CommunityCave's TQI Night - Owning Our Privileges

Thursday, March 15, 2018

6:30 - 8:45 PM

Center on Halsted - 3656 N Halsted St

Facilitator - Lee Andel Dewey

I would like us to read and discuss the linked and quoted article, "The Healing Power in Owning Our Privileges," by Dom Chatterjee.

"Everybody has access to things that others don’t. Everybody perpetuates the oppression of others – some more, some less – but we all have areas of our lives where we must take accountability, regardless of our intent, for the harm we do to others. It’s easy to agree with intent vs. impact, yet there are times we all get defensive. That’s human nature. Nobody likes when our privilege, that access we have that others don’t, gets brought to our attention.

With the way conversations around privilege currently unfold, oppression olympics is unavoidable. Most of us don’t want to fall into this trap, but it keeps happening. We’re in this dynamic because of the very systems of oppression that created this mess. It’s easier to focus on the problem we know caused the pain, our oppressors, than the solutions we don’t yet know that lead to healing. In participating in oppression olympics, we’re fighting to share space for pain to be recognized when there isn’t enough available. Instead, we need to create more spaces where it’s possible to embrace our whole selves, and one path forward is through honoring our individual power.

To move forward together in solidarity, it’s time to reframe privilege, specifically how it operates in our day-to-day lives. Instead of looking at privilege as a thing others have that gets in our way as [insert identity here] – or only theorizing how we have it large-scale within overlapping oppressive systems – we must consider the privileges we have as opportunities. Just as talents lead us on separate paths in life, we all have different privileges, which we don’t choose, and we get to experience different things as a result of them, like it or not.

In order to be truly whole as individuals, we cannot deny parts of ourselves. Embracing who we are is an act of healing. Yes, that uncomfortable act of owning our privileges can be a step towards the healing each of us needs. By scrutinizing and simply sitting with our personal privileges, we stand to gain these things and more:

1) Privilege points us to our agency.

2) Owning privilege stops us from perpetuating harm.

3) Seeing how we’re all complicit creates more grounded connections to others.

4) We develop deeper compassion for ourselves through complete, radical acceptance.

5) It’s impossible to truly embrace intersectionality without recognizing or privileges."

https://restforresistance.com/zine/2016/12/23/the-healing-power-of-privileges

CommunityCave's TQI Night - Owning Our Privileges

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