šļøI seem to have cured my privilege guilt
No more flinching, just walking my path, willing to help where I can
I didnāt set out to purposefully try to cure my lifelong sense of āprivilege guiltāāfrom being born to a financially comfortable, educated, and white middle-class family in the USābut I realized last night that I may have accidentally done so.
I was walking into a grocery store that I hadnāt been to in several years (due to moving house), and I remembered how I used to feel quite self-conscious going in there. I was hyper-aware of the other patrons I tended to see there, who were often from the poorest economic class (in the USāwhich, I understand, is still better off than the poorest people in other parts of the world).
During those years, going to that grocery store was often an exercise in finding out my limits. I discovered that I would decline to help if a man approached me in the parking lot and asked for spare change, because I didnāt feel safe. But if a man (or anyone) asked me, in the store, to help him buy a few groceries, I would absolutely say yes. And so on.
Last night, when I went back to that grocery store for the first time in a long time, I realized that that same sense of hyper, awkward privilege-awareness was gone. Just totally gone.
Instead, I was just calmly inhabiting the fact that I am a person of privilege, and Iām ready and willing to help where I can.
Thereās no fear, no flinching, no apologizing for my privilege. Thereās just open-eyed acceptance of the reality that I have resources others donāt have, and I am ready to use them to help where I can.
I donāt know exactly how this change came about, but Iām guessing that itās largely a result of all my work on āmy feelings matterā practice.
Whatever the cause, Iām gratefulābecause the world is a mess, and thereās no time to waste on flinching and apologizing!
I love what Hermione says at the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (by Eliezer Yudkowsky):
āThere are just people who do what they can, whatever they can. And there are also people who donāt even try to do what they can, and yes, those people are doing something wrongā¦
āIāll go on trying to do most of what I can, or at least some of what I canā¦
āThatās my answer.ā Hermione took a deep breath, her face resolute. āSo, is there something I can do?ā
Thatās my answer too. No more āshouldsāāIāll just do what I can to help others in need as I walk along my own path.
Can you relate to this? What insights do you have to offer for those who struggle with privilege guilt?
Oh yeah, I definitely struggle with this. When I'm feeling down it's very easy to dismiss my struggles as fickle and frivolous compared to what others go through. Then I use that as ammunition to judge myself! š©
I like the "do what I can, when I can" approach. I've been trying to see it more as a scope issue--most of the really troubling problems we hear about are just too big for any one individual to make any difference. Which sounds defeatist, I know, but if I narrow my scope to just where I am and who I encounter each day, that's a much more manageable scale. If I can give some good to each person I encounter rather than making things worse, then I can hope it spreads outward from there.