You Got 99 Privileges, but You Can't Ditch One?

Over the years I have encountered many White people who are perplexed, and even infuriated, by the concept of White privilege. Citing what they view as stories and evidence to refute it, they often assert the opposite conclusion: that it’s really White males who get the short end of the stick.

For example, one acquaintance complained that he faced gender biases while fighting for custody of his children. “In this society people just assume that the mother is the better parent,” he said. “It really makes it hard for us guys who want to be with our kids.” So where is all this patriarchy and male privilege, he wondered. On a different occasion, a White DJ told me about all the trouble he has landing gigs because, in his view, sponsors are only looking to hire people of color. In other instances, heterosexual men working in the fashion industry have claimed to be belittled or bullied by the LGBTQ community, and some White male athletes have expressed frustration about the common (mis)conception that White men just can’t jump. Are we meant to also conclude that heterosexism and racism are overblown exaggerations?

In this issue of UpCurrent, I attempt to reconcile this “evidence” in a way that recognizes the idea that any group—even heterosexual White males—can face sporadic disadvantages in isolated contexts while also asserting the overall validity of the claim that White male privilege is very real. To start, we need to discuss compartmentalization.

Compartmentalizing exceptions to the rule

To be “wealthy” doesn’t mean you have to be wealthier than every person on the planet, and to be “happy” doesn’t mean you can never feel sad for one second in your life. Those would be what we often call “straw man” positions—so mischaracterized and easy to knock down that they don’t actually mean anything. The same is true with the concept of White privilege. To say there is White privilege doesn’t mean that White people never experience a single situation where they’re not privileged, or that White people never suffer hardships. Those, too, are straw man positions—or, in other words, ways of compartmentalizing.

Compartmentalization is when people find an exception to the rule and try to either turn it into the rule or use it as a justification for why the rule “doesn’t exist.” The difference between compartmentalization and channel switching (discussed in last month’s UpCurrent) is that people don’t necessarily do it to derail a conversation; they do it in their own minds, even if there isn’t an audience.

For instance, imagine a White cis-gendered man who wants to work in DEI but says no company will hire him as its DEI consultant because he’s not a “diverse” candidate. This example—and those cited above involving child custody battles, DJ-ing, fashion, and sports—show self-victimization, which is one form of compartmentalizing the problem: fixating on the one area where their privilege does not work to their benefit and using it as leverage to deny the existence of White privilege on the whole. It’s akin to asking, “If White privilege exists, then why isn’t it working for me?”

Remember: the world is not a monolith. There is no individual—in any social group—who experiences privilege 100% of the time (though some may experience it 99% of the time). But just because you don’t experience privilege in one situation does not mean that your privilege doesn’t exist. 

Even if White privilege isn’t a factor in many situations, it doesn’t mean that White privilege doesn’t exist at all. It just means there is more than one form of privilege: individual and institutional.

Individual vs. institutional privilege

Institutional privilege refers to all the advantages of Whiteness that are inherited through history and baked into our social, political, economic, and legal structures. Institutional privilege is not something that you have to earn or do anything to receive. If you’re simply born into a social category that occupies a high-status position, it’s yours. White people today inherit institutional privilege from structures that were put in place long before they, or anyone in their family, were born.

Conversely, because of our society’s history, it’s something that Black people were denied long before they were born, and regardless of what they do in their lives. They will always be seen as Black; so they will never benefit from the institutional privilege granted to White people. Consequently, race in the United States functions in many ways like a caste system—a condition inherited at birth from which there is no escape. But institutional privilege is not the only form of privilege or social advantage.

Individual privilege refers to the advantages that individuals obtain for themselves. It captures the fact that individuals can, and do, achieve wealth, power, and position through their own merit and labor or through simple luck (for example, winning the lottery).

In theory, these two dimensions of privilege are conceptually independent. In reality, however, individual privilege is deeply tied to institutional privilege. A lack of institutional privilege can constrain or restrict individual privilege. Research shows that being Black will present a hindrance to individual achievement, regardless of merit, whereas being White will enhance the likelihood of individual achievement, all else being equal.

It’s important to keep in mind that it’s institutional privilege that determines where people “belong” in the social hierarchy. In her book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson compares social caste, which keeps people in their place, to a plaster cast that keeps bones in place. Both types of “cast/es” limit your mobility, whether you’re trying to move your arm or elevate your position in society. If you have institutional privilege, you’re much freer to occupy high-status roles and spaces because your individual and institutional privilege “match.” If you don’t have institutional privilege, though, it’s more difficult to occupy high-status roles and spaces, regardless of your individual effort or merit.

This distinction between individual privilege and institutional privilege is clearly depicted in the 2018 Oscar-winning movie Green Book, based on the real life of Don Shirley, a talented and successful Black musician in the 1960s, and Tony Vallelonga, his working-class White driver. The film portrays Don as a talented, cultured, and financially secure man—so financially secure that he was able to hire Tony to be his driver. Yet, while he was a star on stage, playing to sold-out crowds throughout the South, Don constantly suffered the indignity of having to enter venues through the service entrance and being refused service at upscale restaurants that catered to Whites. Despite his economic and intellectual “power,” he found himself relying on Tony (and his Whiteness) for legitimacy, credibility, and protection.

Tony, for his part, didn’t have a steady job and worried about providing for his family and paying his bills and debts. However, due to his skin color, he was allowed to frequent any establishment he pleased, regardless of whether it was a predominantly Black or White venue or whether could afford it. Whereas Tony’s institutional privilege granted him more individual privilege than he might have had otherwise, Don’s individual privilege didn’t “match” the institutional privilege of a Black person in America, and his life was unfairly burdened as a result.

Fast-forward to today, and it’s still the case that every Black person, regardless of their role or position, has to contend with racial discrimination. In fact, as Ellis Cose argued in his book The Rage of a Privileged Class, wealthy Blacks sometimes suffer more racial discrimination than more socioeconomically disadvantaged Black people because rich Blacks’ individual status doesn’t match where society believes they “ought” to be. They get hazed as a result.

For a clear depiction of one way this hazing shows up, have a look at this Procter & Gamble commercial on “the look” that Black people and their children have to endure—regardless of their personal wealth, status, or power—when occupying spaces assumed to be predominantly White. Moreover, research by Devah Pager and colleagues shows that White felons applying for jobs even have a leg up on Black non-felons applying for the same job, as seen in the graph below. That is the essence of White privilege.

Hardship vs. racial hardship, and not helping vs. hurting

I don’t mean to suggest for one minute that White people don’t experience hardships—they do. White people certainly experience poverty, disability, food insecurity, addiction, and even social stigma in certain contexts. But consider this question: Do Black and White people believe to the same extent that their race can be a direct cause of hardship?

According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey on Americans’ views about racial inequality, most Whites believe that their race is neutral: Slightly more than 50 percent believe that being White has neither helped nor hurt their ability to get ahead. However, 45 percent of White survey respondents, including working-class Whites, acknowledge that being White in the U.S. does help them.

What’s fascinating is what happens when the question is flipped to focus on disadvantages or hardships, rather than advantages or benefits. While a majority of Black respondents (52 percent) reported that being Black hurt their ability to get ahead, only 5 percent of White respondents reported that being White hurt them. The E Pluribus Unum Fund survey administered in the fall of 2019 to 600 White, 600 Black, and 600 Hispanic adults living in the American South found similar results: Only 5 percent of White respondents reported that their race made it harder for them to get ahead in life, whereas 49 percent of Blacks and 25 percent of Hispanics believed their race made it harder for them to get ahead.

This subtle distinction between believing that one’s race confers an unearned benefit versus believing one’s race creates an onerous hardship is worth highlighting. While many Whites (falsely) believe that the color of their skin does not grant them any special privilege, almost no White person believes that the color of their skin is a burdensome cross to bear (a mere 1 percent in the 2019 Pew survey reported that being White hurt them “a lot”). Those two things are not one and the same, though some people don’t automatically understand the difference.

After one of my DEI workshops, I had a conversation with a White executive—let’s call him Sean—who was absolutely incensed by the concept of White privilege. “First of all, I am not White!” he exclaimed. “I’m Irish!” Although he was born in the United States, he believed that someone with an Irish last name like O’Malley, for example, would never be accepted by high society, and therefore he could not be “privileged.” “I would never be accepted into the Boston Brahmins (a high-society organization) or invited to tea at Buckingham Palace,” he declared. So, where was all of this “White privilege” that I was talking about?

There are two issues here.

The first is that Sean was focused primarily on perks rather than knocks, and he didn’t understand the implications of that distinction. Not having the benefit of attending tea with King Charles III is not at all the same as having the burden of harassment or violence by the police—about as far from it as you can get.

Yet again, the data illustrates this point in stark terms: In some cities, Black motorists are ticketed 18 times more frequently than White motorists. A widely cited 2017 study that analyzed data from police body camera footage also found that Black motorists are treated with less respect than White motorists, even when taking into account the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the race of the officer. Finally, a 2019 study shows that the risk of being killed by a police officer is far higher for Black, Native American, and Hispanic males than it is for White males, especially for those ages 20 to 35. In fact, police use of force is among the leading causes of death for young men of color. Any comparison to the “inconvenience” of never being invited to Buckingham Palace? I don’t think so.

The second, and more important, issue is that Sean defined perks, or benefits, very narrowly. If the definition of “White privilege” is being able to have tea with a British monarch, then he would be right—he didn’t have that privilege. But that is very much an individual privilege, not an institutional one. There are some Black and biracial individuals—think of Meghan Markle and her mother, Doria Ragland—who have gotten to enjoy that privilege, despite the fact that the vast majority of people—Black or White—do not. The same goes, more or less, for his assertion about the Boston Brahmins—those wealthy, multigenerational Boston families who did, and to an extent still do, set the city’s social calendar. Most White (and Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American) Bostonians are not invited. Acceptance into the Brahmins is, yet again, an individual, not institutional, privilege. Sean’s (and many others’) attempt to invalidate the notion of institutional privilege by conjuring up isolated and extreme contexts in which it does not exist is yet another example of compartmentalization.

To really drive this point home, consider if someone argued that being disabled confers an advantage when looking for a parking space. They might be right in that specific case. But that could not be an argument for people with disabilities having more privilege than able-bodied individuals in general. Living one’s entire life in a wheelchair, for example, would create far more obstacles than advantages. Even with the advantage of getting a parking spot closer to the door, you’d have the great disadvantage of increased difficulty getting out of the car and decreased mobility overall. Again, the real question of privilege concerns what happens most of the time, not in single, specific instances.

When it comes to American society, White people do at times experience hardship as individuals, but they always experience institutional privilege. Thus, whether they recognize it as such or not, they undoubtedly have White privilege—even if it’s “only” in 99% of cases. And it’s no accident that White privilege abounds—society was designed that way.