Obliviousness Is the Most Destructive Privilege of All

At a time of increasing attention to issues of inequality, much has been written lately about discrimination and its flipside, unearned privilege.

While some of the discussion involves whether or not various types of privilege (such as white privilege) even exist, at other times, the debate is more about which type of privilege is the bigger problem to which we should attend?

Is it white privilege, male privilege, class privilege for the wealthy, or some other kind that does the most damage, or about which we should be most concerned?

I suppose one could make an argument for any of these, but seriously?

Fact is, systems of inequality, which involve advantages and disadvantages as two sides of the same coin, are all harmful to the cause of a fair and just society. There is no practical point in ranking them in order of awfulness, even were it possible to do so objectively.

Rather than engaging in discussions about degrees of pain and unearned advantage, I find that the most productive way to engage privilege is to examine the one that links them all.

Call it the meta-privilege that connects all the ones we usually talk (and fight) about.

It’s the privilege of obliviousness — the privilege of not having to know other people’s reality and lived experiences.

And unlike the other privileges mentioned above, which only people in those respective categories possess, the privilege of obliviousness is one we all have in some area — or areas — and it can make it difficult for us to engage in these conversations in a fair-minded way.

Think about it.

We all have lenses through which we observe the society around us, and none of our lenses are crafted in a way that allows us to see through everyone’s eyes — only our own.

As such, we miss a lot.

As a straight white male, I have experienced life in a way that is related to those identities. LGBTQ folk, persons of color, and women of all colors have experienced life differently, related to theirs. We’ll have lots of overlap, too, of course. Still, our identities have mattered in terms of how we’ve likely experienced the labor market, schooling, law enforcement, and health care delivery, among other institutional settings.

But here’s the thing: you can have an identity that advantages you in one area and another that disadvantages you at the same time. Likewise, even people who face multiple disadvantages rooted in various identities will tend to have at least one area where they are a member of the dominant or normative group. And in those categories, it will be they who possess the privilege of obliviousness.

So a Black woman will not enjoy the advantages that come from being a man or white, including the privilege of obliviousness that white men have when it comes to understanding sexism and racism aimed at women and folks of color. But if they are straight or cis or able-bodied or upper-middle class, they will have the luxury of being oblivious to the lived realities of persons who are not.

And when you have the luxury of being oblivious to something, odds are you won’t know much about it because you’re not likely to take the time to learn.

As an example, consider something unrelated — calculus.

I am oblivious to it — completely.

Ya know why?

Because I never took it.

Ya know why?

Because the Nashville public school system didn’t require me to, and if they weren’t going to require it, I sure as hell wasn’t going to sign up for the abuse.

As a result, if I were to try and do calculus in your presence, and you had taken it before, you would instantly know that I had no idea what I was talking about.

Because I never took the class.

The problem is, we have a lot of white people who think we are better judges of when racism is happening to Black and brown folks than Black and brown folks themselves — even though we never took the class, so to speak.

We have lots of men who think we are better judges of when misogyny is present or sexual harassment is happening than women are — even though we never took the class, again, metaphorically speaking.

We have cisgender folk acting as if we know whether transphobia — or even transgender identity — is a thing better than trans folk themselves, and we never took the class.

And that kind of arrogance and the obliviousness that drives it is a kind of privilege in that we don’t have to know other people’s reality, but we can still be deemed competent in various areas.

So, for instance, doctors or cops who have no knowledge of the history of racism in medicine and policing can still work in Black or brown communities, despite their lack of knowledge on those subjects.

Social workers, therapists, teachers, and others can provide services to people across a gender spectrum without knowing anything about the struggles of non-binary folks or trans folks — because that knowledge is not required of them before getting a license or certification to do their job.

That’s not to say we can’t understand where other people are coming from. We can train ourselves to do better in that regard. But that requires listening and accepting that other people know their reality better than we do.

And unfortunately, that’s something we often don’t accept.

It’s not because they (or we) are bad people, let alone inherently racist or sexist or oppressive to anyone. But since we have not been required to explore how our identity has shaped our experiences and those of others, we assume our experience is normal, rather than bounded by things like race, class, gender, sexuality, or religion.

In my experience, when we discuss privilege this way — as something that allows all of us, in some arena of identity, to miss some things — it helps facilitate more productive and less contentious conversations.

After all, if we all have areas of unawareness, then a discussion about privilege isn’t about judgment or condemnation.

If I’m admitting I have certain privileges in that regard, and you have to admit you do too, then privilege discussions don’t have to devolve into accusatory shame fests. Instead, they can help us all to see our common frailties.

In other words, a discussion about difference — and how we experience life differently because of one or another category into which we fall — can actually, and perhaps ironically, lead us back to a discussion about what links us together.

Once we realize how we are all affected by these dynamics, we can move past defensiveness and become better listeners. If I want you to hear me out when I discuss my experiences with mistreatment, I need to hear you out when you discuss yours. Reciprocity flows from this kind of pedagogical approach.

And from there, we become more likely to move beyond the interpersonal “checking of privilege” — which is usually a self-indulgent, purely confessional, and unhelpful exercise — and into a space where we feel compelled to challenge institutional inequities that disadvantage some and advantage others.

So, if one person thinks another will come to their aid to fight economic marginalization in a class system, the first might be quicker to come to the aid of that second person facing some other form of disadvantage — racism, xenophobia, sexism, or whatever else. The same is true in reverse. Solidarity becomes more likely once we all are forced to own “our two nickels in the quarter,” as the saying goes.

Granted, some of us may have a couple of dimes in that quarter — but we all have a portion of it. And the obliviousness that our nickels or dimes represent is a privilege we should seek to relinquish as quickly as possible for the sake of a society that works better for everyone.

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This post was previously published on Age of Awareness.

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