Dimension and De-weaponize Your Privilege

Every night, the dark street snakes its way up a gentle slope onto a T-junction that serves as the closest landmark to my house. On the left, a number of houses line the bends and are frequently intercepted by closes, bushes, and a valley that accommodates what I believe is a large network of storm drains. Conversely, the right side of the street is lined throughout with identical detached houses, each flaunting trees rather than lawns. There are no street lights. At night, the security lights in front of most houses cast a dim glow onto the windy road, so I walk on the right side as I return from school every night. It is an upscale neighborhood that houses the upper-middle class, and, as far as I know, only two black families live on the street.

On a particular night last fall, I casually walked on the right side of the road, like I always did. I was approaching the red pick-up truck that is always parked around the last bend, which announces that I was only three houses away from mine. The red truck is usually my cue to whisper a few words of gratitude for having returned home. It’s that point where you let your guard down and relax into the comfort of seeing your house standing some yards away from you. Right at that moment, a dog charged at me from the left side of the road. I was startled and flew into a frenzy. I cannot quite explain how I found myself crouched on the curb, on the other side of the truck. Luckily, the dog didn’t give chase, and I had a moment to gather myself. When I stood and peered over the truck, there was the dog's owner on the other side of the road – a white woman who was unperturbed and made no move to put her dog on a leash. She just stood there, continuing her phone conversation with feigned oblivion to what had just happened. As you can imagine, I stood where I was utterly confused about her reaction and scared to move on because the dog was still unleashed.

“Hello, ma’am,” I called. “Don’t you wanna get your dog on a leash?” Her aloof response: “Well, you scared her with walking right in the center of the road!” I couldn’t believe it. Was she blind? I was furious and did not hold back in reminding her that, first of all, the law requires her to keep her dog on a leash in public places like the street. Next, I categorically stated that I was well on the right side of the road and that whatever side I was on was unrelated to the fact that her unleashed dog just attacked me on the street. Of course, she refused to admit her wrongness. I went on to let her know that this was actually the second time I’d seen her on the street with her dog on the loose, and that I would not hesitate to call the cops the next time it happened. The first time was in daylight, and I had the sense to stand by until the dog went back into her home on its own accord. At the end of the exchange, she muttered an apology which I frankly couldn't care less about, as I found my way home.

Last week, I sat on my bed with my hands to my chest as a panic attack rocked my body. I had just seen the videos of both George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police and Amy Cooper’s attempt at what I would describe as ordering a hit on a black man through false allegations on a 911 call, just for being asked to put her dog on a leash, in a public space. For the first time in my life, I realized that I am “now” a black person in America, where I could easily be any of those two men. As a matter of fact, the Amy Cooper saga was a replica of the exchange I had with the white woman on my street. What if she had had the same reaction as Amy Cooper’s? What if she, too, chose at that moment to weaponize her whiteness and use it against me? After all, she had already shown blatant disregard for my well-being and conjured her own version of the story in which I scared her dog.

Growing up in Nigeria, race was merely a topic discussed in social studies classes at secondary school. Back home, your height and weight are arguably more consequential in the grand scheme of affairs than your race. Privileges are held in other capsules of social constructs like ethnicity, religion, and wealth – beacons that mark your affinity to societal structures rather than physiology. The color of your skin? Nobody really cared about that. So, even after I moved to America, my engagement with racial issues was guided by empathy and a desire for equity rather than relatability despite being black myself.

Consequently, I have been able to characterize systemic racism and its grim expressions especially when others are the subjects. Personally though, it has been an excruciatingly slow realization that blackness has been thrust upon me and my racial identity is no longer a benign subject for me. This is partly because racism is foreign to the constructs upon which I built my sense of self and partly because of privilege. As an African, your prime identity is your tribe. I am first Igbo before I am anything else. While tribalism is a widespread occurrence in Nigeria, it is not marked with the same sequences and structures as racism in America. Firstly, although the Igbos have historically been recipients of tribal opposition, they are still one of the major tribes renowned for their economic prosperity albeit earned through sheer grit and enterprise. Secondly, while my family may not pass for rich, I was born and raised by upper-middle-class parents who afforded me access to the best education, exposure, and networks of people in similar and higher stations.

I have mostly refrained from acknowledging the privileges that I have had both because of a sense of looming guilt when I consider myself in comparison to the have-nots and a constant reminder that what I consider privileges fade next to the stations of some of my peers in Nigeria. The danger with that, however, is the failure to dimension my privilege and to understand its ramifications in the different situations that I encounter. Not truly acknowledging your privilege creates a lousy film of modesty that may blind you to intersectionality. The fact is that being a black, single, immigrant man has different ramifications from being a black, married, immigrant woman and both differ from the realities of being a single African-American man, etc. To ignore the different dimensions of our identity is to stay blind to the nuances that characterize our place in society and where ignorance abounds, abuse is inevitable.

So, I’ve taken a moment to think about the different identities that I wield in the different spaces that I occupy and the privileges and potential disadvantages that accompany these identities. I have taken a moment to consider what this means for others around me especially those who are different from me. I have taken time to question my motivations for my actions towards others and how they translate into the society that I am a part of. Three key realizations emerged and I think that these are worth everyone contemplating on.

    I.           Privilege is Dynamic and Should be Dimensioned

This conversation is not just about racism. It is about any form of prejudice that you can propagate by reason of your economic, social, and/or political station. This is about realizing that no matter what position you’re in, you hold an advantage over someone else by reason of an aspect of the society that grants you some majority status or micropower. In America, racism is very blatant. In South Africa, xenophobia would be more apparent. In Nigeria, tribalism takes the cake.

At the end of the day, the abuse of privilege is possible under an infinite number of situations. That you are not racist is no guarantee that you do not uphold tribalistic or sexist opinions. This is why it is important to understand intersectionality as it pertains to our identity and beliefs.

Also, privilege is not static and this should help you appreciate the place of empathy in this conversation. The stations your privilege affords you can lose their power with a slight change in the affairs of your life. The privileges that I had back in Nigeria that availed me the capabilities and resources to get into a top institution like The George Washington University and move to the United States now pale in the face of my new realities. In many ways, it feels like I went down a few ladder rungs when you begin to consider some of the structural limitations of being a black, immigrant, female student in America.

What am I saying? At all times, dimension your privilege. Understand the angles of your identity, the privileges they accord you, the potential limitations they create, the ramifications of the beliefs you hold, and the impacts that all these have on the people around you.

  II.           De-weaponization of Privilege Must be Intentional

Amy Cooper is a first-class example of how people can weaponize their privilege. However, this does not always play out in abrasive ways as hers did. Sometimes, we abuse privileges in a subtle manner that builds up into a boulder that eventually crushes the society and that too is weaponization. Nepotism is an example of this; you may believe that you are simply creating opportunities for your own people to thrive but when it is at the detriments of merit, you have begun to create a machine for the destruction of cohesion and order.

When I was growing up, we always had housemaids as is common in many middle and high-income African homes. It is commonplace for these domestic staff to be subservient to both their employees and their children, regardless of how young the kids were. Not in my household. We had no liberties to take advantage of our stations, as children to the employers. to disrespect the maids or garner undue favor whenever there was a situation involving the kids and the staff. Right from childhood, we were made to understand that our privilege was as a result of providence and was to be extended to the maids rather than used as a tool to further our own interests.

If we are not intentional about de-weaponizing our privilege, we may find ourselves crossing boundaries as our subtle or blatant self-interest supersedes our sense of otherness. Hence, we should question the assumptions that form the bedrock of our interactions with different groups of people. We need to query the source of the hard feelings we accommodate. We have to come to situations including fights, refusing to kneel on anyone’s neck.

III.           Passiveness and Expectation of Homogeneity are Abuse of Privilege

Have you heard anyone say “but all lives matter!” in response to #BlackLivesMatter?

Have you heard someone say “but men also face problems” when disempowerment of women is the subject?

Have you ever heard “we should all be the same” when uneasy conversations about opposing beliefs are on the table?

Well, these kinds of questions are glaring examples of thought processes that mark abuse of privilege. Firstly, there is no room for passiveness in the face of injustice unless you are not directly impacted by that injustice. Humans are naturally resistant to being subdued so the chances are insanely high that if it affects you, you would be nowhere near silent. Privilege, again!

Secondly, nothing about God’s beautiful world is steeped homogeneity. You cannot expect all people to conform to your purview of life or even more ridiculously, to look or speak like you. To conduct your affairs without fair consideration for others who operate on a different paradigm than you is wrong. Even worse, to mete out any consequence on such people for being different is an abuse of whatever privilege put you in the position to be able to do so.

So, you see, a rapist and a rape apologist are just as damaging as each other. The same goes for a racist and a silent observer. Again, infinite combinations exist to illustrate my point. To exempt yourself from situations of injustice either because you are unaffected or for sociopolitical reasons is to abuse your privileges and at best, to permit others to abuse theirs.

 I hope this gives us all something to think about and act upon.

Stay safe and stay loving!