While it is true that there are invaluable insights to be gained from personal experience, this approach makes all kinds of assumptions. The first is that any one form of privilege – most commonly racial, sexual or gendered – should be deemed more advantageous than another, a proposition that is only possible to support in the most abstract terms. The notion that an individual’s privilege can be reasonably quantified and allotted into some kind of hierarchy is essentially unsound. There are too many variables to take on board, many of which cannot possibly be known without a comprehensive
...more
