What's This ‘Privilege’ Thing, Then?

In about a month, Friends from across Britain – and beyond – will gather in London for Britain Yearly Meeting 2019. The theme for this year is privilege, examining our own and the range of privilege within our community. As the document Preparing for Yearly Meeting (available from the BYM website) notes:

Privilege – whether we recognise it or not – fundamentally impacts our ability to act on our urgent Quaker concerns regarding climate justice and sustainability, and inclusion and diversity. Privilege is fluid, there are many types, and each varies according to context. The purpose of our examination of privilege is to help each of us become aware of the unseen chains that bind us and determine how we act in our lives.

That document has a lot of great material to prepare, and I don't intend to reproduce it or compete with it. There is also a ‘toolkit’ available from the same link above, Owning power and privilege, produced by QPSW, and I do not intend to supplant that, either. It looks at some key concepts and explains them somewhat shallowly, albeit with examples. I say this not as a criticism – for many, this is the most we can expect them to learn about this on their own, and the information in the toolkit is certainly clearer than a lot of explanations of these things. Hopefully, sharper learning will come from sessions at YM.

There are two things that I want to try and help with, in this post. One is simply to recognise the fact that most active Quakers in this country, including myself, won't be at Yearly Meeting. I imagine Friends House would collapse – organisationally, if not physically – if that weren't the case. Friends elsewhere in the world who are interested in the same sorts of learning that Britain YM is trying to encourage will also (in the vast majority) won't be there. These conversations have to happen in other places if they are to have the greatest benefit.

The other is to share my own views, thoughts, knowledge and insights. That is, after all, generally the point of me writing this blog – to share, in a spirit of fellowship, the fruits of my own reading, thinking, contemplation and worship. To that end, I’m going to try and explain in really straightforward terms (to the extent that that is possible), and without assuming that everyone should agree with the idea, what privilege means in this sort of context. It’s important to avoid that assumption, because there’s few things as likely to prompt resistance – emotional and intellectual – as telling people that they should obviously agree with what you’re saying. It’s something we should remember whenever we’re discussing things that people are likely to disagree with, including some other (related and less related) current areas of discussing among Friends.

One note before I start, given the international nature of my audience. This is going to be a general exploration of principles, and examples will be international, but it is obviously largely informed by the experience of Britain. This is important, because the nature of how racism affects society is different between countries. Actually, the same is true of all axes of oppression, but that is the one that is most especially different between the two countries that most of my readers seem to be living in – the United Kingdom, and the United States. The heritage of slavery and the heritage of colonialism produce different results, in very complex ways.

"Privilege" and "wealth" are associated in the minds of
many, but they aren't the same thing.

Now, I’m sure none of you have any difficulty with the essential, everyday meaning of privilege. Oxford Dictionaries online gives the principle meaning of the word as “a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group”, and that is very clear in such technical usage as parliamentary privilege, franking privilege or attorney-client privilege (to use the American term) or legal professional privilege (for the more common common law term). We’ve also probably heard expressions like “the privileged few”, the idea that there are some people with more wealth, influence and power than others. Few would have any difficulty identifying a child who has been sent to Eton College paying full fees, that the family have no difficulty paying, as in some ways privileged. We can even be scathing of those we consider to have been born with a silver spoon in their mouth, an idiom meaning that one was born into wealth – a matter of everyday privilege. It’s not always about money, of course; sometimes we can identify the same sort of general privilege in growing up somewhere with particular facilities available that aren’t available in the rest of the country, such as a particularly good sports centre.

Privilege is not inherently a negative idea, either. We might eulogise someone by saying we were “privileged to have known them”, identifying that we consider we had something positive that others did not have, showing that we truly appreciate them. While we might think it is unfair that the wealthy have the privilege they have, that is very much specific to that form of privilege. It may well also be that privilege has a negative connotation when we identify it in others, and a more positive connotation when we admit it ourselves.

That is a very broad, not very specific, but everyday meaning of the word. However, it’s common that people come up with new uses for terms in specific disciplines or discourses (ways of talking about things). So, when we use privilege in the sense of white privilege or straight privilege, it’s not precisely that everyday meaning. It is related, certainly, but it is not entirely the same. It comes from the discourse of privilege and oppression, somewhat complementary concepts that come up in theory in feminism/gender studies, in race relations and civil rights, in social studies of various sorts.

The trappings of privilege?

If we say that someone is privileged, without qualification, in everyday speech, we are generally saying that they have, overall, some significant advantage compared to the population in general. That’s what we mean when we say that rich Eton kids are privileged. When we talk about privilege in terms of privilege and oppression, it is a way of looking at privilege and oppression from a different direction. People have little problem, usually, understanding the idea of racism as oppression of people from minority ethnic groups (or sometimes numerical majority groups where power is in the hands of a numerical minority; to avoid repeated caveating, minority will be used from here on to mean the group with less power, rather than the numerical meaning). People are oppressed by being refused service in shops and cafes, by being in segregated schools, by being more likely to be arrested, searched, killed by police. You might disagree as to whether these things are real, or whether they are justified, but the basic idea that – assuming they are real – they constitute oppression isn’t a stretch for most people. If you have restricted choices where others have freer choices, or if the choice is restricted for all but the ones available for you are uniformly worse, then you are oppressed. If the police treat you with undeserved suspicion because of a visible characteristic, you are oppressed. There are various technical ways to define this, but it amounts to disadvantage due to membership of a social group or due to personal characteristics.

Obviously, looking at things in that way suggests that those who are not oppressed are ‘normal’, that there is some norm to which they do not have access. Privilege is simply the complement of that, and can be used to flip around the ‘normal’. Privilege is (unearned) advantage due to membership of a social group or due to personal characteristics. Sometimes people frame this as two things that are both different from ‘normal’; that some are privileged and some are oppressed, and then there are others in between. Personally, I prefer the school of thought that sees it as a dichotomy, that privilege is the absence of oppression, or conversely that oppression is the absence of privilege.

The really important point to note here is that privilege/oppression are any advantage/disadvantage, not necessarily overall advantage like the Eton kid. So where society confers, deliberately or otherwise, an advantage on some group, they by definition confer a disadvantage on those not in that group; that advantage/disadvantage is a privilege of that group, or a form of oppression of the those not in that group.

So, if oppression and privilege are complements, why do we here so much about privilege, and relatively little about oppression nowadays? In my view, it’s about a rhetorical technique. You, as (for example) a white reader, or a male reader, may feel challenged, uncomfortable when you are told about white privilege or male privilege. Here’s the thing – that’s (part of) the idea. It’s easy to say “yes, we should stop oppressing black people” (or Asians, or indigenous people, or whatever). Thing is, what goes with that is “yes, we should stop giving me an advantage”, and if people don’t accept that, then the oppression is never going to go away.

So we talk about people having privilege to get them to understand that they have been receiving advantages. I am in the privileged area of most axes of oppression – I am white, I am a man, I was raised in a household with university-educated parents, I’m straight. Here in Britain, the fact I am not Christian isn’t a problem. I am disabled, and much of the problems I face in relation to this are, per the social model of disability, oppression by society, though explaining why that is would be better in a different post, though a piece of my written ministry on disability may aid understanding. Due to various circumstances, I have a pretty difficult life. However, my white privilege means that I have an easier time of things than someone who was in exactly the same circumstances but wasn’t white; my male privilege means that I don’t face as much difficulty as someone who was in an identical situation by was a woman. The same applies for straight privilege and middle class privilege (though that latter one is so complex I’m not going to go into it in detail).

I am not a privileged person, in the general everyday sense. I do, however, experience advantages thanks to personal characteristics or social groups that I fall into. I have privilege, even if I am not privileged.

Now, there are some situations I might find myself in, in my life, in which I’m worse of by being a man, or by being white. In the society in which I live, these are relatively unusual, but they do exist. I will be treated with more suspicion than a woman in many circumstances, and I have not done anything, personally, to earn that reaction. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily an unreasonable reaction. Sometimes it’s quite reasonable – women being distrustful of strange men in various situations is not an illogical position, and it presents me very limited disadvantage. An assumption that men are a greater risk to children, that (for example) a father alone with his children in a public place is more likely to experience suspicion than a woman alone with her children, is less reasonable. The fact that sometimes members of minority ethnic groups are scornful of white people may, on rare occasions, lead to a disadvantage for white people in some small context. That is what we mean when we say that privilege is, in part, context-dependent. However, we do not speak much of black privilege or female privilege, because the balance, the range of situations in which there is an advantage to being in those groups, is clearly (in most of the English-speaking world) in favour of white people and of men.

Very few people have every form of oppression, and relatively few have every form of privilege. In different places, there are whole axes of oppression that don’t exist elsewhere, such as relative privilege between native speakers of different languages, even when the languages have theoretically equal status. Then there’s passing privilege, a relatively controversial idea related to a person being in an oppressed group, but being able to pass as a member of the privileged group – possibly always passing unless they make a point of their status. Thus some people of non-European ancestry can pass as “white”, or a bisexual person in a monogamous relationship with a person of the opposite sex can pass as straight. This is not necessarily about concealing anything; in the example of someone who’s bisexual, especially, in order to not ‘pass’ they would have to be not just open, but vocal about their orientation to be seen correctly by others. Similar concerns can also apply in relation to other characteristics, disability especially. This is very, very controversial within a lot of these groups, because it is sometimes used to suggest that the person’s oppression is absent when they are passing, but things are a lot more complex than that.

We should also be aware that people sometimes seek to set out which oppression is ‘worse’ than which others, whether black people are more disadvantaged than women, whether disabled people are more disadvantaged than adherents of minority religions. This is referred to in various ways, including the idea of a hierarchy of oppression. Now, it may be that there are ways to work out and establish, within the context of some particular theoretical framework, which classes of oppression are worse. However, it’s not actually something that is useful on a day-to-day basis, because the nature of different classes of oppression/privilege are different. Even if we look at Britain in the 50s and 60s, where both non-white people and women faced massive discrimination in the world of work and in accessing housing or goods and services, the nature of the obstructions were different. Today, ‘white privilege’ in Britain is the absence of several categories of oppression, as the oppression faced by people from different non-white backgrounds or with different non-white appearances are different, in some cases very different. In deconstructing, and wherever possible dismantling privilege, we have to understand that it is not a purely quantitative matter – it is, in fact, principally a qualitative matter, albeit one whose manifestations (such as pay inequality) can sometimes be measured quantitatively. For this reason, it is my view that attempting to assess different disadvantages in a quantitative way is unlikely to be useful. You can apply orders to how oppression is manifested – the degree of violence experienced, with genocide at the top – but not to the actual experience of different axes of oppression.

This is about awareness, not shame

It’s particularly important to note that having privilege is not a personal failing. It is simply a matter of recognising that our unequal society has given you some advantages that some others do not have. You do not choose to have privilege. Indeed, if you have privilege, there’s very little you can do in the way of choosing not to have it. You can refuse when offered an upgrade on a flight, perhaps, or other situations where background, appearance or other people’s assumptions give you advantages. You can do your best to use the fruits of your privilege, such as they may be, to help others. You can stand up for people when, for instance, veiled or indirect racism leads to people being barred or disadvantaged in some area for having a natural black hairstyle or wearing clothing associated with their heritage. You can, as a man, do your best to make sure women are heard in meetings. It’s hard, but it’s worth doing – because if you can’t get rid of your advantages, you can at least use them to reduce other people’s disadvantages.

A few years back, the idea of privilege, and what it should mean when discussing various things, was often summed up by the call to ‘check your privilege’. It’s fallen out of use somewhat now, but the fact it was used as a direct challenge has led to a lot of people being uncomfortable with the idea of privilege and how people talk about it. Some people seem to think that check is being used in the same way as checking a bag at a cloakroom in a club or theatre; that they should leave their privilege aside. That has never been my understanding; indeed, it would require a fundamental misunderstanding of privilege to think that’s what it meant, because (as mentioned above) one cannot set aside one’s privilege. I cannot stop the police being less suspicious of me because I am white, nor customer service staff treating me more pleasantly because of my middle class accent. The call to check one’s privilege is a way of saying “what you are saying is informed by your privileged experience, and you need to be aware of that – and listen to what people who have experienced the oppression in question have to say from their lived experience”. It doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, mean that you cannot speak on the subject at all, merely that you should not speak from a position of privilege to tell oppressed people about their experience.

So, what does all of this mean for Quakers in Britain?

Let's set aside the obvious answer, our commitment to equality. That's a reason we should care about this, but it's a hand-waving one. Let's look at things concrete, about how we exist in the world. We are, by and large, a privileged bunch. It is no secret that British Quakers are predominately white, and culturally middle class. We do a little better on the balance of the sexes than society in general, but there is a perception that we still have gender bias in the nature of roles in which men and women are asked to serve. Men are, I have heard, more likely to be asked to serve as treasurers and trustees, women in worship and spiritual roles (such as clerks and elders). The latter matches my experience; the former does not. Of course, in my time among Quakers, I’ve been involved in Meetings that are numerically mostly women, which may skew things a little. We are predominately relatively well off.

Poverty and wealth live close to one another in our
metropolises, as protests have highlighted. They live
closer in our Meetings than we might realise.

That skews our perspective, but it also acts directly to exclude. My experience suggests that the economic inequality in our Yearly Meeting is actually greater than we realise, but the appearance of it is maintained by the fact that people who are less well off feel unable to be open about that. The fact we are culturally middle class means that people who are not may feel excluded at shared meals when they see the different eating habits of Friends that are alien to their own – an example I mean in all seriousness, as I experienced it myself. The fact our Meetings are largely a sea of white faces excludes because people may find it hard to feel at home in an environment in which they stick out so clearly.

But it is not just the real, direct effects of these ways in which we are predominately in privileged classes. It’s the way we talk about them. The fact that we say that we are generally comfortable economically means that people who are less well off will arrive prepared to be alienated and will discourage them (or should I say us) from talking about it. The fact that we are known to be culturally middle class, which may not be talked about in those terms but it is certainly a way of summarising various elements of our image among the rest of the country, means that people who do not share that culture are unlikely to come along. The fact we are known to be so predominately white means that those who are not white are unlikely to even give us a chance to show them that we can speak to their condition.

And I think we can speak to their condition, and to the condition of all sorts of people, but we don’t. We speak, corporately, as might be expected from our demographics. We speak in ways that speak most to middle aged, middle class, white people with professional backgrounds.

The key reason for us to understand our privilege is to be able to take account of it. We must see how we exclude the oppressed, in the myriad ways in which we do so, but we must also understand how it affects how we speak. We must understand the ways in which we speak from a position of privilege, and consciously change that. It will require learning, it will require humility. It will require us to enable those among us who do not share a particular area of privilege to teach us, and it will require us to listen and not think we know better – to check our privilege, as the saying goes. It may require us to engage in this learning from people outside our faith community, simply due to the lack of such people within our community, as we can’t expect any given black person to educate us about blackness – we have to find someone who is willing to do so, and preferably several someones because that experience is not uniform between individuals.

This will require effort, humility, and for us to sometimes just shut up and listen. We’re good at shutting up, but sometimes I’m not sure how good we are at doing it at other times than Meeting for Worship. I’m really not sure how good we are at listening.

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