Insight from a Psychotherapist: Extra Credit
Don’t call it privilege.
If you’re addicted to opiates or unemployed, or both; if you live in a town that looks like a zombie wasteland, it doesn’t feel like privilege. It feels like shit.
When a guy with an earnest look on his face tells you the liberal elite are inserting ‘White Privilege’ into your life and that you are responsible for slavery because of your privilege. Hell yeah, that’s going to be offensive.
So how about we just call it ‘Extra Credit.’ Just for being white, for example, in the United States specifically, you have advantages that are hard to see unless you don’t receive said benefits. For example, if you don’t usually get suspected of crime, or pulled over by the police, let off of speeding tickets, and generally have more leverage with the law, its hard to understand that isn’t the way it is for everyone. Therefore, the people getting into trouble are probably doing something pretty bad. But they’re probably not. Racism and inequity are real.
What is privilege if not the humility it takes to understand how lucky you are to be able bodied and not responsible for navigating every inch of your space between two points? What a blessing to get taken seriously when you raise a counterpoint in a meeting. How fortunate that you have access to safer delivery of your child, as well as adoption, and Airbnbs. You can pay for IVF when children of color sit in residential care for years waiting on foster or forever homes, because you earn more money. How bloody privileged is that!?
As an excellent speaker at a conference I attended over the weekend said…“If you don’t recognize (the lack of inequity and racism in our society) at this point — -you don’t want to know.” — Dr. Tammy Lewis Wilborn, PhD, LPC-S
As a psychotherapist, I am duty bound to uphold this sacred responsibility: to understand (this concept) and to acknowledge my own biases. This is one of many reasons I chose and continue to respect my career and colleagues.
Every human patient we treat, every human we meet, wherever they are in this process, is encouraged to do the same.
