Privilege Journal

Owning and Taking Responsibility for Privilege as a Community.
 

At the privilege discussion yesterday, one of the proposals for continuing to keep issues of privilege in conversation was for all of us to keep a Privilege Journal, and that we would share it at a meeting, perhaps the book club. “The Great White Elephant: A Workbook on Racial Privilege for White Anti-Racists” has a suggested method for journaling about privilege:

“One of the ways to increase your ability to see and understand white privilege is to observe its effects in other people. Over the course of a day, try to observe ways in which you see the effects of white privilege playing out around you. In a quiet moment at the end of the day, write about how you felt while you were making your observations. If you had a difficulty seeing white privilege playing out around you, write about how the effects of privilege might be influencing your ability to see privilege clearly.”

This workbook focuses on racial privilege, but the proposal was for any form of privilege you experience; and possibly any that you see around you, even if you don’t share that privilege.

Here are some of the reflection questions the workbook suggests:
How am I benefiting from privilege?
How do I make myself comfortable with privilege?
How do I ignore privilege?
What am I doing today to address my privilege?
How Do I fool myself into thinking I am powerless?
How does society reinforce my taking myself off the hook?
What education do I need about privilege and its absence?
How do I define my moral obligation?
What are my detours?

Here are some of the action steps they suggest:
Develop the habit of entering situations with knowledge that others do not have privilege.
Notice differences in treatment.
Bring up privilege with others and learn to clearly articulate the experience.
Ask people of color about their experience and be willing to accept their experiences as true, real, and accurate.
Be willing to teach others and hold them accountable.
Practice humility around privilege.
Talk about privilege and its effects even in “uncomfortable” situations.

Those were the highlights! Let’s talk about the PJ’s at the meeting tonight.

 
 

The “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” article is on the attachments part on the right side. and here is a link to the Heterosexual questionairre:
queersunited.blogspot.com/2008/04/heter...

FYI
 
 

Damn, thanks so much for this thorough write-up.

Looking forward to discussing these soon.

 
 

We should talk about how we want to go about discussing these. For instance, are we all going to get together in a large group and throw out subject matter from the journals? Something tells me that people would be as comfortable participating in format as they were the privilege discussion. Maybe we break into smaller groups? One on one?

What do you guys think?

 
   

Is the plan to still have these at the book club meetings? If so, I think the group that meets is small enough to just do a group discussion. But if we move it to the org meetings or something else, we should consider the small group thing. Perhaps we could at least try breaking up into the small groups, and doing the choose a spokesperson thing to bring to the larger group? Maybe we could do them at the org meetings once a month if we are worried about time, and then the rest of the time do them at the book clubs?