Owning My Place on the Ladder of Privilege, Social Justice and Inequity

One coach’s approach to becoming a better human being

I am profoundly uncomfortable.

I recently wrote an article for Smartbrief about how to lead in response to the protests roiling our cities. While I stand by what I said, here is what I did not say in that article: I’m really not feeling like the expert right now. This is hard for a coach to admit, especially where clients and potential clients can see it. But there it is. Truth. Privilege, social justice and equity demand more of me now.

Despite having a personal intention to understand sexism and racism through the lens of privilege since Charlottesville in 2017, I’ve been largely unsuccessful engaging people who don’t look like me in a deeper dialog and on these topics. I’ve learned since beginning the journey that intention alone is not enough. Outreach is not enough. Even education is not enough, because this effort is not about me and solving my discomfort, but about me doing the work to get educated and be uncomfortable in order to begin to see things through a different lens. When I desire to “be educated by someone else” it means I’m still not understanding, or doing, or saying or thinking the thing that would help me become a better contributor in the healing process we as individuals and a society need right now. The fact is that I’m a middle class white woman, and this reality veils my eyes to degrees I’m still learning to see. It contributes to my own biases and struggles to clearly see the problems others feel in their bones. It makes it harder for me to contribute to solutions.

My clients (of all races, genders and nationalities) are also dealing with how to think and act in response to the issues which Black Lives Matter is pointing the spotlight on so effectively right now. So I feel compelled to be of service on this topic, despite my discomfort and inability to know the right way forward.

I am here to announce that I’m not looking for a solution, only a process by which I can grow. Anyone interested in growing with me is welcome on this ride. I welcome your experiences and opinions, if you feel compelled to share them. But this post is not about politics or rights and wrongs, only about the process I’m using to grow myself personally to be a stronger contributor to racial justice, equity and equal rights for all oppressed people. This is not global advice for everyone, or even all my clients. It’s just one coach’s approach to becoming a better human being.

Here are the key ways I’m challenging myself right now. I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the future.

Being Uncomfortable on the Ladder of Privilege and Inequity

When I coach and teach change leadership, I tell people that we succeed at change when we become comfortable in our discomfort, particularly when we encounter resistance. If the protests in the streets aren’t resistance, then nothing is, so I guess I’m taking my own advice by being uncomfortable thanks to them. Because I’m definitely uncomfortable, and not just about my non-expet feelings. It’s about being privileged and part of the problem.

Here’s how I’m thinking of privilege and inequity right now: as a ladder. Like most ladders, it’s narrow and can only hold one person at a time on any particular rung. Everyone has a place above or below the next person in line.

Even though I don’t like hierarchies and spend a lot of energy trying to exist outside them, it’s a simple fact of human nature that when people are in a group, they compare themselves to each other and start falling into subgroups, some of which have benefits and status, which is then denied others. Absent very intentional efforts to offset these natural human dynamics, these denied benefits become inequities that look like racial, sexual, gender, age and ability-related discrimination and harassment. I’m not going to unpack the why’s and wherefore’s of this further except to say that this unfair sorting is both caused by, and reinforcing to, unconscious bias.

Unfortunately, privilege and inequity shows up in ways that look like this in our society today:

• Black people are incarcerated at five times the rate of whites, and are twice as likely to be killed by police as white people.
• Historically oppressed people are dying at alarming rates due to COVID-19, Blacks three times more often and Native Americans are suffering more than whites both economically and through health outcomes.
• Most victims of sexual harassment and assault, regardless of gender, do not speak up or report their aggressors out of justified fears of reprisal. Most reported rapes to police do not lead to an arrest, and most arrests do not lead to prosecution or conviction. And so the cycle continues unchecked.)
• Upward mobility in the US has been stagnant for 40 years, and wealth on Wall Street is no longer a reliable indicator of economic health for the average American.)

Clearly, I could go on.

Whether we want them to or not, these hierarchies create a ladder and confer upon people on the different rungs various privileges, which then create inequities. These inequities are both external (e.g., money, influence, power) and internal (e.g., safety, confidence, aspiration). This complex view of privilege isn’t new either, as evidenced by the video below from 2015, but I would say most people haven’t really gone through an exercise like this, much less taken the opportunity to process it for themselves and with the other people they experience it with. I know I haven’t.

These ladders of privilege and inequity are found in all human societies, on the playground and in the halls of leadership. They show up in ways that are physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually harmful to everyone, most detrimental to those denied the benefits that privileged people enjoy. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it bears repeating: the stress and other factors that accompany a lower position on the privilege hierarchy will literally kill you more often, even when no one points a gun at you.

In other words, black people have a right to be majorly pissed off, and have been for centuries. Native Americans do too. And poor people. And women. And LGBTQIA people. And, and, and…

Focusing on the present for a moment, I’m connecting the last few years of social discomfort to the ladder. Just like #metoo helped give women a voice long silenced in the ‘discussion’ on sexual violence, harassment and discrimination, Black Lives Matter has been, and is, fighting to raise the voice of people too long oppressed about the discussion of privilege. I’m grateful that they’ve kept it up so that everyone can hear, including people like me who unintentionally, but did, allow our own privilege to blind us to their deepest pain.

Just like we women ask men to listen to “us” women for gender rights, black people have the right to ask “us” white people to listen to them. And so I’m trying to shut up and listen.

Seeing Myself on the Ladder of Privilege

I don’t want there to be a ladder. Just as many middle class white women, led by Sheryl Sandberg, have tried to redefine the career ladder into a jungle gym, I’d like there to be a social equity play space that allows people to crawl around to where they’re most comfortable, without having to knock other people off. I will continue doing what I can to build a bigger ladder to make this possible, but I need to be less naive and present to the reality that I don’t personally have the power to build such a cultural space by myself. I have to live on the ladder society has conferred on me while I work to build a bigger playground.

By listening more deeply to the conversations around inequity I’m coming to understand that the ladder of privilege is much taller and more complex than I thought. And almost no one, myself included, actually sees ourselves on this ladder at all. Seeing the ladder is the first act of seeing privilege in many ways. We know who’s above us because we feel stepped on and it hurts. For myself I can say that until Charlottesville I was so busy looking up, I forget to look down and, more importantly, see that there are many rungs above and below me. When we don’t look down, we’re by definition failing to acknowledge the advantages that our rung gives us vis a vis all the other people on the ladder. And to the extent we can’t be as authentically proactive in taking action to help people experiencing inequity below us, we continue to be part of the problem. This means me. And you.

Here is the simplest and most quantifiable way I know to see the kind of harm our inaction creates in cold, hard cash, by looking at the gender and racial breakdown of the wage gap. The fact that “women earn less than men” has too often overshadowed the fact that white women are paid more than black and brown women. This deeper look at the wage gap represented below sadly mirrors other privilege ladders in health and mortality, police brutality, education, job opportunities and too many other aspects of what it takes to achieve health and happiness on this planet. And when white women cannot acknowledge the privilege our “status” on charts like this confers on us, we’re doing a deep disservice to our sisters who experience even less fair treatment than we do.

To be fair, the chart above is a poor representation of the entire privilege picture, since it leaves out other ethnicities, such as Asians, who report marginalization related to their race, and who earn more than the average white person. It also leaves out many other kinds of privilege, but the visual this chart offers is striking. When it comes to privilege, we’re not all on the same rung. But it is an excellent depiction of what pay INequity looks like in our society today..

This issue is not new. The inability for white women to understand and appreciate our privilege has been crystal clear to black women for a long time and black women have been trying to bring this to our attention since the days of bra burning and are still standing up with their truth.

So I’m working to be uncomfortable about my place on a ladder which I’m coming to see more clearly. I know what it’s like to feel unequal and unprivileged when I look “up” the ladder at men who don’t understand what it’s like to be in a female body. And I have to admit that I’m on that ladder in a place that confers upon me privileges others don’t have and leaves me without easy insight into issues this position creates for them.

I am open to learning more about the experiences of others on the ladder. Being open, I’m hearing more. And it is painful to listen to. Not just from a place of guilt but also from a place of compassion for those whose pain has been too long denied, gaslit and ignored. Here is an example I find particularly compelling. I have watched the video below many times and will continue to do so as Kimberly Latrice Jones taps into her well of knowledge, pain and anger to educate me, not only on the facts but on the emotions of the black experience in America.

I have also found Dolly Chugh’s book Being The Person You Want to Be: How Good People Fight Bias very helpful in learning to see what I am blind to and be ok with an imperfect and biased vision of myself. Here is Dolly’s TED Talk.

Here are some other resources I’ve found helpful, just a few out of many many good resources out there.

• Public Address On Revolution: Revolution Now by Rachel Cargle
• Answering White People’s Most Commonly Asked Questions about the Black Lives Matter Movement
• Books to Check Your White Privilege
• A “Scaffold” to through which to view White Privilege

What I’m learning is that like sexual discrimination I’ve experienced and helped female clients through, racism and privilege is a systemic inequity we all affect and are affected by. If you don’t believe me, watch this:

In addition to listening, opening and educating myself, I am learning to hold space for pain that is not mine, especially as it relates to my own privilege and using all this to choose who and how I want to be. I will share more on these strategies in future posts. For now, I’m interested in listening to your experience with privilege, racism, discrimination and inequity. Feel free to contact me at danatheus@inpowercoaching.com to share your thoughts and the questions and discomforts you’re sitting with. Together we’ll move forward one way or another. We always do.

Guide to Women in Leadership