When Speaking Up is Speaking Over

This week in class, we discussed privilege and the question of what to do with it. The two answers we came up with were either finding ways to sacrifice it or using it to make a better world for those we have privilege over.

I find that the second option can be problematic. For instance, many people discuss Muslim women wearing head coverings whether they are feminist or not. There have been so many debates and but rarely are Muslim women asked about what they think – they are cut out of a conversation about their own lives. In a British Empire history class I took freshman year, we read about suttee in colonial India, but we never read any first hand accounts from widows, only from “white men [who talked about] saving brown women from brown men." These men who wrote accounts of sati, and white feminists who talk about how oppressed hibjabis are, and Macklemore, who sings about how hip-hop hates gay people, without acknowledging LGBTQ rappers like Angel Haze and Le1f, are all speaking over marginalized groups of which they are not a part. Using privilege in this way, to speak “for” a group, is dangerous because it is easy to misrepresent desires from that group or individuals in it.

So the question remains, what should you do with your privilege? I think this video of Dr. Joy DeGruy gives a good example. In the video she talks about going to the grocery store with her sister-in-law, who passes as white, and whose check is not scrutinized at the register. When Dr. DeGruy comes up to the register after her and pays with a check, she is asked for two pieces of identification, and the cashier searches for her name in the registry of people who have written bad checks. Her sister-in-law steps in, using her white (passing) privilege, to call attention to the injustice of the situation. In that moment, she used her white privilege to make everyone else in the immediate area aware of something that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. This example isn’t quite sacrificing your privilege and asking the cashier to look at your identification, and it’s not using your privilege to try to effect major societal change. I believe this use of privilege is more effective at getting others to be aware of microaggressions and racism than sacrificing everyday privileges because it reaches a wider audience and draws attention directly to the problem.