Yes, Privilege is really a thing. No, it doesn’t mean hard work isn’t a factor in success.
Many Americans like to think success is a meritocracy based on hard work, with rewards going to people who have the most talent, put in the most effort, or produce the most value.
And maybe have a few lucky breaks.
It doesn’t hurt to be good looking either.
Or to know the right people.
But other than that, it’s a meritocracy, right?
Say this cool picture of the Andromeda Galaxy represents all of the political and social power available in the United States.
Now imagine that this grid is overlaid on top of that cool space picture.
Each box on this grid represents an access portal to that power. Right now all of the access portals are closed, totally blocking us. But, if someone has a trait or circumstance named on the grid some of those portals will open up. That’s privilege. Having traits and circumstances in your life to open up as many portals as possible.
Take Joe Blow here. Average college educated white dude with a steady corporate job. He has a lot of open portals.
But, he still has some blocked portals. So, he’s not just cruising through wide open space. He still has to navigate the space ship of his life through the open space and away from the blocked portals.
Having privilege doesn’t mean that everything in life will go his way or that some of the portals that he has open right now won’t close and vice versa. He could lose his job or become disabled which would impact his income stability and his housing stability, and close several of his portals.
Here’s Michella. She’s a black transwoman with a high school education and a retail job.
She has a lot of portals open to her, but she’s dealing with a lot more closed portals than Joe is. That’s what it means when we say Joe is privileged. He has more open portals than other people do. Other people have more open portals than he does. Privilege exists on a spectrum, and most of us are somewhere in the middle of it.
Who decided what characteristics and circumstances would be privileged?
Imagine 3 little kids are playing together. Two are getting along playing the same game, but one wants to change the game and is gearing up for a tantrum. Just then, one of two that are getting along well comes across a (hermetically sealed and totally safe hypothetical) cupcake. How should this cupcake be split between the kids?
Option 1: It shouldn’t. Finders Keepers.
Option 2: The cupcake should be split evenly in thirds
Option 3: The finder get’s the most but will give 2 bites to the one they’re getting along with, and only 1 bite to the third kid.
Option 4: The finder eats what they want, and then sells what they don’t.
Option 5: The kids fight over the cupcake and to the victor go the spoils.
Option 6: The finder uses the cupcake to barter with some other kids across the playground to get some play dough.
This is how we decide how to share power and distribute privilege. Through millions of small decisions about large and small resources. And with thousands of different people ‘finding’ those resources. Then, people that control resources form coalitions, barter and hoard those resources. So what we end up with is a complex network of people controlling resources with an ever expanding list of criteria for distributing access to them.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, and other axioms about individual effort.
We can all think of an example of a person who grew up with very few privileges becoming extremely rich and successful, like Oprah. And then we can think of wealthy families where the children didn’t take advantage of the opportunities their parents’ wealth gave them.
Many who believe in the myth of the American meritocracy point to stats like 60% of American billionaires work 60 or more hours and 84% of them have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Look! They work hard and have education!! They earned those billions!
But, are they really that different from the rest of us?
18% of US workers report a work week of 60 or more hours — thats 22.7 million people. 330 of them are billionaires for their effort. That’s 0.0015% of all people who work more than 60 hours a week or about a 1 in 68,000 of these folks putting tons of overtime.
33.4% of Americans have a bachelor’s degree or higher, or about 74 million people. 462 of them used their education to become billionaires. That’s about 1 in 160,000.
Privilege is not about possibility, it’s about likelihood.
Social mobility means the ability to change your “standing” in society. In the US we don’t have a clear class system so we often use mathematical divisions to mark our classes. One of the most common ways to look at class divisions in the US is with wealth or income quintiles. Each quintile contains exactly 20% of the population, in order for one person to be upwardly mobile another person has to be downwardly mobile.
Overall the picture of social mobility in the United States looks like this:
As you can see, if a person’s parents were in the lowest income quintile that person is more likely to be in the lowest income quintile — and the same goes for folks whose parents were in the highest income quintile. But social mobility is possible, even with those sticky ends. It’s unlikely that a person will move from the bottom quintile to the top, but it is possible.
But this doesn’t tell the whole story of income and wealth mobility.
The top quintile is stickier for white boys than it is for black boys.
The bottom quintile is stickier for black boys than it is for white boys.
If a person is born as a wealthy white boy, they’re 3 times more likely to grow up to be a wealthy white man as a person born as a wealthy black boy is to grow up to be a wealthy black man. But even more importantly, if a person is born as a poor white boy, they’re 5 times more likely to grow up to be a wealthy white man than a poor black boy is to grow up to be wealthy black man. That is because the systems for protecting and accumulating wealth privilege whiteness.
‘The glass floor protecting affluent children from falling is also a glass ceiling, blocking upward mobility for those born on a lower rung of the ladder.’ — Richard Reeves
Richard Reeves talks in his book Dream Hoarders about the ways that the top quintile works the system to insulate their children from downward mobility. From fighting against rezoning for more multiunit housing in their zip codes, to using their social network to help their children with internships and job placements, these parents are doing what they can to protect the economic advantage they’ve eked out for their families.
But by insulating their children from downward mobility, they are by those actions also blocking others from upward mobility.
This is where we need to get serious about privilege and begin the work of dismantling it.
What you can do
- Learn more about how you’ve benefitted from privilege. Find your American Dream Score
- For white folks, watch “Seeing the Water: Whiteness is Daily Life” with Robin DiAngelo
- Host a discussion about Identity, Power and Privilege
- Always ask — “Are we making the top and bottom quintiles stickier with this policy/program/vote/decision/etc.?”
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