It’s hard to acknowledge your privilege when you’ve enjoyed it for your whole life.
It’s even harder to admit that your success is very much the result of that privilege, and that your self-perceived story of hard work, sacrifice, discipline, and skill might be entirely different absent your privilege of race, nation, gender, socioeconomic class, or health.
Someone who has been listening to my stories this week said, “It’s amazing that you’ve come so far given where you once were.”
I replied, “I’m a healthy, intelligent, white man in America. Even with the misfortune that I’ve suffered in life, I was already hugely advantaged from the get-go. Change the color of my skin or my gender or stick me in a third world country, and my story is probably very different. My path might have been hard, but it was a hell of a lot easier than most people of the world.”
It seems to me that there is a segment of people in America today who enjoy the same or similar privileges but refuse to recognize their good fortune. They feel like victims rather than the beneficiaries of a lottery that afforded them enormous privilege. They fail to see that the struggle of others is largely the result of institutions that make their path more difficult because of their race, gender, or country of origin.
It made me think of these words, spoken by the fictional Game of Thrones character Tyrion Lannister:
