Privilege: The Power to Ignore

Privilege is often portrayed as nothing more than the reward of hard work, as though the world were an equal playing field and every person had the same road to walk. It is easy to glorify someone’s success as effort alone, when the doors they walked through were already open, when the ground they stood on was already steady, when the space around them was already made safe by the others.

To say that privilege is merely about choice is to insult those who never had one. It is to look at the person who never got a stage and tell them they should have performed better, to look at the child locked out of classrooms and say they should have studied harder. This is not truth but is arrogance, and it keeps power in the hands of those who already have it.

The cruelty of privilege is not just in what it gives but in what it denies. It creates a blindness that makes people mock struggles they have never endured, it allows them to reject pain that has never crossed their doorstep, it makes them believe that fairness has already been achieved simply because they themselves were never forced to fight for it. In this way privilege does not just protect the fortunate, it also silences the less fortunate, stripping their suffering of legitimacy while celebrating someone else’s advantage as destiny.

What makes privilege most dangerous is not the comfort it provides, but the indifference it breeds. Once someone convinces themselves that their rise was only about their own effort, they begin to see the suffering of others as weakness, they begin to believe inequality is natural, they begin to defend a system that was never fair to begin with. And when a society normalises that mindset it raises generations who mistake opportunism for merit and selfishness for strength.

Privilege survives through excuses and denial. It convinces people that what they hold was rightfully earned and that others simply did not try hard enough. In that point of arrogance, the pain of those who were never given the same ground to stand on is ignored as nothing and their struggle is treated as failure.