We recently held our first-ever A New Normal webinar, talking about privilege and bias, as two of the most controversial terms in the ED&I vocabulary. Our experience over the last few years has shown that privilege is probably the most controversial topic we talk about. Yet, it has the power to unlock so much of what constitutes true inclusion at work and more broadly. 

Time and time again, we see the cultural context and connotation of words acting as a blocker for people even being prepared to understand the concept itself. This is never more true than with the word “privilege” - particularly emotive for those of us who have an element of privilege as part of our identities.

An Absence of Challenge

We love the way that John Amaechi and Reni Eddo-Lodge talk about privilege as “an absence of challenge”. Having an element of privilege in your identity doesn’t mean you’ve never experienced any hardship, it simply means that, for example, the colour of your skin, isn’t the source of that hardship. 

Understanding privilege means recognising the places where your experiences diverge from those around you. This is a subject I touched on in my post about Chris Kaba - truly, the luxury of being able to scroll past a story about an unarmed black man being shot by the police, without feeling a connection to it, is one of the most precise demonstrations of white privilege I think I’ve ever come across. 

Take the Leap

Making the leap of imagination required to understand this experience gap isn’t an easy thing to do, but one of the few positives about a world where every waking moment sometimes seems to be chronicled on social media is that there are really easy ways to educate yourself on the experiences of other people without placing any kind of burden on those folk (please please please do not expect ANYONE from a marginalised community to educate you). 

We’ve added some resources to our webinar page on the A New Normal website, but we’d love to hear from you about who you follow, and what you read, watch or listen to in order to help yourself make that leap. Educating ourselves is part of being a good ally, and that provides us with the tools to challenge bad behaviour when we see it. We loved John Whaite’s video post in response to the recent story in the Daily Telegraph which claimed Strictly Come Dancing has got too “woke” for its own good (link in the news section).