Is Privilege a Sin or a Blessing?

On being asked—during a Privilege Workshop that was mandatory for Evergreen student employees, to share my privilege inventory—I told the presenter I didn’t find it useful to reduce life in that way. She responded: “Well, some people don’t have the choice to ignore privilege.”

— Benjamin Boyce (@BenjaminABoyce) July 16, 2019

I came across the above tweet and the picture it painted sounded vaguely familiar to me, but something was off.

My wife comes from a conservative Catholic family in a different geographic region from where I grew up and currently live. They practice certain traditions, among them: nightly prayer thanking God for our blessings, a Thanksgiving dinner where each member of the extended family at the table shares what they are grateful for, and ritualistic confession of sins with a priest.

But in the Catholic faith, confession isn't just a private thing. There is also the Confiteor, a confessional prayer recited during weekly Mass.

"I confess to almighty God

and to you, my brothers and sisters,

that I have greatly sinned,

in my thoughts and in my words,

in what I have done and in what I have failed to do..."

It's an incredibly trite take to declare social justice a religion, but I think it's helpful to analyze what old traditions get right.

In the Evergreen workshop, privilege isn't treated as gratitude, something to be thankful for, but as a sin. Participants are (perhaps unintentionally) meant to feel shame for being white, male, straight, or whatever else might place them on the top of the intersectionality matrix.

In Catholicism, congregants are thankful for blessings and acknowledge their mistakes, all while working to be a better person.

In the privilege workshop, there is no distinction; the blessings and sins are treated as the same thing: privilege. It makes no room for participants to feel gratitude, only shame.

I wonder what would happen if these workshops asked people to be thankful for their privilege instead? It might come across as less threatening and more constructive.

I guess the better question is what is the goal of these workshops? Is it to drag down the "privileged" or to make us all better people?

I am reminded of a Chloe Valdary criticism that I often think about.

I’ve had several conversations today about how, by and large, the intersectional response to the threat of white nationalism will fail because it lacks a prophetic vision about human beings and political movements with no transcendent vision often eat each other alive.

— Chloé S. Valdary 📚 (@cvaldary) May 14, 2019

What is the prophetic vision of the privilege workshop? I would find it more interesting if they started with the end goal and work backwards from there.

It also bothers me that I have the freedom to opt out of a religion I disagree with (which I have) but those in academia do not have the option to opt out of the critical theory being taught in these workshops.