About

I doubt many people object to the idea of everyone having equal opportunities to prove themselves and earn the best civilization has to offer. The problems start when we get down to specifics and realize something we thought we’d earned, or something we thought everyone enjoyed along with us, is actually an unearned privilege we might need to give up for equality to happen. It’s only natural we don’t want to hear that.

Privilege isn’t just about certain people being allowed certain freedoms the rest of us don’t enjoy. It’s also about enabling the privileged to avoid responsibility for their actions, and that’s what makes it such a cancer in society. Societies can’t ensure everyone’s equal happiness, but they certainly can ensure that everyone is held equally accountable for their misdeeds. But they don’t. I believe they never had any intention of doing so. Just using my own country as an example, any batch of white land-owning men over twenty-one who can pen a document which says “All men are created equal” in which “men” means “white landowner, twenty-one years or older” has a serious case of privilege. To them, other men are invisible. Even if their intentions were noble, they might as well have been those of someone out to start a race war.

But what you may not realize is that every human being has a combination of privileges and prohibitions. A woman is automatically less privileged than a man, but a white woman has more privileges than a woman of color. Not only race and gender enter into it, but class, sexual orientation, whether or not you’re perceived as physically and mentally “normal” (whatever that means!), what sort of job you have and what religions/political parties/etc. you ally with can impact what privileges people perceive you as having. You may have privileges you don’t realize you have. That’s what this site is all about.