Privilege is an unearned ease in navigating the world, granted by identity and social power.
Because it feels normal, it can be hard to see.

Privilege can show up as being believed, finding spaces already designed for us, or receiving the benefit of the doubt. When these experiences are familiar, we may assume that other people can count on them too. Someone else's account of exclusion can then seem surprising or exaggerated because it describes a world we have not had to navigate.

A person can experience hardship and still receive advantages connected to race, class, gender, disability status, or other parts of identity. These positions overlap and take different forms across settings. Recognizing privilege helps us understand more of the conditions shaping our lives, including the obstacles we have been spared and the support we may have mistaken for individual achievement.

Privilege has an intellectual history beyond RCT. In White Privilege and Male Privilege (1988), Peggy McIntosh examined advantages she received as a White woman that she had learned to regard as ordinary. Her account connected everyday experience with systems that distribute opportunity unequally. It also raised a question of responsibility: recognizing an advantage changes what we need to consider about our participation in those systems.

Jean Baker Miller's Telling the Truth About Power (2003) examined how cultural messages obscure unequal power, including from people who benefit from it. She connected privilege with the resources that give some groups greater influence over other people's lives. This places privilege within the conditions of relationship: whose understanding carries authority, whose needs receive attention, and who can afford to overlook the difference.

Maureen Walker makes that ordinary invisibility concrete in When Getting Along Is Not Enough: Reconstructing Race in Our Lives and Relationships (2020). A professor discovers that his presence makes catering available for a meeting when administrative staff alone would not qualify. What seemed normal to him depended on a rule others had to know. 

Walker keeps the connection with racial inequality central. She shows how stories of individual merit obscure collective advantages, and how acknowledging White privilege can leave the practices sustaining it untouched. She also considers how people can use their greater access and influence in support of racial justice, with a willingness to move beyond familiar comfort.

BCC's definition brings this attention to the experience of ease. What feels ordinary may tell us something about how the world has made room for us. Becoming able to notice that room can change how we listen to people whose experience differs, and what arrangements we are willing to question together.

Choose one ordinary setting where things tend to work smoothly for you. Notice a moment when you are believed, included, or given flexibility without much explanation. Consider what part of your identity or position may make that response easier to receive.

If you choose, explore this with someone who shares that advantage, or read an account someone has already chosen to share about navigating the same setting differently. Notice what your ease has kept you from needing to know. You can pause with that discovery; another person does not owe you a story or reassurance.