A short talk introducing the concept of privilege as a sliding scale that everyone occupies to varying degrees. The speaker defines forms of privilege (e.g., race, gender, socioeconomic status), shares personal examples of her own privileges, and argues that identifying privilege allows people to share it to help those with less (illustrated by the Ella Fitzgerald/Marilyn Monroe anecdote).
Chapters
Let's start by talking about privilege. It's one of those words that you've probably heard over and over again. And right now it feels like a really bad thing to have. People who have privilege always seem to be getting told off or accused of something. But the truth is everyone has privilege, we just have different amounts of it. Privilege is a sliding scale and we all sit at different points on that scale. You might have privilege because of your gender, skin color, socioeconomic background or sexuality. The most common type of privilege we talk about is white privilege. Peggy McIntosh, an American anti racism activist, described white privilege as an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, code books, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks. In short, if you're white or pass as white, you have everything you need to succeed in life. Which is not to say you haven't experienced hardships or oppression. It just means your skin colour isn't one of the things that's making your life hard. Like I said, we all have some degree of privilege. We all have something in our backpacks. Some people just have more than others. So for example, let me tell you what's in my backpack. Even though I'm a person of colour and of African descent, I'm light skinned, so I have light skinned privilege. I have the privilege of a British passport, which opens a lot of doors to me very easily in almost every country in the world. I have the privilege of having a white mother and half my family is white. And so I have a level of white privilege. I have the privilege of a very good education which has given me certain tools and languages that allow me to navigate the workspace more easily than others who hold less privilege. The reason we need to identify our privilege is so that we can use it to help those who have less privilege. It's all about how we share our privilege. For example, the Ella Fitzgerald couldn't get booked by clubs and TV because she was black. And so Marilyn Monroe offered to come to the nightclub every night and sit in the front row if they let Ella sing. That's Marilyn Monroe using her white privilege to help out another black woman who didn't have the same level of privilege.
