Dear Straight White Dudes: Privilege Means We’re Blind. Stop Insisting We Can See.
On social media recently I witnessed a woman of color discussing the concept of white privilege when she was asked to define it by a white man. Even though the man was evidencing trollish behavior, she graciously responded with the suggestion to search for articles on the subject and to focus his reading on authors who are black. Upon this suggestion, another white man took offense at the idea that the race of the author should have any relevance. In my experience, this pattern unfolds all over the internet (and probably in real life as well) ad infinitum. So, on the off chance that white dudes like the ones I witnessed actually do end up googling “white privilege” (or male privilege or hetero privilege, etc.), I just wanted to say that the woman was right; you really should be reading material by non-privileged authors (e.g. authors of color regarding racism and racial prejudice; female, trans, and non-binary authors in the case of gender bias). These authors will — on the average — have more valuable observations to share because privilege blinds you and me.
Privilege essentially means that we exist in a different social reality and, therefore, privilege limits our observations on matters related to our privilege. Our blindness doesn’t mean we can’t understand what they’re going through at all, it just means that we can never really know what they’re going through, so our understanding will always be limited. They can try to describe what happened to them and we can try to empathize and we can look at stories and statistics, but we will always lack that first-person perspective that grounds the experience in reality. Therefore, if we really want to learn more about social phenomena like privilege or we want to understand the true significance of a new Supreme Court Justice who puts the rights of many marginalized groups at risk, we should be looking for opinions from affected groups. And the sooner we can embrace that, the easier it becomes to make space for our friends to share their experiences and help us understand better.
This isn’t something limited to just race or gender or sexual identity. This is a fundamental philosophical fact about the nature of knowledge. There’s a great moment in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams gets right to the heart of this:
There it is. When we try to render opinions about things we cannot know about first hand, we might be able to make some points based on book learning (or some other secondary source), but we can’t offer the more important observations that only come from living the experience. Therefore, we should acknowledge this limitation to our knowledge and experience and strive to learn from people who have first-hand experiences and knowledge of the issues we’re discussing.
Let’s also remember that we’re not talking about something as simple as visiting the Sistine Chapel; we’re talking about the lived experience of millions and millions of our fellow human beings and the different social realities that they experience compared to us. If you want to understand those social realities, you should hear from those people. Even if you’re seeking secondary information that doesn’t come from a particular individual — statistics, for example— people with lived experiences are more likely to understand the context of and potential complicating factors that accompany all secondary information. So when you come across that information, seek out opinions on it from the population the statistics/secondary information talk about.
And even once you and I have heard enough stories that we feel like we know what is going on, we need to keep remembering that we don’t really know. At best we can strive for believing the people we want to support and understanding — to our limited extent — what they are going through. This can be frustrating when we’re used to opining on everything (and there will still be plenty of topics we can contribute to), but being frustrating doesn’t make it less true.
In conclusion, if we want to actually understand what’s going on with privilege and similar societal issues, it helps to accept the blindness our own privileges create and seek out knowledge from non-privileged people. Instead of drawing quick conclusions, ask more questions. If this is our starting point, then whatever observations we subsequently make will have a much stronger foundation in reality. If we reject this method and insist there is no difference between learning about privilege from privileged people or non-privileged people, we’re telling the world that we’re not really interested in learning about privilege and we thereby help perpetuate it.