by Roxane Gay
We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly everyone. Of course we resent these accuastions. Look at white men when they are accused of having privilege. They tend to be immediately defensive (and, at times, understandably so). They say, “It’s not my fault I am a white man,” or “I’m [insert other condition that discounts their privilege],” instead of simply accepting that, in this regard, yes, they benefit from certain privileges others do not. To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.
You don’t necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don’t have to apologize for it. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about. They might endure situations you can never know anything about. You could, however, use that privilege for the greater good—to try to level the playing field for everyone, to work for social justice, to bring attention to how those without certain privileges are disenfranchised. We’ve seen what the hoarding of privilege has done, and the results are shameful.
When we talk about privilege, some people start to play a very pointless and dangerous game where they try to mix and match various demographic characteristics to determine who wins at the Game of Privilege. Who would win in a privilege battle between a wealthy black woman and a wealthy white man? Who would win a privilege battle between a queer white man and a queer Asian woman? Who would win in a privilege battle between a working-class white man and a wealthy, differently abled Mexican woman? We could play this game all day and never find a winner. Playing the Game of Privilege is mental masturbation—it only feels good to those playing the game.
Too many people have become self-appointed privilege police, patrolling the halls of discourse, ready to remind people of their privilege whether those people have denied that privilege or not. In online discourse, in particular, the specter of privilege is always looming darkly. When someone writes from experience, there is often someone else, at the ready, pointing a trembling finger, accusing that writer of having various kinds of privilege. How dare someone speak to a personal experience without accounting for every possible configuration of privilege or the lack thereof? We would live in a world of silence if the only people who were allowed to write or speak from experience or about difference were those absolutely without privilege.
When people wield accusations of privilege, more often than not, they want to be heard and seen. Their need is acute, if not desperate, and that need rises out of the many historical and ongoing attempts to silence and render invisible marginalized groups. Must we satisfy our need to be heard and seen by preventing anyone else from being heard and seen? Does privilege automatically negate any merits of what a privilege holder has to say? Do we ignore everything, for example, that white men have to say?
We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation. We need to be able to argue beyond the threat of privilege. We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics because we’ll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking through difference. We should be able to say, “This is my truth,” and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist. Because at some point, doesn’t privilege become beside the point?
Privilege is relative and contextual. Few people in the developed world, and particularly in the United States, have no privilege at all. Among those of us who participate in intellectual communities, privilege runs rampant. We have disposable time and the ability to access the Internet regularly. We have the freedom to express our opinions without the threat of retaliation. We have smartphones and iProducts and desktops and laptops. If you are reading this essay, you have some kind of privilege. It may be hard to hear that, I know, but if you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do; get started.
Typical First Year Professor
I go to school for a very long time and get some degrees and finally move to a very small town in the middle of a cornfield. I leave someone behind. I tell myself I have worked so hard I can’t choose a man over a career. I want to choose the man over the career. I rent an apartment, the nicest place I’ve ever lived as an adult. I have a guest bathroom. I don’t save lives, but I try not to ruin them.
This is the dream, everyone says—a good job, tenure track. I have an office I don’t have to share with two or four people. My name is on the engraved panel just outside my door. My name is spelled correctly. I have my own printer. The luxury of this cannot be overstated. I randomly print out a document; I sigh happily as the printer spits it out, warm. I have a phone with an extension, and when people call the number they are often looking for me. There are a lot of shelves, but I like my books at home. In every movie I’ve ever seen about professors, there are books. I quickly unpack three boxes, detritus I accumulated in graduate school—sad drawer trash, books I’ll rarely open again—but I’m a professor now. I must have books on display in my office. It is an unspoken rule.
I put a dry-erase board on my door. Old habits die hard. Every few weeks I pose a new question. What’s your favorite movie? (Pretty Woman.) What’s your favorite musical? (West Side Story.) What do you want for Christmas? (Peace of mind.) Currently: What is your favorite cocktail? Best answer: “Free.”
The department’s administrative assistant gives me the rundown on important things—mailbox, office supplies, photocopy code. I forget the code weekly. She is friendly, patient, kind, but if you cross her, there will be trouble. I vow to never cross her.
There is a mind-numbing orientation that begins with a student playing acoustic guitar. A threatening sing-along vibe fills the room. The student is not a chanteur. Most of the audience cringes visibly. I hide in the very last row. For the next two days I accumulate knowledge I will never use—math all over again.
I’ll be teaching three classes, two of which I’ve not quite taught before. Turns out when you say you can do something, people believe you.
Ten minutes before my first class, I run to the bathroom and vomit. I’m afraid of public speaking, which makes teaching complicated.
When I walk into the classroom, the students stare at me like I’m in charge. They wait for me to say something. I stare back and wait for them to do something. It’s a silent power struggle. Finally, I tell them to do things and they do those things. I realize I am, in fact, in charge. We’ll be playing with Legos. For a few minutes I am awesome because I have brought toys.
Teaching three classes requires serious memorization when it comes to student names. The students tend to blur. It will take nearly three weeks for me to remember Ashley A. and Ashley M. and Matt and Matt and Mark and Mark and so on. I rely heavily on pointing. I color-code the students. You in the green shirt. You in the orange hat.
I get my first paycheck. We are paid once a month, which requires the kind of budgeting I am incapable of. Life is unpleasant after the twenty-third or so. I’ve been a graduate student for so long it’s hard to fathom that one check can have four numbers and change. Then I see how much The Man takes. Damn The Man.
Students don’t know what to make of me. I wear jeans and Converse. I have tattoos up and down my arms. I’m tall. I am not petite. I am the child of immigrants. Many of my students have never had a black teacher before. I can’t help them with that. I’m the only black professor in my department. This will probably never change for the whole of my career, no matter where I teach. I’m used to it. I wish I weren’t. There seems to be some unspoken rule about the number of a
cademic spaces people of color can occupy at the same time. I have grown weary of being the only one.
When I was a student listening to a boring professor drone endlessly, I usually thought, I will never be that teacher. One day, I am delivering a lecture and realize, in that moment, I am that teacher. I stare out at the students, most of them not taking notes, giving me that soul-crushing dead-eye stare that tells me, I wish I were anywhere but here. I think, I wish I were anywhere but here. I talk faster and faster to put us all out of our misery. I become incoherent. Their dead-eye stares haunt me for the rest of the day, then longer.
I keep in touch with my closest friend from graduate school. We both really enjoy our new jobs, but the learning curve is steep. There is no shallow end. We dance around metaphors about drowning. During long conversations we question the choice to be proper, modern women. There is so much grading. There’s a lot to be said for barefoot kitchen work when staring down a stack of research papers.
Walking down the hall, I hear a young woman saying “Dr. Gay” over and over and think, That Dr. Gay is rather rude for ignoring that poor student. I turn around to say something before I realize she is talking to me.
I worry some of my students don’t own any clothes with zippers or buttons or other methods of closure and fastening. I see a lot of words faded and stretched across asses, bra straps, pajama pants, often ill-fitting. In the winter, when there is snow and ice outside, boys come to class in basketball shorts and flip-flops. I worry about their feet, their poor little toes.
Helicopter parents e-mail me for information about their children. How is my son doing? Is my daughter attending class? I encourage them to open lines of communication with their children. I politely tell them there are laws preventing such communication without their child’s written consent. The child rarely consents.
There is nothing new in the new town, and I know no one. The town is a flat, scarred strip of land with half-abandoned strip malls. And then there is the corn, so much of it, everywhere, stretching in every direction for miles. Most of my colleagues live fifty miles away. Most of my colleagues have families. I go north to Chicago. I go east to Indianapolis. I go south to St. Louis. I take up competitive Scrabble and win the first tournament I enter. In the last round, I encounter a nemesis who gets so angry when I beat him he refuses to shake my hand and flounces out of the tournament in a huff. The sweetness of that victory lingers. The next time I see him, at another tournament, he’ll point and say, “Best two out of three. Best. Two. Out. Of. Three.” I best him in two out of three.
My own parents ask, How is my daughter doing? I offer them some version of the truth.
Sometimes, during class, I catch students staring at their cell phones beneath their desks like they’re in a cone of invisibility. It’s as funny as it is irritating. Sometimes, I cannot help but say, “I do see you.” Other times, I confiscate their electronic devices.
Sometimes, when students are doing group work, I sneak a look at my own phone like I am in a cone of invisibility. I am part of the problem.
I try to make class fun, engaging, experiential. We hold a mock debate about social issues in composition. We use Twitter to learn about crafting microcontent in new media writing. We play Jeopardy! to learn about professional reports in professional writing. College and kindergarten aren’t as different as you’d think. Every day, I wonder, How do I keep these students meaningfully engaged, educated, and entertained for fifty minutes? How do I keep them from staring at me with dead eyes? How do I make them want to learn? It’s tiring. Sometimes, I think the answer to each of these questions is I can’t.
There is a plague on grandmothers. The elder relations of my students begin passing away at an alarming rate one week. I want to warn the surviving grandmothers, somehow. I want them to live. The excuses students come up with for absences and homework amuse me in how ludicrous and improbable they are. They think I want to know. They think I need their explanations. They think I don’t know they’re lying. Sometimes I simply say, “I know you are lying. You say it best when you say nothing at all.”
I try not to be old. I try not to think, When I was your age . . . , but often, I do remember when I was their age. I enjoyed school; I loved learning and worked hard. Most of the people I went to school with did too. We partied hard, but we still showed up to class and did what we had to do. An alarming number of my students don’t seem to want to be in college. They are in school because they don’t feel they have a choice or have nothing better to do; because their parents are making them attend college; because, like most of us, they’ve surrendered to the rhetoric that to succeed in this country you need a college degree. They are not necessarily incorrect. And yet, all too often, I find myself wishing I could teach more students who actually want to be in school, who don’t resent the education being foisted upon them. I wish there were viable alternatives for students who would rather be anywhere but in a classroom. I wish, in all things, for a perfect world.
A number of students find my website. This is teaching in the digital age. They find my writing, much of which is, shall we say, explicit in nature. News travels fast. They want to talk to me about these things in the hall after class, in my office, out and about on campus. It’s awkward and flattering but mostly awkward. They also know too much about my personal life. They know about the random guy who spent the night, who helped me kill a couple bottles of wine and made me breakfast. I have to start blogging differently.
I get along with the students. They are generally bright and charming even when they are frustrating. They make me love my job both in and out of the classroom. Students show up at my office to discuss their personal problems. I try to maintain boundaries. There are breakups with long-term boyfriends and bad dates and a lecherous professor in another department and a roommate who leaves her door open while she’s getting nailed and this thing that happened at the bar on Friday and difficult decisions about whether to go to graduate school or go on the job market. Each of these situations is a crisis. I listen and try to dispense the proper advice. This is not the same advice my friends and I give to one another. What I really want to say to these students, most of them young women, is “GIRL!”
I am quite content to be in my thirties, and nothing affirms that more than being around people in their late teens and early twenties.
In grad school, we heard lurid tales of department meetings where heated words were exchanged and members of various factions almost came to blows. I was looking forward to the drama, only to learn my department meets once or twice a semester rather than every week. Instead, we meet in committees. The chairs of those committees report to the department chair. Committee meetings are not my favorite part of the job. There are politics and agendas and decades of history of which I know little and understand even less. Everyone means well, but there’s a lot of bureaucracy. I prefer common sense.
The first semester ends and I receive my evaluations. Most of the students think I did a decent job, some think I did a great job, but then there are those who didn’t. I assign too much work, they say. I expect too much. I don’t consider these faults. A student writes, “Typical first year professor.” I have no idea what that means.
Over winter break, my friend from graduate school and I have another long lamentation about choices and taking jobs in the middle of nowhere and the (relative) sacrifices academics must often make. It is tiring to constantly be told how lucky we are. Luck and loneliness, it would seem, are very compatible.
I go drinking with the guy I . . . go drinking with. To call it dating would be a stretch. We are a matter of convenience. I sip on a T&T and lament my evaluations. I want to be a good teacher, and most days, I think I am. I give a damn. I want students to like me. I am human. I am so full of want. He tells me not to worry with such authority I almost believe him. He orders me another drink and another. I hope we don’t run into any of my students because I cannot pull off professorial in my current state. That’s always my praye
r when we go out. Because of this, we often end up in the city fifty miles up the road. At the end of the night, two very short men get into a fight. Clothing is torn. We stand in the parking lot and watch. The men’s anger, the white heat of it, fascinates me. Later, after taking a cab home, I drunkenly call the man I left behind, the man who didn’t follow me. “My students hate me,” I say. He assures me they don’t. He says that would not be possible. I say, “Everything is terrible. Everything is great.” He says, “I know.”
Another semester begins, three new classes. Winter settles, ice everywhere, barren plains. There are three new sets of students, different faces but similar names. Hey you in the khaki hat. Hey you with the purple hair.
The goal, we are told, is tenure. To that end all faculty, even first-year professors, have to compile an annual portfolio. I assemble a record of one semester’s worth of work. I try to quantify my professional worth. My colleagues write letters to attest to my various accomplishments, verifying I am on such and such committee, that I participated in such and such event, that I am a valuable and contributing member of the department. I update my vita. I clip publications. I buy a neon-green three-ring binder. This is how I rage against the machine. I spend an afternoon collating and creating labels and writing about myself with equal parts humility and bravado. It’s a fine balance. Later, I tell a friend, “It was like arts and crafts for adults. I went to graduate school for this.”
I stop getting lost looking for the bathroom. The building is strange, with many hallways, some hidden, and an arcane numbering system that defies logic. When I leave my door open, students passing by will ask, “Where is Dr. So-and-So’s office?” I say, “I have no idea.”
