Pride and privilege

Pride is a strange thing. Our traits are either innate or acquired, and we have no real control over either. One comes from genes and the other one from circumstances – privilege, or the lack thereof.

Yes. Privilege. The bane of my existence.

I wish I’d never heard of it. I wish I could take the blue pill and forget all about it. I wish the ring had never come to me. Because dear God, it’s bloody hard to keep your already flimsy self-worth when you’ve seen through that whole can of worms.

So. Privilege. I have it. And I want to keep it. Because without it, I’m nothing.

This is not an excuse, by the way. It’s one of those ‘look at it this way’ posts that I’m sure will be wildly popular. But the thing is, if it was easy to give up privilege, everyone would do it. There would be no fight for equality. Of course, as an oppressed group, you probably have no interest in pitying your oppressors, but that’s not the point. The point is to understand why it’s hard to give up privilege, or even to acknowledge it – because if we don’t, I have a hard time seeing how we can ever understand each other.

So this is my perspective: when you realize that a lot of the things you’ve accomplished in life have come to you because of privilege, your self-esteem does take a beating. If you’re already vulnerable, it can be hard to see any merit in yourself at all. As I write this, I have a voice in my head going “Well, boo-hoo, middle class white cis girl, suck it up”, and I don’t doubt that some who read this hear it, too. But I have spent too much time analyzing emotions to discount them. Emotions are there, whether we like them or not, and whether we view them as relevant or not. By their very nature, emotions aren’t rational. Even the privileged can be sad. Because that’s to do with feelings, not a structure that systematically hinders you in your life.

And that’s the problem: seeing the difference between privilege and happiness. It can be hard to acknowledge that you’re better off than others when you’re depressed and bullied, when you have eating disorders and cancer and no friends. Even if your privilege buys you treatment or lets you pretend to be normal, those things hurt. But to understand the difference between privilege and happiness, it can help to think, “Would this horrible situation be better for me if I was gay/black/autistic?” If the answer is no, chances are you’re more privileged than that group.

But your feelings? They couldn’t care less. Everyone is an individual, and the individual feels the individual’s feelings, not the group’s. Even if I belong to the most powerful group in the world, I can still suffer, because I’m me, and not my group. Also, people tend to compare their situation with those close to them. That’s why a person who’s rich by global standards can feel poor, because they live in a town or country where everyone else is richer.

This means that many people will cling to what they view as their meagre share, because look at the neighbor, she’s got this and that, and the guy over there has a new car, never mind the beggar on the corner. And even if social competitiveness isn’t a factor, it can be hard to admit that maybe you got into that PhD program because your siblings taught you to read when you were five, and your dad read aloud from the original English Alice In Wonderland when you were eight. Because you want to feel like you did something on your own, don’t you? You want something to be your very own precious.

Well, there is no precious, and that is a valid pain. If I strip away my middle class background, my whiteness, my educated parents, and being raised in a (ex-) socialist country that hasn’t known war for two hundred years, there is very little left that I can take pride in. I’ve had opportunities, and I’ve squandered them, and even that is a privilege that most don’t have.

But what I’m left with is this: my stubbornness. My refusal to give up on the things I really care about. It’s innate, sure, it’s genes, and nothing I have any control over. But if there’s nothing else I can take credit for, at least I can treasure my mulish insistence on writing, writing and writing, despite a school system that saw no point in developing that talent, despite career advisors who didn’t know how to advise me, and despite family who sort of supported it but (of course) couldn’t foresee the self-pub revolution that has made that world a whole lot more accessible.

At the end of the day, the only thing we can do – to paraphrase Gandalf – is to choose what to do with what we are given. And rant about the rest on our blog.