The Word Privilege

There are certain words that can change the temperature of a room.

Privilege is one of them.

You can feel it the moment the word is spoken.

Bodies shift.

Arms cross.

People begin explaining themselves before anyone has asked a question.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us learned to hear the word privilege as an accusation.

As if someone is saying:

You’ve never struggled.

You’ve never worked hard.

Your life has been easy.

But that is not what privilege means.

Privilege does not mean a life without hardship.

It means that some parts of our identity move through the world with fewer barriers than others.

For a long time, I think I held a very preschool understanding of privilege.

As if people either had it or they didn’t.

As if it were a simple category you could assign to someone.

But the more time I have spent in community, the more I have come to understand that privilege does not work that way.

Privilege lives on a spectrum.

It moves and shifts depending on where you are standing.

I see this often in my own work.

My boss is a Black woman.

There are many times when people walk into a room and instinctively reach toward me first.

Not because of anything I have said.

Not because of my role.

But because of the identities they see first.

And there are other times when I walk into a room with a Black male colleague and the assumption shifts again.

People turn toward him.

Authority moves.

Expectation moves.

Privilege and power move.

The point is not to keep score.

The point is to recognize that identity shapes how we move through the world.

And that recognition requires us to talk about power.

Because privilege and power are inseparable.

You cannot talk honestly about one without acknowledging the other.

This is also where the idea of intersectionality becomes so important.

The term was introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black legal scholar who helped give language to something many people had long experienced but struggled to describe.

Intersectionality helps us understand that identities do not exist in isolation.

They intersect.

They overlap.

They shape one another.

A person may experience privilege in one context and marginalization in another.

A white woman may face sexism while still benefiting from whiteness.

A Black man may experience racial discrimination while still benefiting from male privilege.

These realities can exist at the same time.

But conversations about privilege often become stuck because people feel the need to defend their hardships.

As if acknowledging privilege somehow erases the challenges they have faced.

It doesn’t.

Saying that someone has privilege does not mean their life has been easy.

It means that certain aspects of their identity have not been the reason the door was closed.

I think about this often when conversations about women’s rights arise.

Globally, women have fewer rights than men.

That reality matters deeply to me.

But if I am only willing to talk about the ways I experience oppression as a woman, while ignoring the ways my whiteness protects me within those same systems, then I am still participating in harm.

Because liberation cannot be selective.

If we are only advocating for the rights that benefit us personally, we are not working toward justice.

We are simply trying to survive the systems we already know.

And survival is not the same thing as liberation.

I believe deeply in the beauty of human diversity.

In the countless ways people move through the world carrying different cultures, histories, identities, and experiences.

To me, that diversity is not a problem to be managed.

It is something sacred.

But if we are going to celebrate that diversity honestly, we also have to acknowledge that people experience the world very differently.

Privilege and power do not erase those differences.

They help explain them.

And once we begin to see that, the question becomes unavoidable.

What are we going to do with that awareness?