To Dismantle White Privilege We Need to Be Honest About the Way We See Others

I’m mixed-race living in a predominantly white area and I assumed I knew privilege intimately. I was wrong.

Whenever white privilege has been discussed over the last few years it is predominantly in reference to either race or gender, but it impacts so much more.

I remember the first moment I thought about health privilege and how much it shocked me. I was a good person (for the most part). I thought about and treated people fairly and worked hard to not make assumptions. I make a conscious effort to be aware of society’s narrative running through my head and actively questioned it. Yet I had a blind spot, an area of life that I never really gave much thought to because, well, it didn’t affect me. But isn’t that exactly where privilege flourishes?

I’ve always been a healthy person and without meaning to I’ve always expected that to continue. When other people tell me their woes I listen, I care, and if there were a way I could lighten their load I would, but I can’t really identify or understand fully because it’s just not my experience.

When you feel pain in your body, from any cause, it can be all-consuming and maddening while the experience is happening, and if that pain continues for longer than a day added to the physical sensation there are the emotions of fear, panic, and depression. When someone else is suffering, you feel for them but can’t quite understand what they are experiencing, and if their pain is the kind that comes with no outward sign and stays for a long while, that is when we realize that our empathy and compassion are finite.

I was raised to be quite dismissive of illness. In that pull your socks up and get to work mentality, not in a cold-hearted way. I felt that you had to suck it up and get on with the business at hand, whatever that may be. And while it was unintended, woven in with that way of thinking was a vein of distrust or distaste with sickness, because it was weak. It meant there were things you couldn’t do, things you’d need help with, and asking for help has always been a challenge.

It’s not the greatest thing to admit to but rewriting that narrative took me awhile.

Once it occurred to me that health privilege existed, suddenly I saw the evidence of it everywhere. All the assumptions people make about the body and what it ‘should be able to do’. All the assumptions about what it would be unable to do if it looked a certain way.

I realized that so much of all privilege is based on how we interpret what we see.

So many illnesses and disabilities are invisible. Maybe that is yet another one of the virus’ silver linings, with the occurrence of long Covid we are finding it easier to accept that we can’t ‘see’ everything about a person and that only by feeling and being fully aware of our own bodies can we fully understand our wellness. Wellness that rarely lives on our skin for others to view.

White privilege is not just about white people. It affects every person living in a culture dominated by the ideas at the heart of white superiority. It is making decisions and assumptions about others as ‘less than’ completely dependent on their physical appearance and ignoring their lived experience because it simply isn’t yours.

I’m not asking for each of us to be buried under a wave of guilt and shame, I am asking each and every one of us to take a good hard look in the mirror and own up to some truths that we’d rather not admit out loud. Here’s the thing though, if you want to change, you move forward knowing better and doing better, that’s all.

We are all carrying elements of privilege that block genuine connection and our understanding of others, discarding them can be that simple if you let it.