What the term means
From my understanding, the term ‘white male privilege’ originally referred to a set of societal values and laws that, according to those who use the term, enable white men to face significantly fewer challenges than women and minorities do when it comes to being accepted and successful.
It says that in general, white men aren’t actively discriminated against, brutalized, and oppressed in the ways women and minorities often are. On average they make more money, have better health care, have more doors of opportunity open to them, and live better lives. This makes sense at first glance, but the concept feels problematic to me.
Maybe it’s because the label is now applied more indiscriminately to people instead of to societal structures, and people are complex and individual, so painting any one group with one brush is reductive. I also think that many discrepancies attributed to race are much more the result of class differences, of income and wealth. Does a wealthy Black person face racial challenges to the same degree that a poor one does? Does a woman born into wealth experience the same struggles attributed to gender as a poor woman? These days, money is the great lubricator and opener of doors, more so than race or gender in my opinion.
I’ll put it this way: white male privilege does exist as a paradigm to the extent that it exists in the consciousness of many people, and I do believe racism and sexism are evident in some unjust laws, customs, and social norms.
AND
It is my contention that the idea of white male privilege is part and parcel of an overarching system that keeps us divided and fighting amongst ourselves. That system produces very real disadvantages for men and women, minorities and whites alike, disadvantages that are often unseen and insidious.
So are these institutions of privilege actually a benefit? Are they even about race, or more about class? And is the very idea of privilege, perhaps, part of a deeper sickness that screws everyone up?
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My own path
My path of healing eventually led me out of 20 years in the woods and into the world. Out of the belief that society and money were evil, and into being a successful trauma therapist, living and thriving in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
I’m a white male, and I still had to build my success from the ground up. At every step I had to struggle with and overcome the trauma that had been holding me back. Yes, the supposed privileges of society were there all along: clean water, good clothes, friends, quality schools, a safe suburb, a college education. But they didn’t protect me in the ways that mattered most. Those privileges may well have stopped certain kinds of bad things from happening to me, but different, more invisible bad things did happen, and I emerged from my childhood with complex PTSD anyway.
And while we’re at it: does it really make sense to define clean air and water, healthy food, sufficient clothing and shelter, safe streets and schools, and freedom from oppression and hatred as privileges? Are these not basic human rights? Rather than labeling someone privileged because they have access to basic human rights, might it be more constructive to focus on why so many people do NOT have access to these essentials?
Through my inner work and my work with clients, I’ve come to see everything through the lens of the nervous system and stress physiology rather than through the lens of politics, religion, race, or culture. From that vantage point, I’ve concluded that the concept of white male privilege is simply not helpful, and in a nutshell this is why:
Everybody is wounded in one way or another. And everyone is blessed in one way or another.
At the root, the fundamental sickness of western industrialized society is the overwhelming presence of early developmental trauma, which occurs in a culture that lives predominantly in survival mode. In my view, that system is perpetuated not by ‘white people’ but by the wealthiest 1%, who come from many races and include both genders. We live in an inverted economic system, where those at the top of the pyramid, who do the least labor, reap the wealth of those below them who do the most. This system keeps us living in survival mode, which affects us all at the level of the nervous system, where the roots of trauma live. And our nervous systems are all the same colour and gender.
There is a spectrum, to be sure. Everyone suffers in different ways, and acknowledging suffering is important. But ranking suffering, deciding that one kind matters more than another based on someone’s gender or race, doesn’t help anyone or create positive change.
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Lessons from the barrio
Last year I went to the Philippines and spent time with my wife’s family in the barrio outside of Manila. It was a real eye-opener. Everyone should see second- and third-world communities firsthand if they can. But the perspective I came away with wasn’t what you might think.
The people I lived among for those few days seemed rich in internal resilience and human connection, in ways that ultimately matter more than money. Richer, in those ways, than many of the affluent people I’ve known back home.
The children roamed in packs and engaged me with open curiosity and genuine smiles. They got vast pleasure from sticking a plastic water bottle between their bike wheel and frame so it sounded like a motorcycle, or from running up and jumping down a big pile of dirt. Simple pleasures. Open, curious engagement and joy.
I don’t think I heard a baby cry once the whole time I was there. I suspect part of the reason is something we often lack: the mothers and caregivers were constantly attuned to their children, always in contact and connection, especially in the early years.
This matters enormously. Whoever the primary caregiver is, and it is still usually the mother, helps shape how a child’s nervous system develops. The circuits for social engagement, which also support empathy and higher cognitive function, are shaped through attunement with the caregiver’s own nervous system. Mothers in particular carry enormous influence: through their health and chemistry during pregnancy, and through how they relate to their babies in the first few years.
Babies do best when their caregivers are healthy, relaxed, and not running in survival mode. That way of being is not well supported by a system that offers little or no maternity leave and keeps its citizens in go-go-go mode just to get by.
The children I met in that barrio clearly had internal resources and confidence built from attunement, attachment, and community connection. They may have had empty pockets, but their hearts were full. They were athletic, healthy, and engaged, with a groundedness I see far less often in kids who grow up glued to screens.
I know that not all poor communities are like this. Many have little going on other than misery, lack, and deeply embedded systemic trauma with no easy way out. Some places, some situations, are just awful, period. Nothing romantic or redemptive about it.
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The hidden costs of affluence
Believe it or not, some of the most miserable places I’ve experienced were the affluent suburbs I lived in and passed through during my childhood. They felt emotionally and psychically poisonous despite the abundance of clean running water, food, clothing, shelter, and comfort. It’s a different kind of toxicity, and it’s definitely less urgent than hunger or violence, but it’s there. And because it is embraced without question as the norm, it is more insidious.
I believe the poison at the heart of it is the idolization of consumerism: the idea that the goal of life is to accumulate as much wealth and stuff as possible.
We call people privileged because they generally have an easier time accumulating wealth and stuff, can afford to manage their symptoms with better health care, eat better food, and don’t have to worry as much about being assaulted or discriminated against along the way. Those are real advantages. But comfort for the body doesn’t guarantee anything good for the psyche or soul. Affluence can enable a life devoid of purpose, meaning, or deep connection, often without the person ever realizing it, because there are plenty of diversions. In my practice I’ve worked with people who had every material advantage and still felt profoundly empty. You can be privileged enough to live a long, empty life and then die.
It’s worth questioning other assumptions too. We tend to picture poor communities as dens of crime and drugs, yet plenty of predation happens on Wall Street, and some of the biggest criminals on the planet sit among the ultra-wealthy. Many communities that get written off as poor or dangerous are also full of music, connection, family, and touch, the very qualities that make us human, and the very qualities that so many people we label privileged lack.
The message modeled for us by media and entertainment for decades has been the value of stuff and money over human connection and empathy. That message harms everyone who absorbs it, whatever their colour or gender.
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Adversity, success, and labels
There’s another risk in how the privilege label gets used. When it transforms from a description of social structures into a story about individuals, it can carry a subtle implication: that women and minorities are so burdened by survival that they can’t be expected to think deeply, create, invent, or lead as easily. The sheer number of great artists, thinkers, leaders, musicians, writers, and inventors who have emerged from precisely these groups shows how wrong that perspective is.
Which brings me to a core piece of my argument: struggle and adversity can produce greatness as often as they inhibit it.
You want to meet someone with very little to offer the world? Meet someone, of any background, who has been handed everything they ever wanted without having to work for it. A life built only on accumulation, with no hardship to face and overcome, can leave a person with a bigger house and a smaller heart, a fuller wallet and an emptier soul. That emptiness makes people sick, in body and in spirit, in a way that is profoundly disadvantageous in the long run.
From what I’ve seen, everybody suffers, everybody hurts, and everybody has challenges to overcome if they want to be their best self. The nature of those challenges varies greatly, and some are more visible than others.
Taking a whole group of people and labeling them ‘privileged’ or ‘oppressed’ divides us and creates difference rather than connection. It ignores the complexity of the individual. It can blind us to the sickness and emptiness that often fester, unseen, in the nervous systems and psyches of people who appear to have it all. And it can obscure the fact that money and class are major dividing lines too.
I’d like to share a quote from a powerful TED talk I watched recently, “Our Story of Rape and Reconciliation,” co-presented by a rape survivor and the man who assaulted her. This is from the woman, Thordis Elva:
“Labels are a way to organize concepts but they can also be dehumanizing in their connotations. Once someone has been deemed a victim it’s that much easier to file them away as damaged, dishonored, less than. And likewise, once someone has been branded a rapist, it’s that much easier to call them a monster, inhuman. But how can we recognize that it is ultimately human society that creates this violence if we refuse to recognize as human those that commit it? And how can we empower survivors if we are making them feel ‘less than’? How can we discuss solutions to one of the biggest threats to the lives of women and children around the world if the very words we use are part of the problem?”
Indeed.
Shortly after this, Thordis said that because of her privilege she was able to get the care she needed to heal her trauma. But again: should access to health and healing be seen as a privilege, or as a basic human right?
The man, Tom Stranger, went on to say that he raped her because of his unquestioning acceptance of one of the worst norms associated with male privilege: that it was a man’s place to take what he wanted from a woman, and her place to give it. If you watch the talk, which you can find here, you’ll see that both Thordis’s and Tom’s suffering grew out of how that toxic idea plays out in our consciousness, and therefore in our social institutions.
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The real dividing line
Harmful norms are real, and they should be named and dismantled. But indiscriminately labeling everyone who supposedly benefits from them as “privileged,” even when they never gained any real benefit, and even when that position has actually damaged them, is dehumanizing, oversimplified, and uncompassionate. It becomes part of the bigger problem. So does indiscriminately labeling women and people of colour as underprivileged or victims.
Keeping people focused on division, whether by race, gender, religion, or anything else, is a way to keep us from seeing the real criminals in the room.
In my bones I know that the true meaning of success is to live a healthy, vibrant life full of empathy, purpose, connection, and service to others. That is something all of humanity has to overcome its inner and outer disadvantages to achieve, whatever those challenges may be.