Privilege – Foreign Policy Youth Collaborative

The word ‘’privilege” has been at the forefront of our minds for the past year and half. Whether the topic is COVID-19, climate change, or racial injustice, privilege has always had a seat at the table. Although the word “privilege” is defined as “a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor”, I believe no one truly knows how to quantify privilege. Privilege has dictated the way our world works from the very beginning, deciding who gets what, who gets to be king, and who gets to starve on the street. In the words of Aravind Adiga, “99.9% of people are stuck in a “chicken coop” of sorts, sitting in entrapment with no fight left, accepting servanthood, making sure the age-old machine keeps chugging along, because why fix something that doesn’t look broken on the outside?”

Unfortunately, just because something seems to be working on the outside, with all of its shine and prospective glory, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t devastating kinks that need to be fixed. Today’s youth have been grappling with this concept of privilege for a long time. In the United States, where the kinks in this privilege machine are swept under the rug, the general consensus is that privilege is granted to those people in power. These people in question? Cisgendered, heterosexual, neurotypical, considerably wealthy, white men. Since the formation of the States, these people have asserted their control, being represented in media, remaining the sole benefactor of the privilege machine. According to Business Insider, even after over half a century of the Equal Pay Act’s tenure, “American women still face a substantial gender wage gap” that is said to continue until 2059. Another sadt, yet unsurprising fact, is that race also acts as a deciding factor in the wage gap. Black and Hispanic women face the most pay discrimination, with Black women earning 61% of a white mans dollar, and Hispanic women earning 53% of that same baseline. The discussion surrounding systemic housing issues in America is another example of how cisgendered, heterosexual, neurotypical, considerably wealthy, white men have the power to abuse their priviledge in American society, as homeownership and high-quality affordable rental housing are critical tools for wealth building and financial well-being in the United States, according to American Progess. The shocking reality is that it takes a Black family 200 years to acquire the same amount of wealth as its white neighbors. Through displacement, such as in the early 1850s, New York City lawmakers used eminent domain to destroy a thriving predominantly Black community in Manhattan; this led to gentrification, and the inherent racial divide surrounding gentrification.

Even though inequities such as the Wage Gap, and gentrification, have been woven into the fabric of American society for decades, the discussion has only recently started picking up steam with the youth of today. By actually talking about privilege, and giving a platform to voices that have not been heard in the past, the latest generation has gotten significantly more involved. It’s an unfortunate reality that the discussion surrounding privilege has not been more widespread up until late. Especially in a world where, currently, Western countries dominate, the privilege discussion should be more of a commonplace in countries without that same access.

India is one such country. India has been classified as a third-world country or “developing” country since the Cold War Era. This classification is the result of years of the British imperialist government depleting India of its bountiful resources, and manipulating old systems of power to their benefit. One such system is the caste system. The caste system, according to the BBC, “divides Hindus, [people of the majority religion], into rigid hierarchical groups based on their karma (work) and dharma (the Hindi word for religion, but here it means duty). It is generally accepted to be more than 3,000 years old.”. There are four main categories to this system, the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras. At the top of the hierarchy are the Brahmins, who traditionally served as teachers and resided in temples, followed by the Kshatriyas, the ruling class, Vaishyas, artisans, and Shudras, manual laborers. The outsiders of this system are the Dalit caste. Although this caste system was a preexisting institution, having influenced everything in society from marriage to living area, the British infected this system. According to the BBC, “hard boundaries were set by British colonial rulers who made the caste system India’s defining social feature when they used censuses to simplify the system, primarily to create a single society with a common law that could be easily governed;” they did this by oversimplifying and elevating certain texts that classified people into these four categories. The system that was the result of this ignorant over-simplification made previous social mobility in pre-colonial India a distant figment of the past. Although discrimination based on caste is now illegal, caste discrimination is still very real. It has been embedded in Indian society that Brahmins are on the top and Dalits are on the bottom of the social ladder.

This caste discrimination is disturbingly visible during the COVID-19 crisis in India, where, according to CNN, the coronavirus is only intensifying the caste discrimination in India. In April 2020, people in the hilltop villages in Vigayawada, Andhra Pradesh, a predominantly Yanadi (drain cleaners) community, were barred from going down the hill to purchase essential goods such as food and water. Even though there are resources available in the area, such as a milk factory, “there is not a drop of milk for [the] children to drink.” The people from this community are called “dirty,” and are said to spread Covid by “upper-caste” people. Although jobs that the Dalit and Scheduled Tribe communities are classified as essential services, many people from these communities say that they haven’t been given proper safety equipment for COVID-19, and there is even less economic protection if they do happen to fall sick, putting these communities at a debilitating risk for increased poverty and illness. With little to no access to bank accounts, there is rarely any money influx to families in these communities. Finally, because of the location in which people from these communities live, access to adequate healthcare is almost impossible.

Although there is legislation to protect “lower-caste” people, “upper-caste” people continue to find avenues to silence these voices, keeping the privilege machine churning in plain sight. Privilege has been an integral part of a large portion of societies, and although the privilege discussion has been happening in Western countries, the places that desperately need the systems called out and rectified are still falling prey to this age-old system, keeping the 99% of people in the “chicken coop” of modern society locked in with no key to freedom.

Sources: