People…my life hasn’t always been a bed of rainbows and starshine. I’ve been through experiences that, given the choice, I would have much rather skipped. I’ve had to deal with people doing things to me that weren’t ethical, legal, or fair. I’ve had to work hard to get what I want in life. But, and here’s the rub, I still benefit from a lot of privilege.

What is ‘privilege’?

Privilege is defined as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.” And that’s actually a pretty accurate summation of it. Due to the way that our society is structured, there are a lot of advantages, immunities and special rights that we give to certain groups of people. If you want a really great example of how privilege often manifests, please read this amazing comic by The Pencilsword on a Plate. It'll take you about a minute and it's worth your time. 

When we’re confronted with this information, with the knowledge that we have these immunities, advantages and special rights, we all have a tendency to react in a pretty predictable way.

We become angry and defensive.

We often react like it’s a personal attack. For instance, if someone says to me “You have white privilege”, I want to say “That’s bullshit. My life is hard. You have no idea what my life has been like. How dare you tell me that I’m fucking lucky to be white! White has nothing to do with everything I’ve achieved!”

But I’d be wrong. Being white may not take away from the difficult things I’ve experienced in my life, but it’s probably ensured that my life hasn’t been more difficult. When I think about the things that I consider hardships in my life, there isn’t a single one that would have been made easier by being a person of colour.

The problem with the word ‘privilege’ is that often we use it to refer to special things that are given to people. So when someone tells us we’re privileged, we have a look around at our life and go “Where? Where is all this fucking privilege I keep hearing about? Because all I see is a pile of laundry I need to do, some bills I haven’t paid and a few health issues I keep putting off getting checked out.” 

We look at our lives as though if we were privileged there’d be something extra there. Instead, we need to be looking at our lives and seeing all the things that aren't there. As a white person, I can look around and go “Oh, I love the lack of systemic racism in here”, as an able-bodied person I can say “Oh, I love having access to all the places with the things that I like,” and as a non-Indigenous person I can look around and go "Oh my! All of this culture and heritage I still have left, that totally wasn't systematically stripped away from me, how nice!"

If you’re not sure what kinds of privilege you enjoy, try playing a game of privilege bingo. Look at each tile and imagine how your life would be different if you weren’t one of these things.

So let's say, hypothetically that you've accepted that you have certain privileges. Let's say that you've looked at the world around you and realised that it is, in fact, harder out there for people other than yourself, through no fault of their own.

What are you expected to do about it? Well, here's a start. 

When people share their experiences…listen

Once you’ve accepted that you have certain advantages in this world, what do you do with that information? When I acknowledge that I have white privilege it means that I need to listen to the experiences of people of colour. It means that I need to hear what they have to say, and not disagree with them, even if it doesn’t match my own experience.

If someone in a wheelchair is telling me that there aren’t enough ramps in the world, I don’t then get to say “Sure there are! I feel like they’re everywhere.” Because stairs aren’t a barrier to me, so I’m not going to notice them in the same way. I might see half a dozen ramps in a day, but I’m not going to notice the hundreds of buildings without them. Whereas to someone for whom stairs are effectively a “DO NOT ENTER” sign, the lack of accessibility into buildings becomes a major factor in their life. You don't get to tell them that they have everything they need. 

Listening means that when someone tells you about their situation, you need to refrain from telling them they're wrong. Because you're not living their life. For most people without privilege, their lives are a parade of people disagreeing with them about their own lived experiences. Imagine if someone said “How are you?” and you said “Ah, not too great actually, my dog died and I…” and they interrupted to tell you that “Uh, that’s bullshit. You’re doing great. You’re always cheerful and nice. You’re loving life!” Seems kinda fucked up right? Now imagine that you’re trying to tell them about something that affects whether you can access medical care, or whether or not you’re being discriminated against in the workplace, etc.

If you’re talking to someone about their lived experience, just listen. Hear their story. Hear what they’re telling you. And if you listen, without simply waiting for a break in the conversation to interject with your own opinion, you might be surprised at what you learn about the world.  

Accept how other people want to be treated

When you’re confronted with other people’s experiences, it’s important to remember that no two people will have had the same experience. So you might be one of those people who has black friends, or gay friends, or some of your best friends might be women! And those people might have told you that it’s okay to use racial slurs, that it’s okay to call them “faggot” or “dyke”, or you might have been told that rape jokes are hilarious. And then, when you’re confronted with someone telling you that these things aren’t okay, you might be tempted to argue. You might be tempted to point out that some of your best friends (who are totally black) said that you’re cool to use the n-word.

But you need to understand that while some people might have reclaimed words or experiences, other people are still going to be hurt by them, and others are far enough removed from the history of certain words that they might have never been affected by them. But that doesn’t mean you can treat everyone the same way.

I grew up around a lot of transport workers from Italian and Greek backgrounds and everyone in the business would affectionately refer to them as “wogs”, and they would encourage others to do so. To the point that one of them even paid to have his truck customised with the moniker right across the hood. I grew up thinking that it was friendly term, kind of like calling a white Australian a “skip”. But when I met a woman who told me that this was offensive, that it deeply hurt her and that she grew up being called this in the schoolyard, I stopped using the term. Because her experience was different. And you don’t really have to right to disagree with someone when they’re telling you what they do and don’t like being called.

Imagine if someone walked up to you and said “Hey FartMaster” and you were like “Uh, that’s not my name and I’d prefer it if you didn’t call me that”, and they said “Yeah but you’re blonde and my brother is blonde and he loves being called FartMaster.” And then they spent the next ten years calling you “FartMaster” and giving you shit for being “politically correct about your own name”, and campaigning for people everywhere to be able to call you “FartMaster”. You’d probably be pretty pissed. So even if you have friends, or celebrity role models, or a family member who has said “Yeah, go to town”, remember that their experience isn’t going to match up with everyone you meet. You need to accept what people tell you about their own experiences, their own preferences, their own lives.

Understand the anger

Look at your life and find an area that you don’t have privilege in. Maybe you don’t have thin privilege, or aesthetic-privilege, or financial-privilege. And now think about how frustrating it would be for someone to tell you that you’re wrong about that.

If you’re trying to explain how hard it can be to save up enough money to buy a house, and someone with a trust fund is saying “Well you’re just not being financially responsible. Banks give away money all the time. Clearly you're doing something wrong” you’re going to start to feel pretty fucking frustrated. You might get angry. And there’s nothing worse than getting angry, because then people start to use that anger against you.

“Why are lesbians always so angry?”, “Why are trans-women so aggressive?” “I don’t understand why black people are so angry,” and “I can’t take women seriously, they take all this stuff so personally, they get hysterical.”

When people start telling you that you’re doing life wrong, that you’ve been subject to no disadvantage, and that you’re just not trying hard enough; it’s pretty fucking easy to get angry.

And you’ll be judged for that anger. Because everyone else is debating you from a purely ‘academic’ standpoint. Because it’s not their lives that are being affected. For you, it’s real. For you it is every shitty experience, every dismissal, every cruel comment, every thrown punch, every moment you were made to feel less than human. For them it’s a conversation across a dinner table about something they’ve never felt.

Years ago, I was having a conversation with my partner and a mutual friend, both of whom were men. And I expressed my frustration about the lack of managerial roles for women in the workforce. And these two men patiently explained to me that it’s because, from a business perspective, women were more likely to go and have babies, so it was safer to put a man in that role. And I angrily explained that many women chose not to have babies, and why should we be penalised for that? And they, again, patiently explained that it’s just how things were. And I remember I started crying. I was so frustrated and angry, that before my career had even begun I was going to be hobbled by bullshit assumptions based on my gender. And these two men calmly looked at me and explained that there was no reason to cry. It’s just how things were. And I have never forgotten how powerless and angry and frustrated and overwhelmed I felt in that moment. Because for them it was academic. For me it was real.

Learn how to respond

A lot of the time when I have a depressive episode, well-meaning people will try and tell me that my life “could be worse” and that I should “think about the starving children in Africa.”

This is problematic for a number of reasons. But primarily because it implies that as long as there's someone worse off than you, you can never be sad. Which means literally only the most miserable, shat upon, abandoned orphan in a war-zone has the right to feel bad feelings. 

It might seem like having privilege is kind of like that. It might seem like if you’re a wealthy, attractive, straight, white, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical male then you no longer have any right to ever complain about your life. This is spectacularly not the case. You have every right to complain about your life! It’s probably shit. I’m not going to lie, having all that privilege sounds boring as fuck. So don't ever think that your privilege is a form of censorship. It's not. Complain away!

What it does mean though, is that you don’t get to tell other people that their life isn’t as hard as yours. It means that when someone tells you that there aren’t enough ramps, you have to acknowledge that you’re not in a place to tell them they’re wrong. It means that if a woman tells you she’s being sexually harassed in her workplace, you don’t get to tell her that it’s not a gendered issue. When a person of colour gets looked over for job after job, you don’t get to tell them that it’s not a racial issue. It means listening to people who have lived experiences you never will.

It can be difficult to moderate your opinions in discussions of privilege. We live in a society where we believe our opinions are sacrosanct, that they deserve to be retweeted, reposted and have a thousand likes every time we throw them out there.

But sometimes you need to acknowledge that your experience and understanding of certain situations is just going to be different. If you’re a man talking to a woman about sexism, you might want to argue that you’ve literally never seen sexism happen. But you first need to acknowledge that your experience isn’t going to be the best indicator for that.

Take on board what the other person is saying before asking yourself if your experiences are really going to be an accurate representation of a situation. And then consider whether telling someone that you’ve never noticed the thing that clearly affects them regularly is actually helpful.

And if you want to feel engaged in the conversation, find a way to use your voice to support the person you're talking to. You might not have lived what they have, but that doesn't mean you can't acknowledge how hurtful, or painful, or frustrating their experience was for them. 

And whenever someone tells you about an experience they have that you haven’t noticed, take it as an opportunity to start noticing. If someone says ‘I hate how people with my skin colour are portrayed in movies’ pay attention the next time you’re watching a movie. If someone says ‘I hate how every time they talk about women in politics they talk about their motherhood or their clothes’ start looking for that. Because you’re never going to notice something that doesn’t affect your life, unless you’re looking for it. Start looking for it.

Use your voice in your spaces

There are so many people with so much privilege who refuse to acknowledge it, because they feel that just because they’ve internally acknowledged their advantages in life, that’s enough. It’s not.

As a straight person, it is not enough that you mentally understand that you have privileges that your queer friends don’t. Because as awful as it is, your voice will carry more weight on issues affecting queer people. White people will listen more when it’s a white person talking about rights for people of colour. People listen harder when it’s a man talking about feminist issues. People are more likely to agree when a thin person talks about fat-shaming.

Because our society is built to acknowledge the opinions of the advantaged over everyone else. The more privilege you have, the more weight your opinion carries. As a woman, when I talk about feminism people assume I’m just some hysterical female with a victim complex. But when my male partner talks about feminism, when he pulls people up on shitty sexist jokes, or calls out misogyny when he sees it, other men will listen to him. Because he’s one of them. He has their respect.

So if you have privilege, use it. Listen to the experiences of the people around you, hear what they’re telling you, and then call out other privileged people on their bullshit.

To be crystal clear, I don’t mean if you’re a dude you should show up at a SlutWalk and tell all the women there how to feminist. I mean do it in your spaces. Bring attention to issues in the places where your opinion carries weight. Speak up in spaces where you can help to be an agent for change. Work in a an all-male office? Call out shitty sexist jokes. Go to a school surrounded by white kids? Pull people up on racist statements. Family dinner is full of able bodied people? Start a conversation about the lack of funding for disability support.

Change the fucking world

We’re all privileged in some way. And it’s important to acknowledge our privilege, so that we can continue to build a society that doesn't disadvantage people without that privilege. It’s important to stop becoming aggressive and defensive when someone highlights the advantages we have in our lives. They’re not saying we’re bad people. They’re helping us to understand that life is different, and more difficult for other people. Getting personally offended by that isn’t helpful.

We need to recognise that our society does not treat all people equally. Let’s start making a better world, by acknowledging our privilege and using it in the best possible ways.

That is all.

You may go now.