Title: Invisible Power and Privilege | The Fearless Heart
Headings: Invisible Power and Privilege
Invisible Power and Privilege
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Content: The gap between this experience and the pervasive, acute, and unending barrage of discrimination, lack of access to material resources, and encounters with the authorities takes more effort to bridge than most people have energy for, especially those who are already worn out by such ongoing challenge of just making it through the day every day. Even if nothing gets said, the gap in experience remains enormous, all the while being known to one group and not to the other. In addition to the gap in experience in terms of understanding what happens, the different training that different groups receive, itself part of the gap in access to resources, recreates societal dynamics within the group. White people, men, and people with class privilege are more likely to speak in groups and to have their opinions taken seriously than people of color, women, or lower class people, respectively. As one particularly painful example, when a jury is selected, the likeliest person to be chosen as foreman, and I use that word in this way deliberately, is the white male with the highest education in the room. We clearly don’t mean to dominate or take away from others’ access to power, to choice, to participation in decisions, to shaping the vision and direction of a group. And yet we do, without knowing we do it. Different access to resources makes for different life experiences, which makes for different perspectives, sometimes even about reality or the nature of life. This is part of why the conversation can get so hard. In many situations the differences in perspective are so deep that we see and hear completely different realities, even before the inevitable process of interpretation and assigning meaning to what we observe begins.