Why is privilege invisible

Maloney , ranking member of the US Congress Joint Economic Committee, this leads to poverty in the age of retirement, creating entire groups of vulnerable individuals.

This leads to a vicious cycle of hiring only white men in senior position, reducing diversity, and showing the impact of white privilege in the work marketplace. In the end, these systematic racist ideologies create rifts of economic class, due to low income, and public-sector jobs. According to The Poverty Site , around two-fifths of people from ethnic minorities live in low-income households, twice the rate for white people.

Part-working families from ethnic minorities are almost twice as likely to be in low income as part-working White British families: 45 percent compared to 25 percent. And the ones suffering the most are again women of colour. Housing policy in the UK disadvantages people from black and minority ethnic communities. Image Source: Alamy Stock Photo. The U. These differences arise in part because privilege is invisible to those who have it.

Dominant groups are hypocognitive of privilege, having more fragmentary and impoverished cognitive representations of what the concept is, relative to subordinate group members. Across 13 studies, this difference revealed itself in impaired performance on cognitive tasks involving privilege.

Relative to those from subordinate groups women, Black and Asian Americans, left-handers , dominant group members men, White Americans, right-handers needed more information about everyday behavior to recognize themes of discrimination, generated fewer examples of discrimination, and remembered fewer discriminatory instances from a questionnaire or videotaped talk.

They also categorized instances of discrimination on a reaction time task more slowly. These cognitive performance deficits predicted group differences in beliefs about whether privilege and discrimination exist. Performance differences persisted whether privilege was framed as the absence of disadvantages or presence of advantages and whether discrimination was made salient or not. After watching a transgender woman describe discrimination experienced as a woman, both men and women showed increased awareness of male privilege and gender discrimination.

For journal preprint policies, see SHeRPa. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is in fact permission to escape or to dominate. But not all of the privileges on my list are inevitably damaging. Some, like the expectation that neighbors will be decent to you, or that your race will not count against you in court, should be the norm in a just society. Others, like the privilege to ignore less powerful people, distort the humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups.

We might at least start by distinguishing between positive advantages, which we can work to spread, and negative types of advantage, which unless rejected will always reinforce our present hierarchies.

For example, the feeling that one belongs within the human circle, as Native Americans say, should not be seen as privilege for a few. Ideally it is an unearned entitlement. At present, since only a few have it, it is an unearned advantage for them.

This paper results from a process of coming to see that some of the power that I originally saw as attendant on being a human being in the United States consisted in unearned advantage and conferred dominance.

I have met very few men who are truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what will we do to lessen them.

In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the U. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation.

Difficulties and dangers surrounding the task of finding parallels are many. Since racism, sexism, and heterosexism are not the same, the advantages associated with them should not be seen as the same. In addition, it is hard to disentangle aspects of unearned advantage which rest more on social class, economic class, race, religion, sex, and ethnic identity than on other factors. Still, all of the oppressions are interlocking, as the Combahee River Collective Statement of continues to remind us eloquently.

One factor seems clear about all of the interlocking oppressions. They take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see. In my class and place, I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.

I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems. To redesign social systems, we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool here. They keep the thinking about equality or equity incomplete, protecting unearned advantage and conferred dominance by making these taboo subjects.

Most talk by whites about equal opportunity seems to me now to be about equal opportunity to try to get into a position of dominance while denying that systems of dominance exist. It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all.

Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.