Understanding Privilege: For Our Children & Ourselves

Got a question the other day: “I’m confused about white, male privilege — I’m trying to be more aware, but I have 3, white boys who I can’t raise not to be white men. What do I do?”

Let’s chat a little, & I’ll share some resources that worked for me.

Welcome to Sunday Morning’s Coffee & Culture with DMY:

What is privilege, white or otherwise? To paraphrase Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Wanna Talk About Race & Mediocre: the Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, privilege is something that you were born with, didn’t (can’t have) worked for, that gives you advantage, favor or immunity not enjoyed by other groups of humans that are not in your demographic.

Privilege comes in many flavors: whiteness, maleness, able-bodiedness, intelligence, attractiveness, & generational wealth are a few. A big problem to understanding is that people get stuck on inherited wealth — thinking that if they weren’t born rich, they can’t have privilege.

This graphic is great — esp. since most people feel others have attractiveness advantage, we don’t fight the concept as hard. Check this out, & just try to believe that this works similarly for every form of privilege (called intersectionalities).

Reality: we nearly all have some level of privilege which we gained by chance of birth. Think you worked hard to get into college, therefore it’s all on you? Not so. If you were born into a country where the literacy meant you were taught to read as a child — that’s privilege.

At the end of the day, privilege is about how you were taught to show up in the world. Men walk through the world differently than women (Women have to worry about assault by men), white people differently than Black people (Black people have to worry about assault by cops), etc.

There’s a book called White Fragility, which, while it has received some criticisms, I think can still be a good starting place for those tired of institutionalized racism & willing to begin doing the work, but unsure of where to start. (make sure you read Black authors too).

Here’s a quick review I wrote about it when I was doing some heavy work to unculture myself from subconscious racism over the last few years: daniellayoung.medium.com/white-fragilit…

One of the things I love in this book is she helps us understand white privilege through male privilege. So, it’s two for one.

It’s quite challenging to understand privilege from examining your own experience alone, bc privilege is about how you were taught to show up in the world. An example is that preteen white boys don’t generally get ‘the talk’ from parents about how to protect themselves on the street from cops the way black teenagers do, or men, the way female teenagers do.

We just don’t know what we don’t know, so, if you’ve never been exposed to other groups being disadvantaged due to the ‘lottery of birth’, in ways they can’t change & don’t control, then you’ll have a hard time seeing that, if you are the opposite, you have an unfair advantage.

Dr. Robin DiAngelo, of White Fragility explains: Since we naturally see ourselves as protagonists, we feel that any indication that we might be operating under racist patterns is an attack on our character, rather than an indictment of the society that socialized us.

“We cannot understand modern forms of racism if we cannot or, will not, explore patterns of group behavior and their effects on individuals.” — DiAngelo

Ding, ding, group behavior again. It’s everywhere. We really can never escape our socialization. But we can understand it.

If you’re white, especially, if you are a white, cisgendered, able-bodied man, please dig into studying privilege more. Once you see it, you will never unsee it. That’s when good people will want to correct the unjust system. It does mean the privileged using their power for good

So what can we do about it? This question pops up a lot — sometimes by angry white men who don’t want to have to do the work, “I can’t change that I’m a white man, can I?”
But, more recently, it pops up sincerely: “how can we change? How can we not raise our kids in this system?”

These are the questions we need to be asking. When I was 15, I moved to the US from a childhood in Brazil & Mexico, countries that very much struggle with their own racist systems.

But in America, I found something darker & scarier about the racism — and especially about how we pretend it doesn’t exist.

The most important thing to teach our children is to listen (Obviously, we must be listening ourselves). I don’t think we can ever understand systemic injustice if we are still justifying to ourselves that it doesn’t really exist, or that, it’s not our ‘fault’ or responsibility.

We have to understand, & teach our young ones, that you can never really understand the experience of a group of people that we’re not in (just imagine someone telling you they understand war or being in the Army because they have friends or have seen movies?). Doesn’t work.

Once we accept that others have been unfairly disadvantaged, we can accept, by contrast principle, that we have been advantaged. If we truly believe that all humans are equal, we should want to learn to change that.

This mantra from DiAngelo has helped me a lot “I know that I have blind spots & unconscious investments in racism. My investments are reinforced every day in mainstream society. I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me, I do use it to my advantage, & I am responsible for interrupting it. I need to work hard to change my role in this system, but I can’t do it alone. This understanding leads me to gratitude when others help me.”

If we accept privilege exists, & we educate ourselves, listen to others, & teach our children to show up differently, we can end it.

“All we have to do” to overcome privilege is to dig deeply into our own socialization, realize how we were taught to take up space in the world is heavily based on our demographics & what groups we belong to, & then begin to actively dismantle those systems — & not pass them on.

Good places to start are reading White Fragility, How to Raise White Children, So You Wanna Talk About Race, & How to be an Antiracist. For male privilege, check out Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men & Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America.

This isn’t a negative journey about having to change who you are to be accepted in a new, ‘woke’ world. It’s about waking up to something you might never have seen before, but as absolutely been infecting all of us for our whole lives.

We can choose to detoxify ourselves.

Thanks for hanging with me for another Sunday. Happy Unculturing!

Daniella Mestyanek Young is an American author and TEDx Speaker. Daniella has been breaking through barriers and challenging authority figures since her earliest childhood memories growing up in the horrifying Children of God Cult and on through her service and deployment to war twice. Daniella served as part of the first group of women who integrated into deliberate combat arms missions back in 2011 and has since spent the majority of her time leading in veteran service organizations to try and help folks heal and find their own definition of success after their service.

Daniella is married to the world’s best special operations helicopter pilot (retired) and speaks primarily in Brazilian Portuguese with her daughter, who sasses her back in three languages. Daniella is currently at work on her memoir, Uncultured. She can be found speaking speaking truth to power, irritating vetbros and stamping out the kyriarchy on Twitter @daniellamyoung. She can be contacted at daniella.m.young@gmail.com