Member-only story
Guys, Let’s Talk About the P-word.
And why we’re so uncomfortable talking about privilege.
My parents claimed they could easily tell when I was lying.
They were right, for a while. As a boy I would think I was being so clever, so sneaky, but my mom, especially, could tell. She wouldn’t tell me how she was able to tell, but I never forgot what she said about it: “You’re like a kid who stole a piece of cake, standing there with crumbs on your mouth and a dirty fork in your back pocket, saying ‘What cake?’”
It was a pretty effective image. I never wanted to be the kid with the dirty fork sticking out of his pocket, and eventually I learned my lesson: the easiest way not to be caught in a lie is not to lie.
My fellow men: let’s talk about privi — wait, wait, where are you going?!?
All kidding aside, I understand why the people who have a lot of privilege — for example, white men like me — don’t want to talk about it.
Masculinity tends to like calls to authority, such as defining terms. If you want to define privilege:
- A special advantage, immunity, permission, right, or benefit granted to or enjoyed by an individual, class, or caste. synonym: right.
- Such an advantage, immunity, or right held as a prerogative of status or rank, and exercised to the exclusion or detriment of others. (Emphasis added)
We get the impression privilege is bad, and therefore, if we have it, we must be bad, too. It brings up the uncomfortable idea that whatever we have achieved in life had more to do with luck of birth or appearance than hard work or talent
And then there’s the second bit, where this thing that we’re supposedly born with is “exercised to the detriment of others.
What a lot of men — including me, when I first learned the concept — hear when people talk about “privilege” is that: you were born with something you didn’t earn that hurts other people.
It’s not a very short leap from that to you were born bad.
And nobody wants to talk about that.
