Many of my students at Morehead State in KY were in situations as dire or almost as dire as those recounted by “Birgit Umaigha RN MEd”–students struggling to find computers or internet hook ups for online work, working two or three jobs to pay for school, caring for siblings because of addicted parents, going through one death in the family after another, fighting off crushing anxieties. Everything became worse after 2014, but most students continued to do very good to excellent work even as my basic mantra was reduced to “do your best.”
I’m thinking about “check your privilege” as part of the intersectional perspectives that became prominent in the late 80’s and early 90’s. “Intersectionality” was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw to express the way that black women were subject to both racism and sexism. Neither Crenshaw, Angela Davis, bell hooks, or Patricia Hill Collins believed that black women were the only group suffering from multiple, intersecting oppressions and ideas of intersectionality were quickly applied to economic class, immigrant status, disability, sexual orientation, and other hierarchies as well. Within intersectional perspectives, there developed a sense of being obligated to recognize both the fullness of the many ways in which a sector of the population could be oppressed and also the ways in which people could be “privileged” by advantageous positions in the social hierarchy. In this sense, intersectionality has always been associated with an obligation to recognize the full humanity of others.
At the same time, intersectionality has become associated with an ethics of self-recognition that is summed up with “check your privilege.” One element of checking your privilege is to be aware of one’s privilege which with intersectionality means being aware of the full range of social locations that give a person advantageous positions in the hierarchy. In my case, I would have race, gender, cis, educational, class, and ability privilege but would soon be coming up against the disadvantages of extreme age now that I’m almost 68. Within intersectional thinking, all of these privileged locations are identities in the sense of being social facts of my existence and also in defining my ways of perceiving the world, modes of action, etc. The idea of “checking your privilege” undermines the hegemonic white ideology of individualism which views individual attributes (“will,” “hard work,” “intelligence,” “talent,” etc.) as the only relevant source of one’s advantages and disadvantages in life. Consistent with the intersectional obligation to recognize the fullness of other persons, “check your privilege” pushes people, especially people in privileged locations, to engage in a full self-reflection on the nature of their own social locations.
“Check your privilege” also obligates those who are privileged to think, act, and speak on the combination of their reflections on the advantages conferred by various kinds of privilege and how their privileges oppressively affect other people. To “check your privilege” means that people in positions of privilege stop interacting with the world in terms of the social instincts, modes of perception, and cultural norms associated with their advantageous positions. In the case of many wealthy white persons for example, that would mean refraining from acting on their views of themselves as “well off” instead of rich, distinctions between their cultivated taste and middle-brow taste, and assumptions of various kinds of racial hierarchies. In this sense, “check their privilege” involves a critical self-reflection that puts a person outside the culture into which they have been socialized but does not put them into an alternative web of cultural assumptions. There is what Victor Turner called a “liminality” to the obligations involved in checking your privilege. For Turner, “liminality” was primarily a matter of cultural transition in which a person would leave one status prescribed within a culture without having yet adapted another status. “Liminality, in terms of social structure and time, is an intermediate state of being “in between” in which individuals are stripped from their usual identity and their constituting social differences while being on the verge of personal or social transformation.” In the case of “check your privilege,” the obligation is to suspend the cultural modes associated with privileged locations without having another set of cultural modes to adapt. The obligation of people to check their privilege entails a long-term state of liminality.
Early Blackface, Cultural Change, Latest Politics 
In response to: https://writingearlyblackfaceandotherthings.com/2022/01/10/check-your-privilege/#respond
Check Your Privilege
Many of my students at Morehead State in KY were in situations as dire or almost as dire as those recounted by “Birgit Umaigha RN MEd”–students struggling to find computers or internet hook ups for online work, working two or three jobs to pay for school, caring for siblings because of addicted parents, going through one death in the family after another, fighting off crushing anxieties. Everything became worse after 2014, but most students continued to do very good to excellent work even as my basic mantra was reduced to “do your best.”
I’m thinking about “check your privilege” as part of the intersectional perspectives that became prominent in the late 80’s and early 90’s. “Intersectionality” was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw to express the way that black women were subject to both racism and sexism. Neither Crenshaw, Angela Davis, bell hooks, or Patricia Hill Collins believed that black women were the only group suffering from multiple, intersecting oppressions and ideas of intersectionality were quickly applied to economic class, immigrant status, disability, sexual orientation, and other hierarchies as well. Within intersectional perspectives, there developed a sense of being obligated to recognize both the fullness of the many ways in which a sector of the population could be oppressed and also the ways in which people could be “privileged” by advantageous positions in the social hierarchy. In this sense, intersectionality has always been associated with an obligation to recognize the full humanity of others.
At the same time, intersectionality has become associated with an ethics of self-recognition that is summed up with “check your privilege.” One element of checking your privilege is to be aware of one’s privilege which with intersectionality means being aware of the full range of social locations that give a person advantageous positions in the hierarchy. In my case, I would have race, gender, cis, educational, class, and ability privilege but would soon be coming up against the disadvantages of extreme age now that I’m almost 68. Within intersectional thinking, all of these privileged locations are identities in the sense of being social facts of my existence and also in defining my ways of perceiving the world, modes of action, etc. The idea of “checking your privilege” undermines the hegemonic white ideology of individualism which views individual attributes (“will,” “hard work,” “intelligence,” “talent,” etc.) as the only relevant source of one’s advantages and disadvantages in life. Consistent with the intersectional obligation to recognize the fullness of other persons, “check your privilege” pushes people, especially people in privileged locations, to engage in a full self-reflection on the nature of their own social locations.
“Check your privilege” also obligates those who are privileged to think, act, and speak on the combination of their reflections on the advantages conferred by various kinds of privilege and how their privileges oppressively affect other people. To “check your privilege” means that people in positions of privilege stop interacting with the world in terms of the social instincts, modes of perception, and cultural norms associated with their advantageous positions. In the case of many wealthy white persons for example, that would mean refraining from acting on their views of themselves as “well off” instead of rich, distinctions between their cultivated taste and middle-brow taste, and assumptions of various kinds of racial hierarchies. In this sense, “check their privilege” mean involves a critical self-reflection that puts a person outside the culture into which they have been socialized but does not put them into an alternative web of cultural assumptions. There is what Victor Turner called a “liminality” to the obligations involved in checking your privilege. For Turner, “liminality” was primarily a matter of cultural transition in which a person would leave one status prescribed within a culture without having yet adapted another status. “Liminality, in terms of social structure and time, is an intermediate state of being “in between” in which individuals are stripped from their usual identity and their constituting social differences while being on the verge of personal or social transformation.” In the case of “check your privilege,” the obligation is to suspend the cultural modes associated with privileged locations without having another set of cultural modes to adapt. The obligation of people to check their privilege entails a long-term state of liminality.
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. Raised by a single mum with a dad who sued her regularly in a war of attrition, ostensibly for custody of me, I learned about sexism at a very young age. As a bored “gifted” child in class, best friends with a boy of Korean extraction and another who was very poor, I was assumed to be similarly vulnerable by a teacher who taught me all about classism in her cruelty to my friends and self. As a child understanding himself to be “different”, dressing as a witch in crinolines one halloween, as Hans Brinker in another, periodically wearing the blond for the look of it, relishing that in both costumes no one knew it was me, yet also becoming conscious that my mother’s friends were warning her that something was “wrong”. Into a very “privileged” middle school experience, I was bullied relentlessly. Technically kidnapped and sent out of the country to boarding school, I was cut off from all supports, and family circumstances meant becoming so poor that my grade 10 year was spent in a trailer out of school because I had grown and we had no money for clothes.
A thought drawn from a current, painful reality: you explain your privilege born of “race, gender, cis, educational, class, and ability” and that resonates. I have all that. However, those shared characteristics of privilege, while true of me to an extent, are more true in the eye of the uninformed observer than in reality. They are informative, to me, but defining only through the lenses of others.
My life story exposed me to relative wealth and serious poverty, experience of prejudice and erroneous judgement of myself and those close to me on the basis of sex and its correlate, gender; orientation; ethnicity; class, financial and social standing / rank (I early understood the difference between class, money and social “place”), etc..
Seen from my 67th year, I see that the passage of time and shifts in context are relevant. There is too much to explore in these characteristics, the example below is but one, current sorrow.
“Check your privilege” becomes a judgement made through lenses that see only the surface. Perhaps relevant in a specific context, but inadequate and inaccurate more generally.
To me, the phrase reveals blinders on a mind closed to understanding, or even questioning, the assumptions inherent in calling out privilege in a given context. Context is relevant. In the example you provide, it is an easy “slap” on a presumed (maybe accurate) insensitivity to the reality of others. There’s a lot of that going around! The phrase is, however, as revealing of the person who uses it, as it may be a definition of the person it is used against. That does not deny that there may be truth in the perception of privilege. It’s just not the whole, or even the most important, story.
Of those characteristics of privilege, gender is one. I have spent a lifetime striving not to be a stereotypical “man” as generally defined in social construct, at least as that applies to me as a male in society. After periods in childhood wondering if woman might be a better fit, I’ve grown in understanding that sex is not gender, and quite happily own my sex while balking at the social construct and variable limitations of gender.
This is topical and important to me, now, because my daughter is gender affirming (if I have the term correctly) in a way that subverts the gender of her 5 year old child out of a desire not to deny the option of not being tied to biological sex in relation to developing a gender fluid construct of “their” choice. Rather than being appreciative of whomever our grandchild may evolve into—conscious from my own experience that fluidity means just that as part of exploring the self— our daughter affirms in the sense of stripping away any gender references in relation to her child while adopting cis-gender pronouns herself that, to me, claim the territory of “woman” and “man” that I reject as references to the social construct of those roles in society. I am required to adopt he/him relative to myself and “they/them” relative to our grandchild. Indeed, we’ve been threatened with removal from our grandchild’s life if we do not conform. Triggered by this notion of claiming he/him based on my cisgender reality in a way that is used as a gender—not biological sex—label, I cannot comply. And the threat has been made good.
The situation is a heartache (to understate). 35 years of love and support to my daughter is tossed on the dungheap, 26 years of my (same sex) partner sharing parenting when her own mother would not step up on the smallest of contributions, and our daughter has removed us from our grandchild’s life days after the child’s 6th birthday. We cared for him weekly, full days in support of her needs, often ending with our son-in-law joining for dinner after his work with street youth while our daughter wrapped up her work in leading a dinner group for kids on the autism spectrum. Conscious of their economic needs, we had given them a rent reduced place to live right next door, and our mornings would begin with the joy of our grandson peering through the deck doors, a shout to his dad, can “I have a chitchat with the granddads?” Lsat May, a two minute blast of anger from his dad—unexpected, unprovoked, evidently a sign of something festering unknown to us—and our morning greetings disappeared, and the weekly caring dropped over 6 months to 20 supervised minutes, and then they moved with no forwarding address. My partner and I were/are concerned about how incipient anger led to this…but our daughter and son-in-law have concocted the idea that we are unsupportive in their affirmation of their child’s neuro-diversity and gender fluidity. Not so, we support whomever our grandchild may evolve into…but we both, from our individual yet related childhood experience experience and knowledge of trans colleagues, know that it is an exploration that should not be shaped through the parents’ presumptions, but through a child’s self discovery.
Too much information, perhaps. But it is all in aid of noting that one’s privilege is both real, as in your description of yourself, yet not the whole story. Orientation—very much a factor of privilege and absent from the list—is defining for many, yet not at all. Married to a woman for 12 years, people thought me str8. Now, they see me as gay, partnered in our 27th year. Neither is a whole truth. And given where we live, some would hold that “gay” is another for of privilege—as is being a woman—though these privileges to an arguable degree depend upon a historical (and in many contexts continuing) lack thereof. Socialized context is not static. Context is critical.
Ultimately, terms such as “privilege” serve us well as doors through which we may explore, and serve us very badly indeed as labels.
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Thanks for provoking thought. Interesting field of work.
The signature is a pseudonym created as some of my endeavours are incompatible with my public persona. Found your blog through a threads on JMG.
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