On Flavors of Privilege

When I was in college, I had a roommate who initially seemed incredibly standoffish. I'm not always great at picking up on that sort of thing, and for a few weeks I sort of shrugged it off and figured she was just "quiet" or "shy".

After all, I'd been accused plenty of times of being unfriendly myself, and I wasn't about to do that to someone else! I felt proud of myself for "not taking it personally".

Somehow, though I eventually figured out that her demeanor did have something to do with me. I can't even remember how -- possibly seeing how different she was around people who weren't me -- but in any case, I confronted her one day.

Given my history of social ostracism and exclusion, I initially thought I was going to hear something about how I was weird, or annoying, or even "scary". I braced myself for "the usual".

I didn't get "the usual". Instead, I got an admission that I made her nervous because I was white.

This completely shocked me. I sputtered something like, "But I'm not racist! Why would you even think that?"

I don't remember what my roommate said in response, or how that conversation eventually resolved -- but nevertheless, things were much better afterward. We actually ended up getting along quite well for the rest of the time we shared a room. Still, though, it wasn't until several years after graduating that I was able to see the illusory nature of my moral high horse.

For years, I'd seen the positive resolution of our little discussion on race as being a concession on her part that she'd been wrong in her initial uneasiness about sharing a room with a white girl. However, having since learned a lot more about the utterly horrific levels of racism, stereotyping, and general disrespect women of color (in this case, Latina) still experience in our "post-Enlightenment" society, I can now see why my roommate reacted to me the way she did in the beginning.

I can also see how my initial (and held-for-years) perception of our resolution and subsequent peaceful coexistence was, in fact, a consequence of my own unexamined privilege and ignorance.

My mistake had been in presuming that my roommate and I were actually on a level playing field to begin with as far as our backgrounds went -- meaning that (in my mind, at the time) her reaction had been "paranoid" until she'd gotten a clue, whereas mine had been "reasoned".

If that wasn't a privileged assumption on my part, I don't know what is.

My roommate ended up explaining a bit about social activism to me that year -- I didn't quite understand all of it, and at the time I was still living in a "the world is a pure meritocracy so long as you don't play the victim" mindset -- but thinking back, I am seeing how that experience revealed a pretty gaping flaw in my own thinking even if I didn't see it at the time.

I was so used to presuming that prejudice was "someone else's problem" (in the sense that I didn't need to do anything about it aside from proclaim it "wrong" where I saw it, unless of course it was directed at me, in which case I would actively fight it) that I could not see how my own attitudes could help perpetuate prejudice. I thought a person had to actually be prejudiced against one or more ethnic/cultural groups to be part of the prejudice problem, which of course left me off the hook.

Or so I thought.

It has only been through looking at how different people enjoy different levels of valuation and privilege that I've been able to realize that no, I am not off the hook. Even as I work, in whatever way I can, to help bolster the idea that being autistic (or otherwise disabled/atypical/different) should not disqualify a person from membership in the human community (with all the respect and ethical consideration that entails), and even as I acknowledge the unexamined, harmful assumptions regarding brains like mine and people like me, I must not lose sight of contexts where I am the one who needs to check my attitude.

Sure, I might get looked askance at by some due to my "odd" body language or fleeting eye contact or idiosyncratic, inconsistent use of language -- but in general, I don't have people making cracks within (or outside) earshot about how I and my family are probably "illegals" who ought to be deported.

In general, if I walk into a store, the clerks aren't looking at my skin color and raising their vigilance levels due to a perception that people who look like me tend to be thieves.

I don't constantly hear speculations about how people of my ancestral background are probably less intelligent, more aggressive, or less honest -- and that somehow "statistics show this, and anyone who doesn't believe it is just being PC".

I might hear other speculations, all of them equally misguided, but that doesn't make the ones that get applied to others and not me "not my problem"!