what to do when someone calls you a white privileged feminist

Feminist Leadership: What's Privilege Got to do With it?

In the non-profit sector, nosotros're cracking at talking well-nigh structural inequalities. Systemic disadvantages and social divisions? We've got that covered. You need a 50-minute spoken communication virtually social exclusion and its impact across geographical regions? Sure, laissez passer me the mic. Even so despite our fluency in structural analyses of ability, we remain woefully inarticulate about a very specific course of power: privilege. I'thousand referring hither to the types of rights, advantages and protections nosotros automatically receive by virtue of our membership of a ascendant grouping (east.chiliad. male, white, cisgendered, non-disabled). Our inability to turn the lens of analysis inwards to ourselves and our organisations means nosotros are unable to interrogate the office we play in perpetuating inequalities. Whenever we focus solely on bigotry, social exclusion and social inequalities, we reinforce the invisibility of privilege and are blind to the part it plays in perpetuating injustice.

Of course, to a certain extent, our short-sightedness when information technology comes to our own privilege is understandable. We are more probable to be enlightened of how we're oppressed than how we're privileged, as our experiences of marginalisation frequently play such a key function in forming our own identities. But our failure to focus upon privilege, and how nosotros may be upholding inequalities in our workplaces, is having a devastating event. Our sector has… bug. Permit'south look at the Uk, where most charities are overwhelmingly white; where sure parts of the sector — I'm looking at you, international evolution — are incredibly elite; and where our workplaces are not entirely welcoming places for LGBTQ employees.

For many non-profit organisations, privilege is still the 500 kg gorilla in the room. It's something nosotros don't speak about; we get defensive nearly; we have misconceptions most; or we are emotionally delicate about. While I have seen a handful of NGOs actively exploring concepts relating to privilege, in that location's a problem. It'southward almost every bit if speaking about it has become a substitute for actually doing anything to dismantle it. To those employees who are further away from positions of power, these discussions start to feel performative — they become an enactment of a desire to self-interrogate, rather than the get-go of a 18-carat process of change.

How your privilege impacts your ability to lead

Feminist leadership stresses the importance of really knowing our own human relationship to power — and in particular stresses that nosotros must understand how we are complicit in sustaining inequitable systems of power. If yous haven't done deep work to analyse and take action to address your ain privilege, it'south likely to affect your leadership practise in the following ways.

· You will take 'blind spots': a lack of awareness of how your behaviour or the organisational culture and systems you lot work in produce and reproduce inequalities for some and invisible benefits for others. Privilege functions to perpetuate myopia: of course well-nigh of usa don't want to run into our privilege in stark technicolour — if we do, we will have to question a system that is benefiting the states.

· You may treat everyone on your team more than or less the same — considering you assume that they're all starting from the same point and experience the workplace in similar ways. In fact, gender, class, sexuality and ethnicity and our other identity categories tin can profoundly shape the way we move through our workplaces.

· Y'all may misfile the signs of privilege with the signs of capacity — which makes yous unable to spot latent talent or to parse potential from privilege in a prospective or current employee.

· You might find some inequitable practices in your workplace, but practise non prioritise addressing them — mayhap you say they can be addressed later down the line. Once upon a fourth dimension, I asked for diversity to be included every bit a target in a leadership initiative in a non-profit system. 'Let's bargain with women first, we can become to variety subsequently on,' said my white, athletic female manager. For minoritized groups, 'later' is normally an oppressive time zone.

· You lot neglect to interrupt bias when you see it taking place and don't see that your legitimised identities mean in that location are fewer risks to you taking action to accost bias than a marginalised group. Or perhaps you experience that your contribution to ending bias is comforting an injured party, without actively challenging the person or system that caused the damage.

· You don't go out of your way to seek feedback from marginalised or underrepresented groups in your organization — or even worse, when you do, the process of feedback becomes your focus, rather than ensuring that the feedback spurs meaningful change.

· You feel uncomfortable speaking about certain topics and and then take every ways to avoid conversations about them. I recently heard that the outcome of a race bigotry investigation at a medium-sized NGO was the recommendation that employees should not speak virtually race when at work. Yes, this actually happened in 2020.

· You may focus upon the intentions of your actions rather than their affect — significant you don't fully ain upward to the harm you lot may be causing others.

Organisational civilisation is produced and reproduced by individuals. These behaviours, repeated over fourth dimension, aid to embed privilege in our organsiations in ways that can be difficult to proper noun or identify. Without any conscious decision by leaders to proactively promote them, they become normative and expected; baked into the deep cultures in our workplaces. Then how exercise we starting time to dismantle this?

Avoid shame and complacency traps

A common feature I run across, particularly amidst younger women working in not-profits, is a sense of feeling profoundly guilty about the privilege they accept, to the extent that they 'sit statically' within the shame of it. Guilt and shame can be paralysing — which leads to you unintentionally collude with the system that props upward privilege in the first place. Another dynamic I run into is that people feel snugly cocooned within their supposition that, having defended their lives to the pursuit of social justice, they cannot possibly be causing any harm. Finally, there is a somewhat disingenuous trend among certain groups working in the non-profit sector that by but acknowledging their privilege they accept dealt with information technology.

James Baldwin can offer u.s.a. a fashion through this — by reminding u.s.a. that we accept to make a articulate, unvarnished assessment of our ain privileges: 'Not everything that is faced tin be changed, but zippo can be inverse until it is faced.'

Activeness stations

To chip abroad at privilege in our workplaces requires new practices and behaviours — and information technology starts at the personal level. In that location'south a considerable body of evidence showing united states that individual change is an important forerunner to organisational modify — subsequently all, our organisations are made upwardly of individuals — which should give us hope that change is within our grasp. There are many exercises out there that can assistance you do this. (Check out the power bloom from Merely Associates or the Wheel of Privilege tool.) Button yourself to get uncomfortable — don't wait to fix the roof while the sun is shining; this is difficult piece of work and if information technology doesn't feel hard, you lot aren't doing information technology correct.

You can do this while too laying the foundations for future collective action. For case, creating infinite for reflection alongside your peers and teams can help to bring a sense of common accountability for this work, too, and initiate processes of commonage change. Others take written more eloquently than me about how yous can leverage your privilege by practising meaningful allyship or by interrupting bias. Instead, I want to share some common behaviours leaders should AVOID if nosotros are to root out privilege from our workplaces. These include:

'Wilful Ignorance' — marginalised groups oftentimes struggle to get people in ascendant groups to believe their experiences, specially those who do not take lived experience of an issue. When someone points out a pattern of workplace inequality, it's really problematic when our starting time response is not simply to mind, believe and sympathise, but to say that more data must be collected. When this happens, it'southward likely 'wilful ignorance' is partly at play, meaning ascendant groups are invested in not seeing something equally an result, because information technology means doing something to alter a system that actually benefits them.

Giving exceptions to the dominion. When confronted with a case of how privilege excludes some to the benefit of others, it's common to hear people claiming through giving an 'exception'. Eastward.g. 'we can't have a trouble with disability in this organization, we have someone with a disability on the senior management team'. Unpack what is really being said here: namely, that an exception negates wider patterns of discrimination. I'm betting we wouldn't apply such a simplistic assay to other areas of our work.

Aqueduct-switching — refers to when someone raises an issue about an expanse of workplace inequality, but to have it met with an exclamation that another grade of oppression is more prevalent. In the international development sector in the UK, for case, when people of color push for more action on racial multifariousness, we're ofttimes told, 'Ah but the truthful oppression in this sector is class'. This is simplistic thinking at best — we know that inequalities intersect and that siloed approaches do not make sense — and acting in bad organized religion at worst.

Defensiveness only e'er holds an diff status quo in place. When we become defensive later on someone calls out our mistaken assumptions or behaviour, we don't mind, and we miss a gold opportunity for learning and modify. When we experience judged, our starting time response instead should exist: 'What practise I not yet understand?' We all make mistakes and leap to conclusions— feminist leadership is about what nosotros do when we our assumptions are challenged.

A circumspection: I cannot requite y'all a set of skills on privilege and feminist leadership that can be straightforwardly delivered and reproduced. Delight don't let that put you off. The challenge is that our sector is oftentimes obsessed with technical quick fixes rather than deeper, transformative work. How many times have you been in a meeting when someone is enervating to know what are the 'low-hanging fruit' or 'quick wins'? Or when someone dismisses a bold, transformative plan for change in favour of simply 'meeting people where they are at, and going from at that place'? Working on privilege is an ongoing, redistributive and ultimately rewarding projection for the purpose of social transformation of our workplaces and beyond. It is deep work — you owe information technology to yourselves and the causes yous care so deeply about to make a start.

Leila Billing is a freelance gender consultant and co-founder of We Are Feminist Leaders . Follow her @leilabilling on Twitter.

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