White and/or male and/or straight (and/or cis)? Better check that privilege!

Realize that your whiteness, maleness, straightness, and cisness have afforded you liberties and freedoms that people who cannot identify as such demographics don’t universally have the same liberties and freedoms that you do.

As a white person, you’re less likely to have racial slurs barraged at you.

As a man, you’re less likely to get sexualized for the clothes you wear.

As a straight person, you can marry your opposite sex partner any time you want in any state you want.

As a cis person, you don’t have to deal with gender dysphoria.

Cool. Got it. Now that I know these things, what do you want me to do with such self discovery, exactly? What good has “checking my privilege” done for myself, or anyone else?

There’s a reason why these people want you to check your privilege. They don’t want you to actually do some self reflecting on how good you have it, and recognize the ways others do not. They want to make thinking for yourself a moral crime. They want to control your language.

When someone makes themselves out to be a victim, an oppressed person, they’ve already established themselves on a moral high ground where criticizing them is unethical and abusive. That’s where checking your privilege comes into play. If you have no privilege to check, your opinions have free reign - and when your opinions are touted against an opponent who has been shouted down to not being allowed to have one, you’ve already won the battle.

Well, for one, I won’t check any of these supposed privileges I hold so long as you don’t check your first world privilege. Two, I won’t check these privileges as a means to undermine the value of my opinion for a few reasons. I’m an adult. I’m a living person. I live in a part of the planet where my voice and my expression, as well as your own, is virtually free to use. It has nothing to do with whether I may or may not be white, male, or straight. Those are stupid reasons to not express an opinion, or to recite facts. You possibly having it worse than me at any part in your life also does not warrant my censorship. The fact that I’m alive and have the capacity to think for myself is a good enough reason to express what I think, what I know, and even sometimes what I believe.

Privilege checking is meant to be nothing more than a mechanism for shame and dissent.