The Invisibility of Privilege

If you don’t have to think about it, it’s a privilege.

Cisgender people don’t have to think about our gender in the way that gender nonconforming people do. And however complex or even “queer” our gender identities may be, we don’t face the exclusion, violence, and everyday challenges that those who don’t conform to their gender assigned at birth experience. This is an enormous advantage that most of us take for granted.

Whiteness means not having to think about racism and anti-blackness.* When I hear White people deny their privilege because they "didn’t grow up with advantages" or because they "don't believe in white privilege," I point out that white privilege is a historical reality. The concept of white as a racial identity was specifically invented to give greater social power to certain people and subjugate, dehumanize, and exclude others. In ways large and small, obvious and subtle, whiteness is systemically privileged but also obscured as racism, since it is universalized as neutral, normal, and “objective.”

I’m not denying the intersectionality of cisgender or White people’s identities. White cis men and women are not a monolith, and neither are trans, nonbinary, Black, Latine, Asian, and Indigenous people. White non-trans folks don’t have the same privilege, but we still benefit from the unearned advantages of whiteness and cisnormativity.

There are many different types of privilege that impact the complex ways we move through the world. This means that people can be privileged in some ways and not privileged in others. But this doesn’t make privilege—or its unequal and discriminatory effects—any less real.

🎯We must be vigilant in checking our privilege precisely because it is often invisible to those of us who possess it.

Image Credit: Nextdoor. Image description: Illustration of an invisible backpack surrounded by personal items such as a wallet, watch, phone. The image accompanies Peggy MacIntosh’s classic essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” which you can read here: https://www.nationalseedproject.org/key-seed-texts/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack
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* Thank you to Naomi Raquel Enright for helping me to distinguish between race and racism here. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, “race is the child of racism, not the father.”