The path to empathy

'Privilege' is much on my mind these days and is much in the ether as well, but I wonder if we've really looked at it closely enough?

When we talk about privilege, we typically do so as if privilege is all-encompassing of a certain group but the reality is far more complicated.

Privilege, it seems to me, is not a big warm blanket that covers uniformly and protects completely. This may explain why so many people challenge the notion of privilege and doubt its very existence. Ask a poor White person in rural America what White privilege they experience and you're likely to get a blank look. Privilege is contextually defined. Some days and in some spaces, you have it, and other days in other spaces, you simply don't.

When I, with my mix of privileges and dis-privileges, venture out into the real world, what leads the way? What holds me back? What does the world see in me and how does the world judge me? What do I experience as a consequence of the world's judgments? What happens inside of me as I process and experience what's happening outside my locus of control? What do I do with what I receive? If I come away from an interaction successful and better off, do I join the judgmental crowd, relieved that I have been 'saved' from the fate of the dis-privileged?

Here's a case in point.

After the birth of her second child, my friend - a White woman - found herself out of a failed marriage with two children under five and no home to call her own. That time with no fixed place of abode gave her an opportunity to see what the world metes out to those who fall on hard times. Even clean and sober, with no mental health challenges and more than enough intelligence and education to get by, she still found herself struggling briefly with homelessness. For her, it was a moment; a moment when she could develop empathy or cynical self-interest. She chose empathy. Opportunity was everything. Opportunity was a path to empathy.

As a White woman, she had the luxury (!) of not being judged as morally inferior for her single state (with minor children in tow). As a person without the additional challenges of drug or alcohol dependency, she was able to access support services without the palpable taint of judgement or the threat of losing her children. As an employed person, she was able to more quickly get herself back on the straight and narrow. Still, the experience taught her that the path to security is very narrow and that along the way there's limited tolerance for error, miscalculation or plain old bad luck. The path is quite unforgiving. As Simone Biles' experience in Rio showed us, one slip is all it takes to lose your tenuous grasp on the gold. It matters not how many hours of hard work you've put in, one slip and you go from gold to bronze, or from competitor to patient, from housed to homeless, from privileged to oppressed. So it is in this society. 

Perhaps it is the fragile order that we each create in our chaotic universes that makes us so unwilling to be empathetic towards others. Maybe it's the fundamental attribution error that accounts for our reluctance to understand or appreciate others' challenges. Perhaps, all our empathy is used up on ourselves. Any of those may be true, but yet there are those like my friend, who come through fires of their own with both recognition of how their markers of status in society eased their path (if only marginally so), and with greater respect for others whose lack of privilege makes the journey back from the precipice that much harder to accomplish.

I don't know whether we often consider the intersection of privilege and its polar opposite or how that intersection works itself out in our society. Neither do we seem to consider how that intersection might actually present us with an opportunity to grow either as individuals or as a society. My friend was/is privileged as a White person, though not so much as a female. As a homeless person she was absolutely not privileged. As a married female, she had some privilege, but as a divorcée with young children, not so much. In her situation, she was able to recognize that being White eased her navigation of the world of homelessness. She stood outside herself long enough to recognize that truth and now is a warrior for change for those around her. 

It's worth it for each of us to consider the ways in which we are privileged and the ways in which we are oppressed. It's also worth it for us to be mindful of the ways the few privileges we have make our lives easier, and to use that knowledge as a critical opportunity for personal growth. That little bit of personal reflection could make all the difference to the way we move about in the world and what kind of society we might leave behind.

There's a very small group of people for whom privilege is that warm blanket providing total coverage and comfort: educated, White, wealthy, cis-gendered, attractive, straight men who stand between 5'10" and 6' 3" or so. (Short men do not receive nearly the same comfort as the tall ones do. Unattractive men likewise must work a bit harder.) That's a really narrow swath of humanity don't you think? The very limits of the group should chafe the rest of us and work us up to such lather that that privileged club would have no place to meet in peace. Instead, we're all too eager to join. Having not taken the opportunities our challenges give us to learn empathy, we instead simply seek our turn at the trough. We are so terrified that the world really is zero-sum, that we dare not join others with less privilege in battling the beast, lest it mean less for us. 

What's sad about all this is that the intersection of privileged and not, is where the true source of our humanity lies. Too bad we run from its light and seek the continued darkness of privilege instead.