YOU attended an elite legacy school – the kind your grandfather and father went to, and your kids someday would. Consequently, your peers are the offspring of notable bureaucrats, industrialists, politicians and landlords. An expensive private education paves your way to a prestigious university, where its professors use the abundant resources at their disposal to shape you into an analytical thinker. By the time you graduate, you have morphed into a self-starting individual capable of abstract thought, not to mention developed a strong network of influential compatriots — your brothers in arms, if you will.

As you ready yourself to enter practical life, you realise that looking for a job is a grind meant for ordinary folk, not you. You can simply show up at the helm of your father’s business empire and pick up where he left off. If not, your father does not have any qualms calling a few people to put a good word in. Owing to your qualifications — and the right references — you become a middle manager in a top corporate enterprise, essentially shortening your climb up the executive ladder by at least a decade.

By the time you turn 40, you have accumulated enough wealth to consider an early retirement, and rubbed shoulders with enough important people to ensure the wind remains in the sails of your future generations as well. While you revel in your many achievements, somewhere along the lines you are asked the secret to your success; to which you hubristically respond: “Nothing was ever handed to me on a platter. I just worked hard.”

Is success really built on personal achievements alone?

This story of unacknowledged privilege is all too familiar to us who cringe each time a friend or family member fails to acknowledge the exclusive, socially conferred advantages that have helped propelled the trajectory of their career/life upwards.

Privilege is significantly arduous to discuss or reflect on. While one is bound to think of privilege as a simple matter of class division where the rich have access to more open doors or shorter routes as compared to those hailing from working-class families, the dynamics of privilege are in fact all-encompassing, running deep into matters pertaining to gender, race, religious identity, sexual orientation, and both physical and mental health.

To give it context, think of privilege as the inverse of oppression. For one, it is often easier to quantify the oppression an individual is bound to experience than privileges, since maltreatment is more likely to register emotionally than fair treatment. This makes comprehending the magnitudes of oppression simpler: are you poor? Are you a person of colour? Are you a woman? Does your sexual orientation fall under the LGBTQ umbrella? Do you have a physical or mental disability?

All the aforementioned circumstances don’t just cause people to become disenfranchised within their respective social groups — it also increases their odds of being alienated by society at large. But what about people that society does not exclude, in fact empowers at our expense? This radical paradigm shift — the opposite of oppression — is privilege.

This essentially means that some of us have distinct advantages for any number of reasons that we don’t control — like who we are, the colour of our skin, where we hail from, what kind of financial and moral support we had while growing up, what religion we practise, or certain specific things that may have completely changed the trajectory of our lives for the better, with each little difference sneaking by unnoticed.

With time, all these subtle differences begin to add up, to a point that people — who usually fall among the privileged — begin to feel that they always deserved to be on top and that they all did it all by themselves, while the rest of us just begin to recognise and settle into our place in society.

Understandably, this notion can make quite a few among us defensive or upset, especially if we feel the value of our hard work is being diminished. But to be able to truly dismantle privilege, it is first vital to acknowledge it as a systemic structure that grants an unearned advantage to some merely on the basis of their identity — an invisible package of special provisions, if you will — strengthened by denial. After all, who would want to admit that they had better boots afforded to them by their rich father that helped them gain a few extra paces in the climb to success?

If somehow you’ve managed to acknowledge the inherent leg-up you’ve had on the competition by virtue of where you were born or what you look like, so much so that you’re no longer complicit in it, you would then become accountable.

You’d be compelled to evaluate the reasons for your success. By accepting your privilege, you’re essentially eliminating the egotistical belief that you made it to the top all on your own. For some, this is a notion that is hard to let go of.

The writer is a researcher.
Twitter: @fahadamalik

Published in Dawn, February 3rd, 2019