Speech--Raiffa S.

     First I want to talk to you about privilege. We all have privilege. Every one of us, in one way or another. Not in the sense when your parents give you your first phone or laptop and they have to explain to you that this device is a privilege and if you abuse it than they won’t be afraid to take it away from you. There is a difference between “I am privileged” and “I have privilege”. To have privilege or identity privilege is to have an unlearned benefit or advantage due to your identity groups. These identity groups being the majority or the social norm. So if I was to list of some the identity groups I belong to, they would be: Asian, American, Muslim, female, heterosexual, right-handed, lower-middle class, and able. Being a part of each of these groups gives me a certain kind of privilege or does not. For example since I am right-handed I have privilege since I do not have to drag my hand through ink or graphite while I am writing. While on the other hand I am female and do not have male-privilege and therefore may be discriminated against when applying for a job. The privilege you receive simply from being who you are is not a conscious decision. So when people talk about things like white-privilege it may feel like they are attacking you for who you are or attributing all your success to your skin tone. Just because you are white or just because you are male doesn’t mean you don’t struggle. In no way does white-privilege or male privilege or anything strive to degrade who you are and what you’ve done but gives the up to the down of discrimination and racism. Basically if somebody is suffering then the other person, in some way, has to be benefiting.

     So now that we’ve established that while life sucks, sometimes it’s suckier for someone else, why is this a problem? Well the easiest way to exemplify the problems that stem from identity privilege is through the effects of institutionalized racism and sexism. As I stated before, if a system is benefitting one person it has to be doing the opposite for someone else. It has been statistically proven that being a person of color or being woman in America has been and is harder than being a white male. African Americans have had to overcome slavery, segregation, discrimination, and most recently racial profiling. In the first 30 years of the existence of the Federal Housing Administration 98% of recipients were white. African-Americans comprise 13% of the U.S. population and 14% of the monthly drug users, but 37% of the people arrested for drug-related offenses in America. It is obvious to see the negative effects of systemic racism in America. A person who benefits from white-privilege can be sure that they won’t be overlooked for a job or a housing loan simply because their name is a little foreign and can be sure that when they get that thing others won’t attribute it to affirmative action. But when you are not regular subjected to discrimination due to your skin color, it is hard to recognize the daily struggle those who are face. In 1963 at the height of segregation a Gallup Poll showed that 66% of white people thought racial minorities were being treated equally in matters of housing, education, and employment.

     Along with this more obvious effect of privilege and racism, there is a more subtle one and although you may not be able to see it except in extreme cases, it deeply affects those who live with it. This issue stems from the idea of implicit bias. Defined by psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji in 1995 implicit bias are the attitudes and stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions unconsciously. They are really the bases of most of the racist jokes we made in middle school and probably do now but anyways… They created this test called the implicit-association test that requires you to categorize two target concepts with an attribute for example you would get the word suffering and match that with pleasant or unpleasant. The faster your response, the more ingrained it is in your mind. There are a few different types of these IAT including the stereotype-IAT which has revealed that people more strongly associate the word black with words like athletic, musical, poor and promiscuous and the word white with intelligent, ambitious, uptight and greedy. It is important to note that Implicit stereotypes come from an unconscious response while explicit stereotypes are those you deliberately think and act on and may not always be correlated.

     So basically as someone who has identity privilege you don’t not have the burden of carrying all those negative stereotypes attributed to your identity which are the foundation of all the more obvious problems discussed earlier. Because black people are more associated with negative and violent attitudes we may be more prone to be suspicious or cautious around them which can sometimes lead to more serious issues like racial profiling. Because Muslims are more associated with terroristic behavior we may automatically see them as suspicious leading to things like extra screening by TSA.

     And it’s not something we can protest against to persuade policy makers to do something about. We cannot change the unconscious response that every person experiences. And even if we tried to combat it with policy and the like it would not change the fact that these minority groups have to deal with negative stereotypes associated to their race. Negative stereotypes that can lead to discrimination in employment and housing, etc. and that can greatly affect the self-identity of the people in these minority groups. Personally I feel like I am constantly judged by those simply because they can tell I am Muslim and they associate that with the things they’ve heard. I feel like I am automatically knocked down a peg in people’s minds because of who I am and I have to work harder to prove my worth and even then it doesn’t help because the implicit stereotype overtakes the explicit.

     So now that you are familiar with what privilege actually is, what do I want you to do?

     Well I want all of you to apologize right now for having privilege.

     Just kidding. No one wants you to do that. The reason we talk about privilege is not to make you feel guilty because you are benefitting from a society that doesn’t look out for the little guy or to get you to apologize, but to aware that yes, you have privilege and you should educate yourself. The less knowledge we have about the people around us, the more we are perpetuating stereotypes that contribute to privilege and discrimination and everything. And the only way we can recognize and understand our own privilege is when we contextualize our experiences we those around us. When we educate ourselves we can get rid of the stigma around words like Muslim or female and look at an individual for who they are—an individual part of different groups.



Works Cited

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Utt, Jamie. "How To Talk To Someone About Privilege Who Doesn't Know What That Is." Everyday Feminism. Everyday Feminism, 7 Dec. 2012. Web. 12 Dec. 2014.

White Like Me. Dir. Scott Morris. Prod. Scott Morris. By Tim Wise. Perf. Time Wise. YouTube. N.p., 31 Jan. 2013. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

Wise, Tim. "F.A.Q.s." Tim Wise RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2014.