I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the word privilege. It’s developing a bad reputation that is undeserved, and I find that happens with words that reveal things about us that we didn’t want to know or think about. We tend to demonize the words instead of looking underneath them to see what we need to learn. We’ve done it with the acronym DEI also. Our culture doesn’t want to be shown places where it needs to grow.

One of the most fascinating books I read in the last year was The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. The main character is the daughter of one of the men in charge of working on the dictionary, and as she grows up around the work, she starts picking up the words that are discarded as not being important enough or good enough to go in the dictionary. Eventually she sees a pattern – many of the words are of the lower class or of the experience of women, and all of the people working on the dictionary are upper-class men. They tend to privilege, or lift up, their own experience because it is all they know. By doing so, their work reinforces their experience as the only one, which affects society and culture in profound ways. The main character decides to go after words that privilege women’s experience and well as lower class experience, and the journey is an interesting one.

Recently I decided to watch old episodes of The Amazing Race, which was a show that interested me, but I never had the dedication to watch regularly. Streaming has made it a lot easier! I’m struck by how often the comments teams have as they ‘race around the world’ reflect the privilege that we have living in this country. We have centered our experience as normative and true and right, and when we meet circumstances in which that is not true, we tend to expect things to change to meet our norm. That’s just not possible or right! For example, contestants on The Amazing Race often complain about how few people speak English in other countries, countries where the language is not English. They complain about what people eat or the kind of work people have to do. They especially dislike areas where people are poor, locations are overpopulated, and rodents exist. They criticize the people helping out in the race, whether their taxi drivers or the judges of their tasks. Contestants have a distasteful tendency to nickname other teams by the characteristics they don’t like, instead of humanizing other teams by using their names. The teams of gay people are always targeted, but so are those who are black or brown, female, poor, older, or from a rural area of the country. The refreshing teams are those who are able to recognize the cultural beauty and differences, understand that they need to adapt to the country they’re in, and who show respect and appreciation everywhere they go.

Privilege is a word that asks us to start to understand how we have centralized our own experience and understanding of the world to the extent that we think everyone around us should conform to it. It’s a word that indicates the multiple ways in which we can easily go through life without the challenges and struggles that others navigate every day. Privilege is not often something we actively cultivate or seek, but it is attributed to us. Privilege, just like power, can be used for good or for bad purposes, but if we don’t recognize it, our lack of awareness does a lot of harm.

For years, black people have struggled against structural and institutional issues in our country that have harmed them irreparably. In Baltimore, there were still redlining rules on the books that prohibited black people from living in certain neighborhoods, as an example. Real estate agents would be surprised that they couldn’t sell houses without changes. Black people protested against those things, but it took a long time to change, and in some cases, change still hasn’t happened. White people didn’t often join those protests. Why? Because it was an issue that didn’t affect them. In other words, white people had the privilege to not have to worry about whether or not they could live in any given neighborhood. So they didn’t take a stand with black people on that issue, or on many others.

Traffic stops or border crossings can be places where differences in privilege are exacerbated. We all should be equal at those points – required to show our paperwork. Yet some people are not asked for much, and others are quizzed carefully. Some go straight through, and others are searched. Some are sent on their merry way and others get tickets or more. If we are the people of privilege, we tend to think that anyone being stopped or searched deserves it, rather than asking the questions of whether there is a pattern that needs to be seen. If we are people without privilege, we see one more circumstance in which our lack of privilege by whatever group we’re in makes life more difficult.

Asking us to be aware of our privilege simply means that we’re being asked to think about what streamlined paths we have because of who we are – it might be our money, our social status, our skin color or gender, our identity, our education level, our religion, our language skills or country of origin, to name a few. Awareness of how these things can make our lives easier allows us to start to appreciate what people have to go through when their path isn’t streamlined. It can lead us to think about ways in which we can use our power and privilege to help, rather than to sit naively by.

As our discomfort in daily life increases, I would argue that this is the opportunity to see our privilege for what it is, to notice what is now harder that used to be easier, and to learn from that for the future. A more aware and educated community can more easily help each other in ways that matter.

Blessings on your discernment around privilege!

Pastor Kimberly