Privilege Doesn’t Do What You Think It Does
Change requires inward, not outward focus
In the United States, it has become common for people to focus on privilege in order to foster conversations about equity and diversity. We often meet clients who use phrases like “he needs to check his privilege” or, more commonly, “I’ve had so much privilege, there’s no way I could understand.” While it’s important to acknowledge inequality and where a lack of awareness of suffering holds us back, bringing awareness to our own suffering is a much more fruitful, powerful, effective, and liberating approach to change, even if it involves a little discomfort along the way.
To demonstrate the power of the self-first approach, we conduct an exercise with clients that involves a story about two hypothetical colleagues, Joe and Maura. They come into conflict about a work challenge and they have a hard time working it out, even though they both like and respect each other. Joe is older, white, and male and Maura is younger, female, and of color.
In the exercise, we provide other details about the two characters, like where they grew up, what their career aspirations are, their experiences of grief, their health challenges, and how the pandemic affected them. Then we ask clients to identify the factors that are influencing or contributing to the conflict.
Most people, at least initially, start by locating the source of the conflict in the difference of experiences based on their identities: age, race, gender, status. What’s interesting is that most people become somewhat frustrated or agitated as they do this. They want to know what the company policies are; they want to blame Joe for what he said or tell Maura to apologize for what she said. Sometimes, people suggest that the only solution is for Joe to learn more about Maura’s identity and change his behavior accordingly. Sometimes, people say Maura, who has experienced racism and sexism in the past, just needs more people like her to work with so that she’ll find better support. Joe shouldn’t advise her on anything, they say. People often express anger at Joe and sympathy for Maura or anger at Maura and frustration or hopelessness for Joe. They ask about rules or policies that might force change—wanting more details added to the fictionalized story to help them manage their own discomfort. This is the power of the exercise.
Very quickly, people start to search for some solution that will fix this conflict. And, at least initially, the source of this desire for resolution is in their own discomfort. That’s the point of the exercise–to have clients feel when their own discomfort pushes them to find a band-aid solution. And, while they are feeling this discomfort, we stay right with them with no judgment and no quick fixes. There’s no problem with the discomfort. It’s more like a hard chair without a cushion: we find a more sustainable, comfortable solution when we examine our own posture first.
Routinely, people find it hard to imagine any story of resolution between the two colleagues that doesn’t involve concession, punishment, giving up, or sacrifice. This is the point. We’re asking clients to notice when they feel so challenged or upset that they seek resolution in blame. This is the pattern we are seeking to unravel. As we note in our post on Diversity without the Enemy:
“The work of diversity is the work of healing. And healing doesn’t mean consequences don’t exist. It just means our capacity to heal does not depend on the punishment of another.”
Strategically, we ask clients to look at a wide variety of influencing factors, even ones that the characters themselves would never know about each other. But we’re also asking them to be with their own reactions to a story of conflict. It’s really hard to know what to do when your only tool is to find the problem person, the problem gap in knowledge, or the problem policy and fix it.
As inclusive leaders, our job is rarely to fix. We can be most effective by serving as a guide. We guide best when we see clearly. We see clearly when we know where we are standing.
Once clients acknowledge their own emotions, including how frustrated and sad they are that they can’t fix this easily, they can see more of what’s impacting the story. For example, Joe and Maura are both people who grew up in small towns, both were the first in their families to go to college, both experienced grief in early adulthood, and both often feel pressure to get it right all the time. These are additional influences on the story of conflict, and they, like all experiences of pain, will continue to have an impact until we notice them with love and care, rather than judgment and blame.
This approach tends to be a new experience for participants. They, like most people, have been socialized and trained to look for a singular problem. They feel overwhelmed by too many difficulties influencing a situation, which often leads to a collapse in our ability to empathize. We pick one side and blame the other.
There’s nothing wrong with this experience of overwhelm: this is step one in building an inclusive community. To get to step two, which involves a more harmonious and stable space of peace and collaboration, we have to agree to see it all and then alter our relationship to the pain.
Conflict arises from different and shared challenges, so organizations have a better chance at resolution when we examine all the emotions and beliefs showing up in the moment. We acknowledge that challenges come from past pain without prying into details that may be inappropriate or inaccessible. The coaches and facilitators that we work with do this so well that they can have a calming impact even in the most challenging of settings. Your HR manager can also benefit from this approach. The same process of co-regulation applies and, luckily, they don’t have to know how to stop a war, just how to provide a sense of resolution to activated people. The counterintuitive thing is that this is, first and foremost, self-focused work.
When we focus on privilege, we are often asking people to look away from their own pain. This doesn’t encourage change. In fact, it can heighten tensions and feelings of overwhelm. In our approach, this is where the neuroscience of emotional processing comes in. We know that occupying the space of compassionate witness transforms the experience of hardship for the victim and for those around them. We practice, with our clients, holding this position through metacognition—thinking about thinking, or better yet, thinking about feeling. Our non-activation encourages that of others.
Trauma is a near-universal experience: healing our own pain is how we become a source of calm and connection in our communities. We can build our capacity to see the impact of racism, sexism, ableism, poverty, grief, and more when we see the pain it’s caused in our own lives, whether we have been victims, perpetrators, or both. From this zoomed out perspective, we’re making space for it all and thereby increasing our options for transformation and connection.
The easy way out is to assume that your pleasant memories have more bearing on a situation than your pain. Yet, even though some might say that it’s a privilege to not focus on the pain, our experience in this work is different. What at first might seem easy is ultimately isolating and self-defeating. Becoming an inclusive leader is agreeing to heal yourself, and that’s the beauty of it. To face the discomfort—and then realize it doesn’t define you—is a liberating path to transformation.