Internal Battles with Privilege

Commitments and questions for confronting the oppressor within

Photo by Lisa Fotios from Pexels

I want the world to be more equitable and just. Upon reading George Packer’s recent piece in The Atlantic, “When the Culture War Comes for Our Kids,” I felt the need to get specific about the internal battles I needed to fight for equity and justice, rather than focusing solely on the external ones. I found that, while they can bring moments of turmoil and emotional challenges, these battles within also bring joy, peace, and fulfillment.

Sexual orientation, race, and gender do not define who we are as people. How we value one another and our capacities for love and intellect do that. But as a straight, White, cis-gender male, our economic, political, social, and cultural systems bestow enormous undue privilege upon me. These are the forces privileged people must grapple with if we want to have humanizing relationships with others.

A pursuit of critical consciousness — consistently asking the inconvenient questions about how privilege affects our world view, relationship to others, and sense of self — is the core of this process. It helps us identify and learn from our wrongs. It allows us to hone our capacities for love and intellect. It’s the moment to moment commitment to a process of reflecting critically on our thoughts and actions as we interact with the world.

But this process has its limits. No matter how diligently I challenge my assumptions, I can’t “conscious” my privilege away. I can engage critically with how it affects my perspective, beliefs, and actions, but the systems we live in will continue to bestow undue privilege because they remain inequitable and unjust. Accepting this helps us define our collective challenge in developing just and equitable relationships: to find ways to reach across barriers of privilege and connect in humanizing ways. To do this, we must employ and hone our capacities for love and intellect.

Here are some examples of what this pursuit of critical consciousness and the exercise of love and intellect look like:

• Listen and watch for signs you’ve offended someone rather than waiting for others to bring a complaint. With the massive weight of privilege shielding us as White people, it’s safe to assume that those whom we offend probably won’t take the risk of calling us out. When body language or a sudden change in tone during an exchange catches our attention, we can commit ourselves to reflecting upon what and how we communicated, and consider how we may have impacted the other person. Sometimes, I seek insight or perspective from a trusted friend. But, I don’t ask the person I may have offended to explain my transgression. My actions are my responsibility, well-intentioned or not.
• Apologize openly and try to let go of the desire for that apology to be accepted. People we’ve offended deserve the apology. We deserve grace from them when and if they decide they can give it. If someone can’t give me grace when I think I deserve it, I assume I don’t yet understand the gravity of my offense or that there is a greater trauma to which I’ve contributed.
• Act towards others in ways that lay the groundwork for deep and trusting connections, even when these efforts are not reciprocated. The foundation for any positive and authentic human connection is trust. If we want trusting relationships across boundaries of privilege, trust has to be earned. It can start with being the first to offer a “hello” or a smile to a stranger. But, real trust often requires taking personal risks to share openly and honestly. It requires offering up support or being of service, even if we become vulnerable in the process. Authentic demonstrations of unselfish love hold the power to open wary hearts to the possibility of trust and connection.
• When efforts to connect across boundaries of privilege are not reciprocated, own your disappointment. No one owes White people trust given the enormous privilege we wield and the context in which we live. When we feel disappointed with unreciprocated efforts, those are emotions we must own and resolve for ourselves.

Beyond the day to day, there are bigger tensions to confront in how we handle privilege. Here are examples of the questions I use to engage those tensions:

• Which professional roles should White people avoid to ensure that marginalized and under-represented folks have space in leadership? I’m committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but I also have a deeply rooted ambition to leverage my love and intellect to create meaningful impact, and I want to contribute to the financial well-being of my family.
• How can we show up in professional spaces in ways that celebrate the voices of others while also leveraging our own capacities to contribute? Privilege sometime leaves me feeling like Edward Scissorhands. I have the technical skills to lead institutions that create enormous impact, but trying to love others without extreme care leaves them needing stitches.

These questions point to dynamic tensions that don’t have definitive answers. They are important for us to grapple with while we err on the side of stepping back rather than forward.

Taking on this responsibility to ask such questions of ourselves and the world can be emotionally and intellectually taxing. It requires a commitment to step up to the frontlines of the battle against oppression that lives inside all of us. Despite the undue privilege I experience, I choose to step up to the battle rather than step around it.

I battle because that is the only path to authentic joy and peace in my relationship with myself and others. Doing this work internally helps enable me to connect in humanizing ways across barriers of privilege. Those connections give me a sense of hope in these moments of great division and tension. They provide the joyful moments of watching my child play with other children — unaware at three years old that our culture, politics, and economics suggest they shouldn’t see each other as fully human. These connections help me begin to relate to the personal and familial realities that lead one to see hope in leaders that bring me a sense of fear. It is insights like these that help me understand the seemingly intractable divisions in our society. They give me hope that if we can support one another in fighting the internal battles, the external ones will be far easier to resolve. Because I want to live in a more equitable and just world, I do this internal work. It is a means to an end. But, it also is a deeply fulfilling way to walk through life.

In all of these processes, we will make mistakes that offend and hurt others. I may have made some here in this writing as a result of poor word choice or blind spots I haven’t yet discovered. As someone who desperately wants to lean into love and empathy, the shame, embarrassment, and self-loathing that comes with these mistakes makes me want to retreat. I’ve found resilience by granting myself grace. We are all sinners, and a continued commitment to learning from the pain I mistakenly cause others will make me more adept at wielding love and privilege in productive ways. It can be an emotional roller coaster, to be sure. But, this is the internal battle with privilege we must each undertake if we have any hope of contributing to a more just and equitable world.