Salma El Wardany: Allyship and Privilege

Before we do anything else and before we even get stuck into allyship, we have to talk about privilege. It's become a real dirty word. And everyone fights and argues that they don't have it because they don't want to seem like the bad person. But the truth is, everyone has privilege. Privilege is just this sliding scale and we all sit at different points of that scale. Now, my privilege is that although I'm a person of color with African descent, I'm light skinned, so I have light skinned privilege. I've got the privilege of a British passport, which opens a lot of doors for me and gets me into just about every country in the world very easily. I've got the privilege of having a white mother and a half of my family are white. So I've got a level of white privilege as well. I've got the privilege of a very good education which has given me certain tools and languages that allow me to navigate white spaces and be successful in those spaces far more easily than some of my black peers. My education has helped my career, which has in turn allowed me to set up a business. They're all my privilege points and it's really important to recognise where your privilege lies so that you can then use it to help out people with less privilege. The reason we identify our privilege is just so that we can use it to help people.