not!

Being privileged is only fortunate and lucky and not a fault. But it is absolutely a fault to not acknowledge it. It is our human instinct to be defensive of our privileges since as much as privileged we are, we also understand struggles and go through them. Being privileged in one sense does not mean we shall not be oppressed in another sense. For example, a rich boy in India is privileged to be born in a family where he’ll have access to education and basic necessary freedoms, but what if he is queer? He will know struggles to live with a sexual identity that undergoes oppression. So, he is privileged economically while he is not sexually. Privileges are therefore all intertwined. Privilege and oppression, as they are, are intersectional. ( To know more about intersectionality, click here https://my-brown-pages.blogspot.com/2020/07/what-is-intersectional-feminism-and-why.html )

When we talk about privilege, we are basically not questioning the ones who have it, bu we are questioning the rest who don’t. We do not want the privilege of a rich man to be snatched away to prevent his daughter’s education so that they are at par with the girl next door who does not get educated because she is poor. What we must question here is that why does one person in the same neighbourhood not have access to a basic right while the other person has a free pass to it. Countless other examples can be taken into consideration where we know someone has to undergo ten times the struggle their counter part has to face to achieve the same goal just because their counterpart is privileged while they are not. This privilege can be anything – wealth, race, class, caste, creed, beauty, nationality, language, education, religion, sex, physical and mental ability, age and what not.

However, we know that these questions can never be answered by the privileged ones because after all, it is not their fault that they are born this way! What is important is that we look beyond this into the systematic oppressive institutions that have continued to impart opportunities unequally for ages that have resulted in this today. These institutionalised systems have made some of us fortunate, and overlooked the others who have today turned to be not privileged or under privileged.

But one can never be privileged enough. Systems of oppression shall make us suffer in one way or other, but only quantitively lesser than the ones who don’t possess privileges. In today’s world, if you are a man, you are privileged; if your able bodied, cisgender, white, you are privileged. In India, if you are a savarna, well paid, you come from a well-off family, you are privileged. Everything else is under-privileged- being black, being brown, being browner than the fair ones, being poor, being a resident of a village or an under developed suburb, being fat, being queer, being a dalit, a north-eastern or tribal, everything else is under-privileged. If you have a shelter and a good home and family, you are privileged. The sheer existence of privilege all around us is so fragile and invisible that we forget to consider it most of the times. At the end of the day, do we ever ask ourselves what are we grateful for?

Now that we know of privilege, let us ask ourselves of our own privileges. What do we have that we know many don’t? That’s privilege. Ask yourself, What’s Your Privilege? It does not matter if you have struggled to get the job you do today because remember, there is always some one who had to fight ten times harder than you to get the same job.

So, the next time you hear someone say “Is privilege even a thing?” tell them it is. It is only because of their privilege that they don’t know what it feels like to not have it. Tell them that it exists. The next time someone says “I get it anyway so why should I care?” tell them that as a responsible human being it is their duty to acknowledge their own privilege and look beyond what they get and what they don’t. If someone is truly concerned to change the systematic institutions of oppression to change the world, one must first accept its flaws. Tell them that we don’t want to take away their own privilege to make them care, we want them to care for the ones who don’t have privileges by accepting their own’s first. The next time you hear someone saying “I think I’m too privileged to understand this” tell them that it is only because of their privilege that they come across these terms to know what it is to be not privileged. It is for their privilege that they should understand the non-privileged truly without snatching their narratives but through acknowledgement of their own, acceptance, empathy, inclusion and participating in a unified fight to end the systematic unequal oppressive institutions.

If you think you had a slight bit of change in your understanding of what is privilege, you will know you have approached your first step to owning it. Like someone once said, “Don’t let the things you want make you forget the things you have.” At the end of the day, ask yourself, what's your privilege?