This will be another post about privilege. It’s like a lo...

This will be another post about privilege. It’s like a loose tooth that my tongue keeps prodding, because I can’t make heads or tails of it. This is a lovely little post about how equality feels like oppression when you’ve got privilege, and it hits the nail on the head – but there’s something else on my mind, something vague and uncomfortable that I hardly dare voice:

The plight of privileged people in the wrong context.

A man once said to me, “I feel like I get all the stick for being an oppressor, and none of the privileges that go with it.” He was made to feel bad for being a man in a female context, and other men dismissed him too – for being the wrong kind of man. He wasn’t good enough for either group, and that got me thinking – as things tend to do.

So a member of a socially powerful group can be at the bottom of the pecking order if the context is wrong. In the words of critical discourse expert Hilary Janks, you can be top dog in one situation, and bottom dog in another. Everyone knows this. There are areas where you feel confident, and others where you’re less so.

But when you grow up as bottom dog, while belonging to a layer of top dogs that won’t acknowledge you? What then?

Let me exemplify. I’m middle class, but I was brought up in a working class village, and boy did I feel that lash. On a national level, I was on the side of the oppressors. I was from the south, a child of teachers, with parents who could afford holidays abroad. But how did I experience that ‘privilege’? I had stones thrown at me by working class kids. I was ridiculed for my accent, my clothes and my face (wrong kind of face, what can I say, there’s a geographical aspect to that, too).

And now I’m a grown-up. Now I understand the class society that brought about all that animosity – and rightly so. So with this knowledge, I should rise above it, but I can’t. I still hurt from that ancient rejection, and to make matters worse, I can’t presume to have been oppressed, because I was part of the dominant culture. Even though ten-year-old me had no idea, and certainly didn’t get any favours because of it (except from an educational point of view, which means little enough today when PhD’s equal unemployment and the people who dropped out are raking it in).

So can a privileged person be an oppressed minority in their own life? How do we even talk about that? Am I blowing things out of proportion, or do I have a point? And how do you heal from childhood wounds when your social conscience tells you that you deserved everything you got, just for being born to the wrong parents? That sounds weirdly like condoning oppression, doesn’t it?

Some of these thoughts have made it into the latest instalment of my Pax series, Cutting Edge (release date April 6, 2016), but I feel far from finished with it. I need someone else to chime in now, because my brain has its limits. I wish I could find a conversation about this, because nothing in life is clear cut and easy. If it was, there wouldn’t be a problem.