The privilege of talking about privilege.
By Srishti Bali - Founder of Your Local Educator
I“Privilege” seems to be the buzzword of the 20’s. But is it just as simplistic as living and experiencing a very comfortable life? I think not.
We often hear about the ‘gaze’ in reference to gender relations, the ‘male gaze’ and the ‘female gaze’. But, what about an inherently racialised gaze that is underpinned by a hybridity of whiteness and façade?
This unusual gaze is a little complex. It is the gaze that ridicules the actions of a man for making a comment with misogynistic undertones yet is the same gaze that averts itself to forms of behaviour that do not impact them, even though both are equally as important. It seems agreeable and noble at first, almost seems reasonable, but there’s always a catch. A big catch. One that lights fury in some matters but not in others.
Let’s draw to Jane Sloan from the Bold Type. Jane Sloan is a white woman who is fierce, who will call out misogynistic behaviour and who will unravel stories that are ground-breaking for women. As our contemporary #girlboss, Jane Sloan has a large following and is looked upon as this tenacious, modern feminist that calls out the indiscretions of cis het men. However, once Jane’s world unravels and she loses her job, she is faced with the challenge of an extremely competitive job market. When applying for a new job, Jane is told that a publication she interviewed for went with someone else as a result of a new diversity hiring policy. Jane rants to her friends about this experience, exclaiming that this is “unfair” because she was “the best candidate for the job”. The truth is that Jane doesn’t know – it is not a fact that she was the best person for the job and simply assumed that she was. Jane’s close friend Kat, calls out her behaviour for being ‘racist’ and draws attention to the fact that you can simultaneously be a ‘diverse’ individual and the best candidate for the job, drawing on her own experience as a black woman who is the head of a department at the publication she works at. Jane immediately refutes. However, what follows is a journey where Jane has to deconstruct her white privilege, but it is all prompted by a close friend who is not white to bring that to her attention.
The reality is that prior to that event, Jane did indeed engage with big world events. She would post about getting vaccinated, about #BLM and about the current events in Afghanistan. But, she would be disassociated. For her, it would be about using her platform to appear as an ally and heck maybe she would even attempt to look up pages that might give her guidance to be a better ally. It would be all about spreading ‘awareness’. But the thing is, Jane would only ever be invested in those stories that she feels personally connected to as a white woman. She wouldn’t be going into any sort of ‘deep dive’, unless it concerned taking down a cis het man. Because the truth is the only threat to someone like Jane is patriarchy and therefore it posed as the only structure she cares about taking down.
Unfortunately, not all of the Jane Sloan’s in the world have a close friend that will have that difficult conversation to break free from only spending her critical thinking in deconstructing gender relations. Most Jane Sloan’s in the world may not even have any friends who are people of colour to expose them to how gender actually interacts with other structures. How it is actually about holistically considering social underpinnings that create minorities and create monopoly on voice, experience and existence. They may be secluded in their bubble of whiteness and token ‘progressive’ politics, where the predominant motto to preach is the elimination of patriarchy.
When real-life archetypes of Jane Sloan talk about deconstructing privilege, many of them engage in a form of privilege – the privilege to pick and choose which structures to deconstruct, the privilege to choose which issues to address. The same individuals that will often rebut a criticism of their conduct as a viewpoint that is engaging with ‘toxic identity politics’ yet negating that there is a world where identities intersect with a complex array of systematic oppression besides one predominant hierarchical structure. An identity that does not have the privilege to be complex when explored further but one that may be a hybrid of an individual’s physical presentation and their internal complexities. An experience that does encompass an intersectionality that one cannot escape from.
No one can escape from privilege, but we can understand it better. We can step aside and understand where our actions are inconsistent. It may be impossible to feel the brunt of marginalisation when we may not be impacted by a particular social structure, but we can make those perpetuating such structures more accountable. We can start by holding a similar degree of anger we may feel for an experience that is similarly jarring but not our own, applying the fire that enables us to call something out when we are hurt for also acting in that way when we see others also impacted by injustice. Ultimately, we need to avoid advancing privilege when we deconstruct privilege and move on from monopolising certain forms of oppression over others by sticking to the same rigid hierarchical tactics that disadvantage us in the first place.
Basically, let’s learn from Jane Sloan’s cautionary tale.
