Privilege

Privilege.

Writer Roxane Gay defines it as "the right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor...Privilege is relative and contextual. Few people [in this country] have no privilege at all." (From her essay "Peculiar Benefits, in her book Bad Feminist (2014).) Daniel J. Beal defines it as "a group of unearned cultural, legal, social, and institutional rights extended to a group based on their social group membership. Individuals with privilege are considered to be the normative group, leaving those without access to this privilege invisible, unnatural, deviant, or just plain wrong." (Beal, "Conflict and Cooperation in Diverse Workgroups," 2009.)

I work in a court and see privilege played out in many different ways. I have presented workshops on implicit bias, the kissing cousin of privilege, several times (and will be doing so at a state conference with a co-facilitator in March). That being said, I am like many privileged people in that I swallow hard when I am in a group and someone makes a statement smacking of privilege. While I know I should speak up, I too often don't speak up because I am too uncomfortable and don't want to rock the boat.

So I was both stunned and pleased when I rocked the boat at a recent training session.

The training session was on domestic violence and mediation: how to screen for it, how to address it, what precautions a mediator may need to take if the dynamics of the mediation take a turn for the worse. The facilitator, a well-known and experienced mediator in Columbus, was talking about items in a mediation room that could be turned into weapons, such as metal travel mugs. She related the story from many years ago when she had a young mother with an infant and a worker from Children's Services in the room. The agency worker went to take the child from the mother. The mother was not aware this was happening at the mediation (nor was the mediator). In response, the mother picked up a chair and threw it at the agency worker. Our facilitator assured us the chair did not hit anyone (including the infant) but that she was always careful after that as to what was in the room. She also related that, many years later, she still felt she had failed at that mediation by not making it a safe space for anyone, including the mother.

A few minutes later, an attendee, a woman attorney, spoke up and said the mediator should not consider it a failure. Perhaps she had saved the child from a terrible life. And if nothing else, "the mother showed her true colors in the mediation," said the attendee.

We were all quiet for a moment. I was uncomfortable. But instead of swallowing my discomfort as I so often do, I spoke up.

"I don't think the mother showed her 'true colors' at all," I said. "I'm not sure I would be calm and in control if Children's Services suddenly took my child during a meeting and I wasn't expecting it. Losing control wouldn't make me a bad parent." 

All of us in the room were white, well educated (all but one of us were attorneys), and not struggling with dire poverty. To my knowledge, none of us had had any children removed by an agency. Those are all privileges that the long ago mother may not have had, or may have had some but not all of them.

Privilege is everywhere. It is not inherently evil, just as implicit biases are not inherently evil. But when it raised its head in that training, I'm grateful I found the resolve to say something.

A statement I keep in my office is "speak the truth, even if your voice shakes." I'm learning.