What Is Privilege?
Acknowledging privilege is not an accusation of blame. It is the start of a much more useful conversation.
In South Africa at the moment you will be hearing the rumblings of talk about privilege, specifically white privilege. This is a place to host the much needed conversations that are happening, with the intention of defining and dissecting what privilege actually is.
Discussing privilege is difficult. It makes anyone who has it feel guilty, or worse, shamed, and anyone who does not, resentful.
What is important to get straight is that asking someone to acknowledge their own privilege is not an accusation of blame. In fact, having privilege is often totally unrelated to anything one has done at all. Privilege is the by-product of circumstances that one simply arrived into, and now takes for granted as normal.
It is a way of experiencing the world that is so ordinary to those who have it that it is hard to imagine an experience of the world without it.
Privilege is access. Access to information, to support structures, to resources, to opportunities, and to a way of thinking that makes the task of navigating the social and professional challenges of the world that much easier. Without it, those same challenges become next to impossible.
Let us air what it is, what it is not, and, most importantly, how it can be used as leverage to bring those who do not have it into a world where the odds are more evenly in their favour.
Tamryn Sherriffs
Founder and editor of DIFFERENTLY. She writes about the systems that shape how we live, learn and work, many of which she has spent two decades experimenting with.
Read her full story