I’ve been having a few conversations recently with people about privilege. Mostly about how people in our communities benefit from privilege yet refuse to acknowledge this or don’t know how. It’s not an easy thing to recognise that there’s stuff you don’t have to deal with if you’re non-Indigenous or male or able bodied or whatever. But when it really comes down to it we need to recognise and challenge this privilege if we want to make some decent changes within our communities.
And as often seems to happen when I have an issue popping up in conversation a lot, a really good article on the topic pops up in my RSS feeds!
I highly recommend you take five minutes and read this article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh. It is superbly written and is a real make you think-er.
I think it’s a really interesting exercise to go through for anyone wanting to question privilege and how it works on their own life. Especially for those of you out there wondering why we’ve managed to remove most of the overt legal forms of discrimination yet the statistics still show a massive bias towards the able bodied straight white guy. Our behaviours as humans are so habitual and discrimination and privilege are definitely creatures of habit!
I’d love to hear what anyone else thinks about this article.
Incidentally, I found this article on the Women’s Creative Collective blog which I recently came across and it’s fecking excellent, you should read it too!