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Reflecting on an experience of casual privilege in my supermarket:
I walked to the store, and put 10 items in my bag. I skipped the long line, choosing the self-scan checkout, which works except when it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, you’re trapped until someone comes to help.
I walked to the store, and put 10 items in my bag. I skipped the long line, choosing the self-scan checkout, which works except when it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, you’re trapped until someone comes to help.
My last two items, 2x pappardelle at $3.99 from the cheese case, wouldn’t scan. I politely let one of the cashiers know I needed help. I waited and waited and waited. (Politely! It’s Saturday. They’re busy. They’re nice here. This store is locally beloved.)
Finally, a friendly manager appeared. I said “I have two of these at $3.99.” She fiddled with a terminal, cheerfully said “ok you’re all set, go ahead and check out!” — then disappeared.
I looked at my order. She’d rung in 2x “cheese misc” at $7.98 each, not $3.99 each.
I looked at my order. She’d rung in 2x “cheese misc” at $7.98 each, not $3.99 each.
I considered my options. The store seemed even busier. I couldn’t get anyone’s attention. So... I checked out and paid the overcharge, then went back to the cheese case, took 2 more pappardelle, put them in my bag, and walked back through the store and out the front door.
Now, you might say, what does this have to do with privilege? But think about who in American society can confidently do this kind of thing with no worry whatsoever, both 1) certain that we have not committed an offense and 2) secure that if questioned, we will prevail.
I am in no position to speak for any nonwhite people, let alone all of them. But I’m perfectly aware that my right to confidently move through the world like this is tied to my being an affluent-looking white man who behaves (as coded by white people) conventionally.
In my daily white life, I benefit from an absolute presumption, almost everywhere, that I am Not a Problem. I am so far above suspicion that in the event of Trouble, almost always, everyone else in the vicinity would be suspected before I would.
This kind of casual privilege doesn’t necessarily cause *acute* social harm to bystanders. (My 2 extra pappardelle didn’t hurt the business or any employee or customer.) But in aggregate and over time, it accumulates into a material injustice.
By perverting the behavior of institutions across society, in favor of people like me at the expense of others, casual privilege exacerbates a social environment where, at the margins, police can brutalize people without consequences, as long as those people aren’t like me.
All of these things are connected. And at a moment like this, when much of America is examining the structural inequities that drive economic inequality and lead to physical brutality, these casual social inequities need to be part of the conversation.
I note that every single store employee I saw today was nonwhite, and the manager who helped me was Black. This is not irrelevant. The racial inequity in social power built into American society imposes an extra burden on her if she challenges my Not-a-Problem status.*
*I do not mean to deny agency or responsibility to individual Black people! She certainly *could* have challenged me. But that extra burden is not nothing, and the everyday benefit I receive because it exists is not nothing either.
Candid examination of all this by ordinary people is part of the project of rectifying four centuries of structural inequity, deliberately imposed and often brutally enforced—especially given that our formal institutions are extremely tentative in their support of that project.
