I want to think of myself as a self-made woman, from self-made parents. Everyone does. I know very well all the hard things I've had to deal with in life. I know exactly how hard I've worked to overcome them. I bristle at any suggestion that somehow my hard work doesn't matter, that I didn't earn my accomplishments. And that's exactly what any suggestion of privilege or help sounds like.
I grew up poor or low middle class, depending on the year. My Dad worked more than full-time, my Mom usually worked part-time or babysat other kids. On top of that, they worked essentially another full time job managing apartments so we could have a place to live. Still, we lived in as much of a bad neighborhood as you find in the suburbs. I found used drug needles when picking up trash around the complex, there were gangs and vandalism. In just the small complex we lived in, I remember one person being shot and ultimately paralyzed and another being murdered by a stabbing. We were well off for the neighborhood, always had food, clothes and a little extra. Things were much harder after my parents divorced and didn't really start to look up until I was a teenager.
My parents had it worse. My Dad grew up one out of seven children, and while I don't think he would appreciate me displaying the details of his life on the internet for all to see, some of the stories feel more like something out of a sad book on rural poverty than anything someone real and so close to me grew up with. Both of them graduated high school, but with kids and other responsibilities piling up in their early twenties, neither was able to attend more than a few classes at community college.
Now, I'm in lawschool, I have a brother in college, and it's just a given that the rest of us will go to college and have nice, middle class lives. Both of my parents are solid middle-class homeowners. My Dad is an IT manager in a position that most of the other managers have MBAs. Life isn't perfect, but we've come very far and worked hard to get there.
I want to look at all that and talk about hard work, boot straps and how you better believe that we earned and deserve everything we have. But that just isn't true. We are enormously privileged. My parents and now I work hard to make the best of those opportunities, but there are a whole host of other factors, some luck, but mostly just that society is set up to work better for people like us.
I had a hugely privileged education. Free schools of decent to good quality. Curriculum created by people from my general culture. At home my parents read to me, helped me with/forced me to do homework, because they had the time and knowledge to do so and that was the norm for our social group. Even not being college educated, they both read and spent time with other educated people at church and other settings. So they talked a certain way at home, so I grew up around a large vocabulary and proper grammar. I didn't have to do anything special to learn it, that was just the environment. I also had the privilege of everyone around me automatically assuming I would go to college. That played a big deal in how I viewed myself and the types of choices I made.
Even though we weren't always technically middle-class economically, I grew up in a very middle-class kind of a culture. I grew up exposed to how things work in the Middle-class world. I know what to wear to a job interview. I know how to behave in different restaurants. I can make appropriate chit chat. How? My parents taught me, by example or explicitly. I participated in mock events at church. Manners and social graces aren't signs of moral character, that's all learned behavior. The hardest working kid from a poor working class family won't have that social knowledge and that will make things harder. The same way I would be lost at a country club or other upper-crust kind of a setting.
I'm white. People are going to make more favorable assumptions about me based on that fact alone. In most business settings just my race makes me feel automatically more familiar and similar to the people in charge. And even if we really were color-blind (whatever that means) the fact that so much of what we get comes from our parents, who got stuff from their parents and so on, means that because 50 years ago my grandparents had significantly more opportunities and faced less discrimination than the grandparents of many people of color means that I get all sorts of generational benefits.
There are also other little things that I didn't earn that help me out. I have natural talents that I did nothing to earn. I didn't do anything to be "smart". Sure, I worked at school and cultivated that, but the basic ability to learn quickly is pure luck. That's a privilege. I'm also pretty, at least according to today's standards. Not stunning, but it's enough that when I dress well and smile, I get a favorable response. That's a privilege too. I have epilepsy, and that does place some limits on me, but my overall good health is also a privilege. Just like my near constant access to health care and healthy food is too.
And that's just me. I'm also married to a man who is quite privileged and I get all kinds of benefits from that too. Both his parents are college educated, work hard and are generally wonderful. Educated, upper-middle class, white male Zach has all kinds of privilege going on.
All of that puts us in a very good position. We still have to work hard. We still have to make good financial choices. When we make mistakes, like me getting into too much law school debt by going to a Tier1 private school instead of a lower ranked but more affordable state school, or not living more bare bones than we are already, that can and does hurt us. We live on about 20k in student loans per year, the same amount the school says should be the expected budget for one person, (plus the 20k in savings we started out with) so we eat our rarely, don't have a car, live in a studio,etc. and are generally responsible. Oh, yah, the ability to get the credit to take out those loans is another privilege. But, even with all the ways we are awesome (and we are), we still wouldn't have been able to accomplish so much if we didn't have so much privilege going for us. At the very least it would have taken much, much more work on our part.
Privilege is all that and so much more. It's all the little bits of our societal framework, the way we tend to think thing just naturally work. Only, just because that's how things are, doesn't mean it's how things should be or have to be. Just that after years and years of choices and norms and power, things are such that they tend to benefit the kinds of people who generally have had the power to make the choices that create all those structures.
This doesn't mean I should feel bad or guilty about being handed a life with more than many people. But I should recognize it. I should maybe even look at some of the societal structures that we take for granted, recognize the ways in which they aren't fair and try to change them so they are. I should certainly remember how much of everyone's lives are somewhat outside of their control for better or worse, remember that my perspective and my experience is not universal, and treat people accordingly. Just generally not being a self-righteous, judgmental biddy would also probably be good.
