The Privilege Meme - a few words from Will

I want to respond to some of the comments from the blogsphere about the privilege meme. I am thankful to N. Jeanne Burns at http://quakerclass.blogspot.com/ who took our experience and moved it into the blogsphere, modifying it appropriately and keeping our names on it. Her posting was the start of the meme, we just wrote the experience. I am also thankful Peggy McIntosh for her "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" that is one grandparent of what we produced.

We designed a small group experience on privilege as a way to explore class, creating a list of items grounded in the published research literature and in our interviews as markers of privilege. Our assumption was that that privilege is one way to explore class.

This is a collection of statements that when taken together reflect to a large degree the privilege that people had when they grew up and that privilege in turn reflects on class. The list focuses on the opportunities provided for people and does not focus on individual actions. We tried to make statement about things that are generally true for many people and I apologize if your story didn't get told in our list.

This experience reflects a "capital" idea of class, which is one among many useful models of class. Beginning with Pierre Bourdieu's ideas of economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital to which we added academic capital because of our context on campus.

This experience is designed for US American college students or recent college graduates.  In the newer version one item has been added for international students. It would be interesting to see versions from other nations and cultures.

The goal of the exercise is to get people talking and thinking about privilege as a way to talk and think about class. Talking and thinking about privilege and class will lead to learning about privilege and class. That's it.

It is clear that this experience leads to an emotional response in many people, and it is important to explore the emotional response that you have to this experience in a constructive and positive way. This experience is not designed to evoke any particular emotional response. The two most common emotional reactions are guilt and anger. Identifying what it is on the list that makes you angry or guilty and what it is in you that makes you feel guilty or angry are part of an increased awareness of privilege and class. Emotional responses to the list may also reflect your world view about difference and diversity.

"This statements doesn't match my experience of privilege and class so the whole thing is wrong and Dr. Barratt and his colleagues are . . . " This is a typical anger response read in many blogs. I hope that people realize that their experiences of privilege and class will be quite different than other people's experiences of privilege and class, and I hope people don't generalize too much from their own experiences of class.

This is one among many ways to get people thinking and talking about privilege and class. I use Milton Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity as a model and intercultural learning, so I see people as moving from denial through defense, minimization, acceptance, adaptation and finally into integration. Discussion of this experience and people's emotional reaction to it can productively use these six stages as an underlying model.

Great articles and blogs on the meme are at: