So someone said, “Check your privilege”

It seems to me that white males get more upset about being told to “check your privilege” than do women or POC. (And, yes, POC do sometimes get told to check their privilege because privilege is complicated—Ijeoma Oluo has a nice chapter on checking her own privilege.) “Check your privilege” is upsetting, I’ve been told, because they understand themselves to have been told that their opinion is irrelevant purely because of who they are.

And I think women and POC have had that–being told our opinion is worthless because of who we are–happen so often that it’s nothing new. If anything, being told that my opinion is invalid because I’m speaking from such a place of privilege that my view is distorted is a much more valid reason than many others I’ve been given over the years. (My favorites remains the time that a man shouted at me that, because I’m a woman I couldn’t possibly understand logic.) After all, there are ways in which my coming from a place of privilege does make my opinion worth less (and sometimes worthless).

For instance, when I went to graduate school, it wasn’t possible—let alone necessary—to buy a personal computer, tuition was low, and housing close to campus was available and affordable. Therefore, although the stipend was low, it was possible to make it through the program with very little debt. Since I came from the kind of family that paid for my undergraduate education, I started graduate school with no debt at all. That I was so privileged means that any advice I might now give to students considering graduate school is worth less than the advice of someone closer to them in experience.

I give a lot of advice about writing, and, although I try to incorporate advice that others with different experiences have given, ultimately, what I say is going to be from my perspective. And my perspective is shaped by the advantages I have and I’ve had (such as low or nonexistent debt) And therefore it won’t be good advice for some people. They should ignore my advice.

If you tell me to check my privilege, you’re telling me that you think I’ve forgotten my epistemic limitations. You think my privilege means that my advice or judgment isn’t valid, or, at least, much more limited than I seem to realize.

What people who get defensive when told to check our privilege don’t understand is that your saying “Check your privilege” to me isn’t changing our relationship. You’re just naming it. It’s just a verbalized eyeroll. If you hadn’t said it, you would still have thought it.

So, the best response is to ask for clarification. In the days before people said, “Check your privilege,” there were other ways of making the same point: “You’re just saying that because you’re….” “I think you’re forgetting about…” “From my perspective…” “Someone from [this background] would look at it really differently…” and so on. And I think we’ve all had someone point out that our advice or judgment really was seriously limited by not having thought about it from another perspective. And it was useful.

It’s particularly hard to see how our perspective is limited by privilege because power comes into play. When I had people from prestigious and well-funded institutions give me career advice that was seriously limited by their privilege, it was hard for me to say, “Yeah, that won’t work for me” because they were powerful, and I needed their support. I didn’t say anything. But neither did I try to follow their advice because it didn’t make any sense—I didn’t have a TA to do my grading, a research assistant to help with clerical work, an administrative assistant to help with program administration. They hadn’t thought through how their advice was coming from a place of privilege, and was useless for someone like me.

This isn’t to say that someone who says, “Check your privilege” is always right. Sometimes people have a lot less privilege than it might appear, sometimes we’ve misunderstood how power works in a particular setting, sometimes people misunderstand what privilege means. Sometimes when people say, “Check your privilege” they want to talk about it, and they’re willing to explain in more detail. But sometimes they don’t want to, and that’s fine too. Almost always, it will take some time to think about whether and how privilege may have affected our judgment and what we should do about it.