Why I Suspect“Owning Our Privilege” Might Be Doing Benevolent Harm

I am intuitively wary of the term privilege. On the surface, there is something inherently strange and wrong with calling a mechanism we use to reveal systemic oppression a privilege. I cringe when I hear “I want to leverage my privilege,” or “My Whiteness is a privilege”. It’s confusing and contradictory. We tell children that a privilege is a reward for good actions, or to teach them gratitude, and later we tell them that Whiteness, that relentless tool of White supremacy, “has privilege”. On one hand, “It is a privilege to be here” connotes honor and gratitude, and on the other, we call riding the coattails of White supremacy to “get away” with shooting a Black child to death “White privilege”.

It just doesn’t add up.

I recently had the opportunity to reread Peggy McIntosh’s 1987 piece “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. Some assert that this is where and when popular notions of privilege first appeared on the social justice scene. I appreciate how accessible this piece is for folks who have never thought about systemic inequity before. I appreciate how it looks at the individual, lived manifestations of larger systems. I deeply honor McIntosh’s humility and contribution. I also think that it’s time to let go of the term privilege. What’s become increasingly clear is that privilege is nestled quite comfortably within the larger neoliberal agenda, asking us all to psychologically recommit to existing biases in order to be “good anti-racists”.

(For those who are not familiar with the term neoliberal, or have heard it bandied about without fully understanding its implications (like I did for so long), “neoliberals advance a particular vision of society that promotes reducing the size of government by replacing governmental organizations with private corporations, establishing markets as the model for all economic and social transactions and creating the entrepreneurial individual who only relies on her or himself rather than society”.)

So what does “privilege“ have to do with neoliberalism? Well, privilege asks us to look at an individual’s social location by identifying generally immutable social markers like race, gender, sexuality and correlate that with opportunities available or blocked at a systemic level. But what began as “I am constructed within a biased system that privileges certain identities and rewards those identities with opportunities” has been reduced to “I have privilege”.

Let’s apply this to an extreme case. Someone has the benefit of being born with certain identity markers (white, male, able-bodied, etc.) and attains financial success, in large part because his life is buoyed by a lifetime opportunities that are supported by these markers. He may “leverage his privilege” by giving back to those “less privileged”. Enter the Gates and other philanthrocapitalists, who are powerful and moneyed enough to actually change public policy based on the research they conduct on those who are less privileged; this research leads to government funding for their programs that supports their ideas, their agendas, and oftentimes lines their pockets. To a lesser degree, this is how the average woke person ends up contemplating their role and prerogative through the lens of “privilege”. How do I use what I have gained through categorical inclusion to shine a light on the categorical exclusion of others? And this is where I think the “critical privilege lens” not only keeps us stuck in, but actually ends up promoting neoliberal commitments, perpetually siloing us even when people are very genuinely “confronting their privilege” with the sincerest of anti-oppressive intentions.

Psychologically, this plays out in a very convoluted and counterproductive way. For example, as a Hindu, I am a religious minority in the United States. In order for me to engage in the conversation of privilege (with the purported end goal of helping to dismantle racist or oppressive systems), not only must I think of my religion as dis-privileged, but I must advocate for that supposed fact. (Conversely, in India, I must declare my Hindu privilege at the SJ Customs Counter and overwrite Hindu history with a narrative of Whiteness.) That I must think of my faith as dis-privileged and actually articulate this in my own words and voice strikes me as a double offense. Not only do I live in a society that barely acknowledges that my religion exists (and when it does, often reduces it to a punchline), now I have to take something that I really value, that is central to my identity, in my way of being in the world, and name it as a dis-privilege, when, in fact, I consider it to be a great privilege to be Hindu. Of course I understand that this is a specific way in which the term privilege is being used, but there is an individual and collective psychological impact of having people who are not from dominant groups name the things that are central to their identity as dis-privileged. And there is an equal, if not even greater, damage caused to individuals and the collective when those who come from dominant groups consistently name their dominant identity markers as privileged. It reinforces the perception within individuals and between all people that these hierarchies are valid, even as we strive to “undo oppression”. This is why leveraging my privilege feels like benevolent harm.

So what to do? Well, I think there’s one possibility that may push us towards greater change.

About nine years after we first heard about privilege, sociologist Charles Tilly spoke of categorical inequalities, as a way of examining social inequality through the control of resources. Tilly laid out two mechanisms — exploitation and opportunity hoarding, both of which require and manipulate social categories. Exploitation operates when “powerful, connected people command resources from which they draw significantly increased returns by coordinating the efforts of outsiders whom they exclude from the full value added by that effort.” Opportunity hoarding “operates when members of a categorically bounded network acquire access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network’s modus operandi’ (Tilly, 1998, 10).

What I find so intriguing about opportunity hoarding is that it disrupts the notion that privilege is an inherent quality within an individual or group of individuals. “I have privilege” or “How do I leverage my privilege to help others?” are both certainly admirable stances one hears from woke folk that might lead to important shifts and actions. On the surface, though, privilege still somehow seems desirable, even though we admit that it lies clearly at the foundation of inequality. It also leads us to a binary (either you have a certain privilege or you don’t), which is oftentimes misleading. Even more confusing, there is a degree to which privilege dwells in a funky pool of guilt and generosity, both of which are problematic. Guilt can quickly become a toxic ingredient that halts a process that calls upon all of us to actively heal and bridge inequity. And benevolence reinforces hierarchies, while reeking of doership or a savior complex. And, as Freire articulated with laser sharp clarity, generosity depends upon the status quo.

Any attempt to ‘soften’ the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their “generosity”, the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this ‘generosity’, which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source” (Freire, Chapter 1, Pedagogy of the Oppressed).

Opportunity hoarding, on the other hand, seems to offer us something different. “Hoarding” references patterns of individual and collective actions that are simultaneously inequitable and remediable. The term conjures a quality of feverishness — rajas, in Ayurveda — that is ungrounded, untethered, leading to a loss of balance, conflict, fragmentation. Hoarding seems neither desirable nor healthy or responsible. And this shift from guilt to responsibility appears more conducive to thoughtful action.

Now we can look at the significant educational opportunities — from quality public schools in our highly segregated cities to college access — with greater clarity about the systems that have been put in place that afford certain people the opportunity to hoard at community, city, state, and national levels. If we expand our notion of opportunity to include a broader, subtler range of possibilities in our current sociopolitical context, more things begin to come into focus. We can consider the opportunity to appear as the complex, accessible protagonist in a children’s book or feature film. The opportunity to make mistakes. The opportunity to send one’s children out into the world without fearing for their lives every day. The opportunity to hold a massive, peaceful march without automatically and incessantly having violent tones superimposed upon it. The opportunity to have one’s under-recognized, under-advocated civil rights finally move to the front of the line. The opportunity to walk through life without the fear of being sexually assaulted. (This sounds similar to privilege, except when it is framed as an opportunity, hoarding immediately comes into the frame.)

So what happens when we take up this framework to understand systemic inequity (social, economic, educational)?

One of the most common tensions that surfaces in conversations about systemic inequity is that they are frequently punctuated with one or more individuals claiming that they are not racist, (sexist, etc). And then the counter argument is made that racism is systemic, and is not about personal bias. So you can be someone who doesn’t personally hold bias against individual people of color, but you can still benefit from a system that is very biased. This is what we’ve come to describe as privilege. What makes it so confusing is, that same person who is benefiting from racial privilege may be disprivileged because of another identity marker — gender or sexuality or ability or religion or class or education. So then we bring up the nuance and complexity of intersectionality. Which is all true, but is missing the forest for the trees, because of how intersectionality is taken up as simply a combination of identity markers, the hand that we’ve been dealt.

The problem is that all of this still leaves us categorizing (sometimes ad nauseum) individuals who are being mechanized in a system that benefits from categorization. It leaves us at the identification of marginalized categories.

Opportunity hoarding reminds us of the purpose of the categorization. Person of color may mean something very specific in the United States, where certain non-white groups have experienced severe oppression, but it’s not because all the people who benefit from that oppression are sadistic and want to see people suffer. They don’t mind that differently- categorized people are suffering, because they want to hoard the resources. And at the the end of the day, the most egregious hoarders (the one percenters, for instance) benefit the most from the masses having this same hoarding mindset. The entire thing is based on the projection of scarcity of resources, appealing to our basest fears and survival skills.

But it gets confusing and complicated, because these categories have been created and exploited one way in the United States, but manifest differently in other places. For instance, there are transnationals who might be considered people of color in the United States who are not people of color in their other country, but are able to hoard opportunities in a very different way there than they are in the United States. Every society has a system that relates to the allocation of resources. And, to top it all off, the United States — as a nation — is an opportunity hoarder. There are hoarders everywhere — even in brown and black countries, even before the Europeans colonized what is now known as the United States, and they used whatever means of categorization necessary to monopolize resources.

Ibram X. Kendi names this brilliantly in Stamped from the Beginning (2016), as he traces the history of anti-black racism around the world.

“Ignorance/hate → racist ideas → discrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship — racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discrimination → racist ideas → ignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.” (p. 18)

Racial discrimination can be substituted with any other form of discrimination, America’s history can be substituted with any other history. And, to take it even further back, discrimination is a form of social sorting that enables resources and opportunities to be hoarded.

Racism is not the purpose of racism. Privilege is not the purpose of racism. Hoarding resources is the purpose of racism. Hoarding resources is the purpose of privilege. Racism is a form of categorization that enables exploitation. Misogyny is a form of categorization that enables exploitation. Privilege is a form of categorization that enables exploitation. Calling out racism and misogyny and privilege is not enough to stop hoarding.

Hoarders will simply find new categories, and will do anything to feed their habituated compulsion to hoard power and opportunities, including those who are disenfranchised by some of those very categories. Look at Susan Collins and what happened on the Senate floor last fall.

Racism and privilege and fear of scarcity are embedded mindsets that enable hoarding to happen so that a few can monopolize the bulk of resources while the everyday hoarder earns a commission for keeping the system afloat by hoarding some things for themselves.

What’s also fascinating about hoarding is that it sheds some light on previously confounding patterns around generosity. Have you noticed that sometimes it is the wealthiest people that are the least willing to give of their time or money? Or when they do, it has to come with recognition? Or why some people who are less financially resourced always seems to be willing to give more of their time or money, even when it doesn’t come with any recognition? (This isn’t a blanket statement. Those that are less financially resourced have every reason to hoard whatever they can, to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.) Perhaps it has to do with generosity. Or perhaps it has to do with hoarding mentalities.

Awareness is important, and privilege helps us see that. But maybe it’s time we stop thinking about leveraging our privilege, which seems like a polite way of saying “I don’t really want anything to change for me, even if I think it perpetuates a system that is not fair to others.” We need things to change and perhaps real change can only happen when we look at patterns and habits of hoarding.

Towards that end, I offer that maybe it’s time for us to start look at patterns of hoarding, around us at a systemic level and in our own habits and internal energy patterns. The point of this exercise is not to label ourselves. Patterns and habits can be changed. So the question is not “Am I an opportunity hoarder?”. It’s “Do I hoard opportunities?” (If you can bear it, take a look at Kavanaugh’s testimony again, and see if he seems like a hoarder, threatened that his opportunities are going to be taken away.)

Some possible question to consider:

• Do I find myself wanting to learn more about inequities but also unsure about how to let go of the abundant resources or opportunities I’ve secured for myself (and my family), even though we’ve never really had to worry about having things?
• Do I believe in school integration, but also that it’s not possible for everyone to get “the best education”? (And that I have worked hard and my kids should get the best education?)
• Do I buy or take more (food, supplies) than I actually need, just in case?
• Do I associate racism and misogyny with individual hatred or with greed?
• Do I feel good about myself when I leverage my privilege even if I don’t have to give up anything?

Sources:

• Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
• Hursh, D. (2013). Raising the stakes: High-stakes testing and the attack on public education in New York. Journal of Education Policy, 28(5), 574–588. http://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2012.758829
• Kendi, I. X. (2017). Stamped from the beginning: The definitive history of racist ideas in America. Bold Type Books
• McIntosh, P. (2003). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In S. Plous (Ed.), Understanding prejudice and discrimination (pp. 191–196). New York, NY, US: McGraw-Hill.
• Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press.