The Privilege of Teaching about Privilege

Abstract

A scholarly literature on the intersectional realities of race, class, gender, and sexual privilege exists, but professors often struggle with how to teach it, especially given our own (often) privileged positions. Here, the author describes how he uses self-reflexive story-telling as a point of entre to encourage students to think about their own lives within a matrix of privilege and subordination. He shows how stories can illuminate the central role played by ideologies of individual meritocracy in privileged peoples' narratives. The author argues that personal stories are limited unless they also are contextualized within structural analyses that illuminate collective agency. He ends by describing an undergraduate study of USC janitors that reveals how the institution constrains these low-wage workers, while putting into stark relief the relative privilege of students and faculty. He concludes that a pedagogy of privilege should always be grounded in the standpoints of subordinated groups of people.