Free So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo Page A

really dig deep through all of the advantages that you have that others may not. Write them down.
    You may well want to list your disadvantages as well. This is not the time for that,so please resist the urge. It is natural to feel like focusing on your advantages invalidates your disadvantages and your struggles in life, but that is not what will happen. You can be both privileged in some areas of life, and underprivileged in others. Both can be true at once andcan impact your life at the same time. This is an exercise you should do even if you feel extremely underprivilegedin life. I feel very underprivileged as a black, queer woman, and it would be easy to dismiss calls to check my own privilege under the argument that it’s really those with a lot of privilege who should be doing the work and I’m too busy fighting racism and sexism to fight the few advantages I do have. But failing to check my own privilege means that my efforts to fight racism and sexism wouldleave out many of the women and people of color I claim to be fighting for. I march for black people, but am I marching for black trans women, disabled black people, incarcerated black people as well? The number of people I’d be leaving behind and continuing to oppress by refusing to check my privilege would make my efforts ineffective at best and harmful at worst. If thinking about your privilegewithout addressing your oppression is hard for you, and you need to write down your lack of privilege later, that is fine. But please, dedicate this time to seeing how you can make your understanding of justice and equality more inclusive.
    Once you’ve written down a nice long list of privilege, start thinking about how this privilege might have influenced not only your status in society, butyour experience with and understanding of the world at large. How might your privilege have impacted your ideas on racism, on education, on the environment? Then start seeking out work on these subjects by people who don’t have your same privilege, and listen when those people are speaking. Being privileged doesn’t mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right—it meansthat there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.
    Practice this often, especially when thinking about social or political issues. After having practiced looking at my privilege more formally, I casually revisit this exercise whenever I’m confronted with a new privilege that I was previously unaware of, and again at the start of every year, as a way to refocuson my social justice goals. Get used to that uncomfortable feeling that arises when you discover that perhaps your privilege is hindering your ability to truly understand or address an issue. Get used to that pang of guilt that comes with realizing yet another area of life where you’ve benefited at the expense of others. It will not kill you. You can withstand it. You want to be more comfortablewith this, so that when you are confronted with your privilege in a stressful situation (like a Facebook argument that suddenly takes a turn for the worse) you will be able to limit your defensiveness enough to listen and learn.
    This will also help you better empathize with the feelings of anger, fear, and shame that people feel when confronted with their privilege and may help you approach someoneabout their privilege with more generosity. It is also easier to explain privilege to someone else, if you should choose to do so, if you are familiar with explaining it to yourself. When you first became aware of an area of your privilege, it did not appear to you as “privilege.” You had to be able to see what your advantage was, that others did not have that advantage, and that it was influencingyour words and decisions in a way that could be harming others. Remembering this might allow you to put more detail into your entreaties for people to check their privilege and may increase the chances