On the Fourth of July, BuzzFeedYellow posted this video: "What is Privilege?". It shows a video of ten people participating in a privilege awareness exercise, where everyone starts out in a single line, and then each steps forward or back one step at a time, based on how each person identified with 35 conditions of privilege.
As expected, the white straight males ended up near the front. And that sheer predictability is one of the biggest flaws in this exercise, as pointed out by Christina Torres in this article: Why the Privilege Line is a frustratingly unfinished exercise
Quote:
Over on![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jesse_the_k's journal, there's a discussion about how this exercise barely even acknowledges Disability as a culturally oppressed class -- of the 35 statements on privilege, there's only one that even acknowledges that physical or mental disability exists (#4), so if you have such a disability, you get "docked" one privilege point -- the same is true for both of the other versions Christina Torres linked to in her article. This, in itself, is a sign of how little awareness of ableist privilege there is in our society. Because if that box does get a check in your life, then a whole cascade of privileges slip out out of your reach, and there is zero acknowledgement of that.
So I'm including the "original" 35 questions behind a cut, below. And then, I'm going to try and come up with my own list, that a) has more specific acknowledgement of able-bodied/sound-mind privilege, b) includes some empowerment statements such as Torres suggested, and c) is roughly the same length of the original list. That means some questions will end up being dropped, which I acknowledge is problematic.
( The original 35 *Privilege Walk* questions )
( My Version )
So -- how'd I do?
As expected, the white straight males ended up near the front. And that sheer predictability is one of the biggest flaws in this exercise, as pointed out by Christina Torres in this article: Why the Privilege Line is a frustratingly unfinished exercise
Quote:
PoC often end up as props to help White people see how privileged they are.
Which… I get. I get often needs to be done. WP need to see, somehow, the privilege they live in, and if this does it, then that might be a start.
[snip]
When I do this exercise from now on, I want to start doing the line again, but with a different version of the questions. Something that centers on and calls out the unique ways PoC have their own forms of power, questions that uplift communities and also pushes PoC to question their own experiences with each other.
Over on
jesse_the_k's journal, there's a discussion about how this exercise barely even acknowledges Disability as a culturally oppressed class -- of the 35 statements on privilege, there's only one that even acknowledges that physical or mental disability exists (#4), so if you have such a disability, you get "docked" one privilege point -- the same is true for both of the other versions Christina Torres linked to in her article. This, in itself, is a sign of how little awareness of ableist privilege there is in our society. Because if that box does get a check in your life, then a whole cascade of privileges slip out out of your reach, and there is zero acknowledgement of that.So I'm including the "original" 35 questions behind a cut, below. And then, I'm going to try and come up with my own list, that a) has more specific acknowledgement of able-bodied/sound-mind privilege, b) includes some empowerment statements such as Torres suggested, and c) is roughly the same length of the original list. That means some questions will end up being dropped, which I acknowledge is problematic.
( The original 35 *Privilege Walk* questions )
( My Version )
So -- how'd I do?
