The Responsibility of Privilege

The current theme seems to be a heavy/thoughtful post Mondays, so I thought I’d keep it going for a while longer. I’ve been cogitating on this post for some time now, and the more I read about other people’s thoughts, the more I think about it myself, the more I found myself driven to comment on it.

In light of the events happening around the world (including those particularly in our faces here in the US), it can be overwhelming to consider the pain humans can inflict on their fellow human beings. It can be so overwhelming, in fact, that it would easier not to think about it at all. And so I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the responsibility we all hold, as human beings, to other humans. But, of course, this wouldn’t be one of my posts if we didn’t have a strange and seemingly nonsensical side-bar thrown in, so I’d like to take you, very briefly, down another road first. James gave me a book for my birthday called White Ravens. Written by Owen Sheers, it is a modern-day retelling of the Welsh fable of Branwen, Daughter of Llyr. Of course, like most mythology tends to be, it is heartrendingly lovely before it is ugly and repulsive in its exposure of human fallibility & cruelty; while I’ll resist the urge to spoil it for you, the true reason it’s relevant is because White Ravens talks about the idea of ‘being a bridge, not a barrier.’

It’s a sobering moment, when you grow up enough to realise that you were born into, and developed your sense of self, as a member of a privileged world. I will never know the struggles experienced by WOC; the fear of discrimination and segregation based on the colour of my skin; I have never had traditional lands stolen from me; had my children taken away for ‘their own good’; I have never been forbidden from looking at, talking to, sitting next to, or eating in the same venue as another person. And the idea that such an experience could belong to anyone, let alone generations of people, whole cultures of humans, makes my stomach turn.

Sometimes it can be very difficult to reconcile yourself to living in this world: not only because of the ugliness within it, but because sometimes you can’t help but ask yourself—how can anything I think, or feel, be truly important when compared to what is happening to all these other people? How can my experiences matter? It is terrible for any human to question their own importance: your life holds value because it is yours. And I believe we have no requirement to justify our personal experience of pain, or hardship to anyone else… But once we figure out we’re privileged – and despite how self-evident it probably should be, sometimes it will take a long, long time for some to finally figure that out – we have to shoulder the burden of our responsibilities.

Our responsibility is to allow the voices of the marginalised to be heard and, where appropriate, to amplify them. Our responsibility is to recognise that we have been given advantages in life based on nothing more than the luck of the draw – which society, race, gender or culture we were born into – and acknowledge it. We have the chance to be a bridge, not a barrier. 

We have a choice to make, every day, about what kind of world we will accept. If you are privileged, part of our privilege is the freedom we have been given to make a choice: whether we’re going to exist in our happy little bubble where ‘racism doesn’t exist any more’, ‘men don’t get preferential treatment over women’ and ‘if I don’t think about it and don’t look, it’s not my problem’, or whether we’re going to use our privilege to fight for the people who don’t have the freedom to pretend those things aren’t happening. People who have wrongly been pigeonholed, trodden on, marginalised, overlooked, and castigated and abused for nothing more than the colour of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation, their religious beliefs, and the unfortunate world they were born into, where those attributes are considered to be important than who you are as a person.

Psychological research tells us that the only difference between someone who is prejudiced, and someone who isn’t, is the non-prejudiced person works every day to combat their own inherent biases.

Only you can make that choice for yourself, just as I’m the only one who gets to choose how I act and how I see the world. I’m not saying that at times it won’t be hard: sometimes it is so damn easy to just fall in with the group and to demonise someone for their differences rather than trying to understand who they are as a human being… But we can try. Try and keep trying, naïve as it may sound, to do what we can to make the world a better place. It is easy to sit on the sidelines and spectate, but our value is in acting to try and help others—however that may happen.

For me, I want to make a difference for people through my words. Think outside the box in which I live and fight to portray a world in which all people are accepted, regardless of how they’re categorised by society—to find out if I can help someone be heard, if there is some way in which I can help someone understand their own worth. A big dream, maybe, but what are we here for, if not to dream big?

Sometimes all it takes to make a change is some faith and some courage.

— Ana.

If you found this post at all interesting or thought-provoking, I’d also love to recommend some posts by some pretty incredible bloggers in a similar vein: R.K. Brainerd over at Awake Dragon recently wrote a piece called “I am a White Writer” talking about her own perception of the privilege associated with being a white writer when considering the challenges for writers of colour, while one of my newest discoveries, Mandy Len Catron over at The Love Story Project wrote ‘Attending to the Small’ which beautifully considers the challenges of writing about love when we’re feeling overwhelmed by the ugliness going on around us.