Check your privilege! Your privileged ass will never understand this!!! Stay ignorant up there in your privilege bubble! How often do we hear statements like this in today’s culture? Privilege has become one the most controversial and least understood concepts, because of how it’s now being used (or, more exactly, abused) by mainstream social justice movements. There’s almost always a toxic, shaming connotation to it, and that’s no good. The concept is too powerful and interesting, but you have to go about differently.

The term was coined by Peggy McIntosh in 1989 in her seminal article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Since then, there’s been a collective reckoning around privilege in academic circles, but when the term made its way into the general culture and became tainted by politically motivated trivialization and polarization, it lost much of its original power and meaning.

Privilege is simply any random, unearned advantage that we have in life. It’s the circumstance that gives us rights, freedoms, access, opportunity, power, and authority that other people don’t have for no fault of their own.

In communities, organizations, or even entire countries like the United States, where the narrative of meritocracy is deeply embedded into the cultural fabric, privilege is a challenging concept to acknowledge and understand. On the one hand, meritocracy dictates that all advantages and disadvantages we experience result from our individual effort and individual failures, thus obscuring contextual and structural phenomena in place. On the other hand, privilege by its very nature is invisible to its holders, so reckoning with it requires advanced cognitive skills (like curiosity and the capacity for paradox and dialectical thinking) along with advanced emotional skills like shame resilience, courage, and generosity.

The good news is, those skills are learnable and teachable. The bad news is, that’s not as easy as putting a #BLM hashtag on your Instagram profile. It takes skill to lead conversations about privilege in a way that encourages people to learn and listen, instead of getting on the defensive, denying, and rationalizing.

That’s where the understanding of privilege shame and four functions of privilege comes into play.

Invisibility, Denial, Rationalization, and Complacency: Four Functions of Privilege

As already mentioned above, having random advantages is by default invisible to their holders, no matter how obvious those are from the perspective of people staying on the other, oppressed side of inequality. Peggy McIntosh referred to privilege as an invisible knapsack of advantages that we carry navigating through life, and I still can’t think of a better metaphor. No matter how huge the knapsack is, it’s hidden from our field of vision as we go forward. There are at least two reasons behind it. One has to do with the fundamental attribution error, one of the deepest and most pervasive cognitive biases. It makes us more likely to believe that our successes and advantages are our own due, than to consider how much random situational factors, including structural inequality, contributed to them.

Another reason is the cultural conditioning of meritocracy that, aside from insisting that we all deserve what we have, leaves a silent trailer saying that we're worth as much — and only as much — as we accomplish.

That’s a profoundly corrosive message, because it not only drives us towards perfectionism, exhaustion, predatory competition and other self-defeating behaviors, but also makes us implode with shame when someone else’s story or lived experience exposes the reality of our privilege – i.e. the fact that our successes were at least in part due to luck, and not our own merit.

And what happens when we slip into shame? Critical thinking and empathy go offline. Denial, blame, and rationalization take over. That’s why check your privilege discourses are so unproductive.

Shame resilience skills, learned previously in other relational contexts, make this kind of response less likely. However, we cannot foresee who has those skills and who doesn’t. We cannot control and manage other people’s emotional reactivity, but we can make sure that the way we talk about privilege is not shaming – i.e., it doesn’t contain arguments and framings that suggest someone is a bad person just because they’ve had the luck others haven’t had, especially given the fact that they’re most probably never realized having it.

Such is the first function of privilege: when you have it, you walk through life with a presumption that everybody has the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as you do, and you’re conditioned to disregard structural and systemic inequality.

The second function kicks in when we’re, in one way or another, presented with the evidence that structural inequality is real. As long as we have privilege, we’re conditioned to opt out of the conversations and the reckoning about it – because it’s uncomfortable. We’d rather watch cat videos on YouTube or browse cupcake pictures on Pinterest.

The third function shows up when, for one reason or another, we have to stay in the conversation about inequality. Then, we start to rationalize and naturalize inequality – because we know we can get away with it. For example, we know we can employ the arguments like “women are naturally weaker than men” or “the nature made it so that LGBT people shouldn’t have kids” or “it’s necessary that some people are rich and others are poor, because it creates educational incentive”. We know these narratives have been around for centuries, and they’ve been validated by systems and institutions. Instead of thinking critically, and thinking for ourselves, we just repeat the tropes of oppressive ideology that have been part of our conditioning. And no matter if we’re speaking from a church pulpit, a corporate chair, or the microphone of a presidential campaign, since we have privilege and the protection and power it implies, there will rarely be accountability.

The fourth function, which I think is the most dangerous, comes into play when we’ve had the courage and critical thinking to recognize and work through some major aspects of our privilege – like race, gender, sexuality, and physical ability. At this point, we can decide that we already know enough about the pieces of random luck in our lives, and assume that everything else we have only results from our merits and efforts. As a result, we become deaf to the stories and lived experiences of people that expose dimensions of inequality where we still have unexplored and unowned privilege. This brings us full circle to the first function: since having privilege by definition means not being aware of it, we can never afford to assume we know enough about our random advantages. Instead, we should consciously work towards opportunities and situations where we can listen to people different from us – and believe their lived experience exactly as they tell it.

Identity and Circumstantial Privilege

The original racial discourse centered on white privilege, which is one example of what I call identity privilege: that is, a set of advantages that results from who you are in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and so on. But privilege, with all its inherent functions, is broader than that. It also includes circumstances of our life that cannot quality as identity but nevertheless hugely impact our well-being and access to resources and opportunity. Examples include circumstances like having a supportive family, having appearance features that match your era’s cultural standards of beauty, meeting mentors early in life that help you get crucial skills and assume the right mindset, being born in a country with a developed healthcare system, or meeting a romantic partner early in life with a stable, functional, healthy relationship following.

Again, because of the first function of privilege, we can struggle to enumerate all the circumstances that played in our favor in the great lottery of life, never mind assess their impact on our most important outcomes.

What we can do, though, is get curious about stories of people where the same circumstances played out the other way. That gives us the idea about the impact of things that by default we take for granted.

While conversations about privilege are rarely easy, if led with empathy, curiosity, and generosity, they become utterly transformative. In her follow-up article, Peggy McIntosh described white privilege as “an account to spend” – that is, she recognized that the power inherent in our unearned advantages can be used to weaken the systems of inequality and oppression instead of propping them up.

That is profoundly meaningful. Dismantling structures and systems that for centuries caused just as much harm to people’s basic human rights as they caused to our economies, by wasting talent and suppressing diversity, is a common task for both the privileged and the oppressed. We can no longer speculate that it’s the job of the latter to build a table and invite society for a conversation, just like we can’t argue that it’s the sole responsibility of the privileged to take down the system their ancestors created. It’s the table for everyone, and the task is common as well – because structural inequality in the end hurts all of us.

We’re not responsible for having or not having privilege. We get it in the great lottery of life, without even having to buy a ticket. But we have full responsibility for how we go about it. When coupled with critical thinking, curiosity, and empathy, privilege awareness becomes a huge force for good, and a living example of daring leadership.