Two Cents on Privilege Guilt [Empathy Part 2]
A journey with misguided empathy
Empathy series Part 1: You Are Correct
Starting Out
I used to think privilege guilt was incredibly noble, a type of burden only an extremely sensitive and moral person would shoulder on. It has kept me bashful about taking on opportunities or self-promoting. I thought of myself as the epitome of other-centeredness (altruism).
Except for I wasn’t. This pleasure for “noble suffering” got out of hand, and I started to feel incredibly bad simply for existing. Why am I here in the developed world of the Northern Hemisphere? Why do I have so much? What did I do to deserve such abundance when the rest of the world can barely get on?
The acute reader will notice that none of these questions really demonstrate other-centeredness. It’s all about me and my unfortunate fortune.
Rather than countering these thoughts head-on, I decided to do a thought experiment. Generally speaking, exploring the opposite of X helps us to learn more about X. So I asked myself: what is the opposite of privilege guilt?
That’s when I made a realization.
Epiphany
Privilege guilt and poverty guilt are two sides of the same coin. In both cases, you personalize your environment, believing it has unfairly plotted against you. You are taking responsibility for where you come from, even though you had no say in the circumstances into which you are born.
How you are born is not a source of shame. In order to lift others up, there is no need to beat down anyone.
From my personal experience, I have seen that privilege guilt is a waste of empathy and even slightly self-indulgent at extremes, because you are paying disproportionately more attention to yourself than to the underprivileged.
I could be wrong. Maybe someone else uses their guilt more constructively. All I know is…
You aren’t responsible for the environment you were born into. But you are responsible for where you go from there.
