When you have it, and when you don't.

I've started occasionally calling people out on Facebook for sexism. If they're good friends, I'll say something in a calculatedly nonthreatening, jokey way, and if they're not good friends I'll just unsubscribe from them or unfriend them depending on the severity. I'm sick of having sexist bullshit weigh on my mind all the time. I'm sick of having to justify my annoyance to myself when there are a million things I'd rather be using that mental energy for. I'm ready to stop caring what anyone thinks and start kicking it the fuck out of my space. But it gets me thinking.

I don't happen to have straight, white, or male privilege, but I do have a good whack of class privilege, and I'm also one of the "good" minorities. So I've had the opportunity to be called on my privilege before in several contexts, and I can confirm that it seriously fucking sucks, especially coming from someone you care about whose opinion you value.

"I didn't ask for my privilege," I would whine, "and I curse the day I was given it! Cast me among the righteous who have earned the right to depression and misery and self-hatred through real suffering. I want to feel sorry for myself in peace." Obviously I didn't have a word for privilege then, but you get the idea. Eventually I grew up, found a couple of scraps of dignity lying around, and covered my shame with them hoping no one would notice.

Then I discovered feminism and expanded my vocabulary a bit. Privilege, contrary to the assumption of many an unremarkable straight white man, is not the ability to get whatever you want whenever you want it. It's the permission to feel that you have earned everything you have, and you deserve everything you want. It's the freedom to believe that your opinions are valid and your needs and desires justified. It's the assurance that you have the right to be treated the way you want to be treated.

What I hadn't realized in my self-absorption, what I had to be hit with over the head, is that people without privilege are no more allowed to feel sorry for themselves than I was. They have no social permission to feel depressed and miserable and hate the world. They don't get pats on the back for doing more work for less pay, for being mature enough to earn their self-regard instead of relying on their culture to tell them how wonderful and superior they are, for having to fight like dogs for every scrap of respect and dignity and credibility they've been given. The best they can expect are pats on the head for being what they're expected to be.

Like money and sex, privilege is something you only have to think about when you don't have it. You don't notice when people don't decide you're stupid and violent as soon as you walk into a room. You don't notice when people don't assume you only got that promotion because you were fucking your boss. You don't notice when people grant your opinions and ideas exactly the credibility you think they deserve. As a privileged person, you have to learn to notice these things, and often to have them pointed out to you until you learn to recognize them yourself. You also have the freedom to stop thinking about them at any time, to decide for yourself what these ideas are worth and how much weight you, a thinking person, should give them.

As a non-privileged person, you don't have the freedom not to think about privilege. You don't get to decide the validity of the concept of privilege, or how much your awareness of privilege will weigh on you. You have to constantly hold yourself together, to remind yourself that no matter how many people judge you less intelligent, less dignified, less deserving than they would a privileged person in your place, you don't have to believe it. You don't have to give them permission to decide that for you. But of course you're not the one giving the permission. You're the one taking it away, and you'll never be allowed to forget that.