Focus on the Blind Spots

For many people with some form of privilege, being confronted about that privilege is a problem.

It is generally a problem for most people with any type of societal insulation to be made aware of their relative comfort, but it is even harder for people with lesser levels of privilege to accept that even the little they possess is better than nothing. They believe, mistakenly so, that privilege has to be absolute, it has to be generational, it has to be a farm stretching to all corners of the compass before it can even recognised as something in need of addressing.

It really isn’t. Casting privilege as some leviathan only a few can harness or ride creates handy blind spots in which possessors of lesser privilege can hide.

And while the leviathan that is generational privilege is the white whale our generation is called upon to kill, there are smaller catches along the way that need to be dealt with, too.

Yes, we must get Moby Dick, but we also have to fish these waters for lesser evils.

Talking to the possessors of lesser privilege – by the way, that sounds like some short story waiting to snatch the Caine Prize: The Possessors of Lesser Privilege (dibs!) – sets up a strange and uncomfortable confrontation in which the person being questioned about a specific behaviour or action, or their safe distance from an issue, is shown to be unable to see their privilege for what it actually is: Something, no matter how small, that drastically dilutes the effects of a poisonous situation, whatever that might be.

The most common responses such people give is this: “I just don’t see it, hey.”

Usually they precede it with the following: “I see/hear where you’re coming from, but…”

“Yes, I know it’s hard for women to secure managerial positions, but… I just don’t see it, hey.”

“I know in the past it was like this, but… I just don’t see it, hey.”

There is a hell of a lot of looking but very little seeing.

It’s the strangest thing. Such people can hear the merit in someone’s logic, they can do the maths, but they still do not see the problem right in front of them. Worse, they do not see their role in it.

That is what we call a blind spot.

Everyone has one. No, not a blind side that will conveniently be saved by Sandra Bullock adopting you and turning you into a Baltimore Ravens first round draft pick. I am talking about a blind spot, that thing right in front of you that you cannot see, or are not willing to see.

When you look properly, when you let go of the fear of judgment, or acknowledge that you are a possessor of lesser privilege, you realise that you cannot see the issue because you are a part of it.

You are the blind spot.

And focusing on, or confronting, that blind spot takes some serious courage.

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