“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin
I live in a small rural town in Northern Michigan. At a recent Harbor Days parade, the town celebrated the pillars of the community: the fire department, police department, athletic teams, local queens, the library, We even had a Mutt Strut so that everyone could display their beloved dogs. It was a lovely gathering of positive people celebrating community.
It is also real bubble for most people who live here – completely disconnected from the chaos of city life and the messy challenges of dealing with the diversity of urban melting pots. I’m not being critical. My point is that I doubt anyone was looking over their shoulders for border agents or worried about being stopped for being black. The crowd was 98% white. The median age in the community is 58 and trending higher. The national median is 39. The fastest growing population are people over 70. It’s even a climate refuge so citizens rarely have to deal with fires, floods, or extreme heat.
For me, it’s an unsettling experience to be part of a community that appears to be going about business as usual, enjoying the abundant privileges that Northern Michigan offers, while the world is literally and figuratively on fire, the institutions that we have come to rely on are crumbling around us, and we are living in a broader context of fear and hate driven by extreme polarization and authoritarianism.
To be dramatic, it feels like we are living in a new ICE age. The oldest known ice age occurred over 2 billion years ago and predates even the earliest multicellular life on Earth. The planet was almost entirely frozen. This ICE age is equally cold and chilling – not from a lack of heat, but from an abundance of cruelty and carelessness. At a time when we should be investing every penny available to rebuild infrastructure, to protect the environment, to provide aid to starving people, to discover new medicines and technologies for the next pandemic, to attract foreign talent, to deal with the emerging threats from AI, China, and Russia, etc., we are spending $75 billion dollars to chase down immigrants and to build new detention centers to house them before they are deported to El Salvador or Sudan. Our planet may not be frozen, but too many hearts seem to be. Meanwhile, we pretend that all will be well and go about our lives as if nothing of any consequence is happening outside of our bubbles.
My question is, why are we not examining the privileges that may be blinding us to the need to take action?
It’s not like this issue has gone unexamined in the literature.
In her seminal 1989 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh details a long list of daily advantages she experiences solely because of her race: maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks. Critically, she notes that she was taught to see racism as something that disadvantages people of color, but not as something that simultaneously confers an advantage on her. This obliviousness is the essence of unexamined privilege. It is not about feeling personal guilt or apologizing for one’s circumstances; rather, it is the failure to recognize how one’s place in the world is shaped by systemic forces and historical context, leading to a warped perception of meritocracy where success is attributed solely to individual effort.
In Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America Stephanie Wildman and her colleagues define this obliviousness as the ability to compartmentalize social problems – a form of privilege that enables people to treat issues like racial injustice, economic inequality, or gender discrimination as abstract concepts—topics for a news article or a dinner table debate. They have the option to tune out, to change the channel, or to simply not engage. The world is built in such a way that these issues do not typically intrude on their daily lives. For individuals who are not privileged, however, these same issues are not theoretical; they are a constant and unavoidable reality. Systemic barriers and biases manifest in daily interactions, from hiring processes and housing applications to encounters with law enforcement. When the privileged retreat into their bubbles, they not only fail to understand these realities, but they also signal that these struggles are not a collective concern, but a private burden to be carried by the marginalized.
In Evicted by Matthew Desmond, exposes the economic machinery that leads to housing insecurity which is maintained by landlords, courts, and policymakers—many of whom have never faced eviction or poverty. Their ignorance is not just a personal failing but a structural one, embedded in laws, zoning codes, and social assumptions that treat the poor as objects of reform rather than participants in democracy.
In White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo’s argues that white people, insulated by privilege, often react defensively when confronted with racism, not because they are evil, but because they have not had to develop the emotional stamina to deal with systemic injustice. Furthermore, privilege often fosters fragility—the inability to tolerate critique or disruption. This fragility shuts down dialogue, undermines accountability, and sustains inequality.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Tom and Daisy Buchanan exemplify the dangers of privilege left unchecked. They are “careless people,” as Nick Carraway observes, who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” Their wealth allows them to remain insulated from the consequences of their actions— they are never held accountable. The novel is not just a critique of the American Dream; it’s a warning about how privilege can allow people to live unexamined, destructive lives with impunity. Unexamined privilege often leads to moral disengagement.
Similarly, in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, white characters like Mayella Ewell and Bob Ewell weaponize their racial privilege to condemn an innocent Black man, Tom Robinson, to death. The Ewells, poor and marginalized in many ways, still hold power over a Black man simply due to their skin color. Their unexamined privilege blinds them to their own complicity in injustice, allowing them to uphold a racist system without confronting their own moral failings.
In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, the microaggressions and racial slights that the speaker endures are invisible to the white people around her. They exist in a bubble of presumed innocence, assuming that their words or actions are benign because they have not experienced otherwise. The speaker, by contrast, cannot compartmentalize. She must carry the burden of race in every interaction. This asymmetry in emotional labor underscores how privilege affords not only physical and economic security but also psychic distance from suffering.
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom further explores how privilege enables escapism. Characters like Patty and Walter Berglund navigate mid-life crises, environmental causes, and family dysfunctions with the luxury of second chances, therapy, and geographic mobility. Their suffering is real but buffered by access. They compartmentalize personal ethics and public action, retreating into selective narratives that preserve their self-image while glossing over their complicity in broader systems of inequality
These examples highlight that privilege not only protects individuals from consequences but also distorts their moral and social vision. When people do not interrogate the structures that advantage them, they become complicit in the marginalization of others—even if unintentionally.
This willful ignorance has devastating consequences for the broader social fabric. When those in power fail to acknowledge their privilege, they are more likely to defend the status quo, seeing existing systems as fair and just because they have personally benefited from them. They may interpret calls for equity as an attack on their own achievements, rather than as an attempt to level a profoundly uneven playing field. This perspective obstructs progress and stifles meaningful dialogue, preventing the development of creative and effective solutions to pressing social problems
Ultimately, the failure to examine and own one’s privilege is a failure of responsibility. It is a form of civic disengagement that allows harmful systems to persist, unchecked and unchallenged. By recognizing our own advantages—whether earned or unearned—we can move beyond a simplistic understanding of individual success and begin to see the intricate networks of advantage and disadvantage that shape society. The goal is not to eliminate all differences, but to build a society where the opportunities for a good life are not contingent on the invisible knapsack one happens to carry. It is a shift from a mindset of passive acceptance to one of active stewardship, where privilege is used not to escape reality, but to confront it and to work towards a world where such advantages become entitlements for all.
As James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Privilege, when examined, can become a tool for partnership, structural change, and social healing. But that requires discomfort—a willingness to break the protective compartments and step outside the curated bubbles of one’s experience.
Clearly, there are abundant stories in the literature – both fictional and non-fictional – that make the case for examining our privilege. Sadly, we don’t need to take a deep dive into the literary troves to discover this truth. We only need to take a glimpse of the obvious when we read the paper, listen to the news, or tune into our favorite podcast. What we are seeing in this administration is one of the most extreme examples of unexamined privilege in history. Few authors would be bold enough to write the actual account of what’s happening in front of our eyes on a daily basis – they would be afraid they were cheapening their craft by succumbing to hyperbole.
And yet, here I am living comfortably in my safe, little town with privileges galore. The only thing I’m carrying is a big backpack of invisible advantages. I do what I can, but it feels so inadequate.
I’m hoping my little community will continue to enjoy the privileges Nature has generously granted to it AND take a little more responsibility for owning and stewarding that privilege. I’m hoping more people will ultimately gain the privilege of not living in fear and not being the victim of hate. Finally, I’m hoping the ICE will eventually melt and that we will find more warmth in our hearts. May it be so.
Really good Ricky-I feel quite guilty and inadequate but I continue to marvel at your eloquence…thank you!
[…] I have examined my privilege; I have tried to reconcile my ideal self with my real self; I have made an effort to find quiet in […]