Welcome to this card on considering your privilege. Now privilege is a topic that can be a little challenging for some people. So we wanted to take a moment to offer you some frames, some things to think about, which might help shape your thinking on this topic. So first up, privilege is something, or lack of privilege is something that we didn’t earn.
So it’s unearned, earned advantage or disadvantage. And that can come in many different forms. So we can think of things like gender. We can think of age, we can think of the socioeconomic status you were born into, the place you were born to. Uh, we can think about ability or disability and all of these make up, all of these mix together to make up the pool of advantage or disadvantage that people experience.
These can change over time. So something like disability is something that we on a long enough timeline all step into to one form or another during our lives. It’s contextually relevant as well. So, um, being a woman in certain parts of the world is a lot more disadvantageous than other parts of the world.
So there are countries in which women do not have the, the same rights as men. So that’s an obvious example of privilege playing out there. And it points to the fact that there’s no real pure meritocracy in the world. So meritocracy on its face seems like this really good idea. So we’re all rewarded according to our efforts, but people start from different starting blocks and we’ve had different levels of unearned help into in, in terms of getting where we, uh, where we are.
So that’s really what we’re talking about here. Privilege doesn’t prevent hardship in life. So even superficially or on paper, the most privileged individuals will have still experienced difficulty in hardship in their life. And it doesn’t, it doesn’t prevent or it doesn’t negate that experience. And going back to this prevailing theme, that it is unearned.
An important point here is that we shouldn’t feel bad about the level of privilege that we take ourselves to have. So we didn’t choose to be born who we are to the parents we were born to, and the place we were born in the level of health or, uh, you know, the level of health that we, that we experience.
So we shouldn’t feel bad that we have potentially a more privileged lot in life than some other people. The real question is, what are you gonna do about it? What’s your personal responsibility? And I like breaking down that word response-ability, your ability to respond. So considering your personal mix of advantages and disadvantages, how are you going to use that position to benefit those around you?
That’s really the question we’re asking here.
