White Privilege Lady enters the classroom donning a condescending smirk, a penguin waddle, and two uneven backpacks—one filled with books, the other empty.

The backpacks are a metaphor, she explains: Everyone walks around with an imaginary backpack (read: baggage), but only privileged Americans have the books (read: education, opportunities, resources) necessary to gain a step ahead. A girl in the class—wearing a middle school do-gooder facial expression—raises her hand and asks, "How do we make sure everyone has books?" White Privilege Lady’s solution? Move the books from one bag to the other. Mine? Fill both goddamn backpacks.

Now, this story takes place at a middle-school diversity conference, and as the absurd title we give our teacher makes clear, we are nowhere near educated enough to have a nuanced opinion on privilege. However, our teacher’s lesson, while not without limitations, has legitimate virtue in that it exposes a collection of obnoxious, prideful, bombastic private school seventh graders to the concept of white privilege.

But my gripe with White Privilege Lady at the time—her belief that privilege should be relocated, rather than proliferated—is just one example of a larger trend in which organizers lambast privilege instead of attempting to make it universal—a trend that has potentially detrimental effects and inadvertently leads people to tune out incredibly important movements like #BlackLivesMatter.

I’m white (as was my teacher, by the way). I’m private-school educated. I’m from New York. I was raised by two parents. I go to Harvard. All this to say: It’s hard to be more privileged than I am. So, I acknowledge that for me to attempt to dictate how people around me, especially those less privileged than I am, interact with and view privilege is not only a limited pursuit, but also, possibly, a patronizing and condescending one. I get this.

I also get that my argument seems to fall in line with the conservative “pick yourself up by the bootstraps,” “I’m not willing to pay higher taxes,” “I want to birth Ayn Rand’s spawn” sentiment you hear from Republican politicians. But that type of hands-off approach to addressing racial inequality—an approach that has fallen short time and time again throughout American history—is not what I am advocating for.

When we talk about white privilege, we are not only talking about combatting institutions like segregation, police brutality, and the criminal justice system. We are talking about the manifestations of systemic inequality that play out on a personal level. We are talking about a fight to make certain privileges—ones that white Americans unconsciously reap the rewards of every day—rights for all Americans.

We are talking about a fight to make sure every citizen has a path to higher-education not limited by her race, gender, or class; to make sure all children are safe from prejudice; to make sure that everyone can walk past a police officer without fear of being killed.

Don’t empty your backpack of the the right to make an argument without people assuming your opinion is dictated by race; to cross the street without hearing nearby cars lock their doors; to talk about what college you go to without feeling like affirmative action is some sort of elephant in the room.

These privileges shouldn’t be taken out of anybody’s proverbial backpack. They simply shouldn’t be privileges. After all, what White Privilege Lady referred to as privileges are not the kind of thing you can just transfer from one person to another like tax dollars, charity, or literature. They are the fundamental liberties that people from all backgrounds and political points of view should possess. It is the responsibility of every American, especially those with privilege, to actively work to make these privileges universal rights.

While many people of color are forced to grapple with double consciousness—a constant awareness of how one is viewed by outsiders based on her race, in addition to how she views herself—I have the privilege of living an unconscious existence when it comes to race. And without actively pursuing equality, I would never have to think about it.

There needs to be a paradigm shift that forces white (not to mention straight, cis, male, wealthy, and able-bodied) Americans to acknowledge their privilege and then work towards making it omnipresent—to see what’s in their backpack, and then work tirelessly to ensure it’s in everyone else’s.

These privileges should be rights as basic to Americans as the first ten amendments of the Constitution.

If we view them as such, we will work towards a future in which privilege becomes the universal standard for all people—a future in which teachers feel the need to carry only one backpack as they awkwardly waddle into middle school diversity conferences faced with an audience of spoiled, pompomed, and privileged seventh graders.

 

Sam H. Koppelman ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Hollis Hall.