I was leaving the parking lot of The Home Depot in Seaside and I just missed the light. So I was the first car he showed his sign to. He had caught me at a weak moment. I dug in my pocket and handed him a few dollars. “God bless you. … Where y0u from?” So I told him I was from Gustine and was on my way back home. “Yeah, I saw Merced.” (That was the license plate holder from Merced Honda on the front of my Element, splattered with bugs from the Central Valley.) “I would have sworn you were from Pebble Beach.”
A thirty second conversation while waiting at a red light and he knew. The stain of privilege remains after all these years and my repeated attempts to lose it.
I grew up in a small gated community which was eventually incorporated into Rolling Hills Estates. I went to a prestigious public high school. Most of my classmates came from even more privileged families than mine. But I knew I had plenty of privilege which I had done nothing to deserve, including an uncanny ability to see the solutions to math problems without having to work them out. Privilege from the place I lived, and the family I was from, the education I had received, and the intellectual gifts I had been given. I knew I had it and it made me very uncomfortable.
When I had to register for the draft I decided that it wouldn’t be right to take advantage of my privilege and get a college deferment. I went to college but I didn’t apply. My lottery number was 50 so I was drafted into the army at the end of my freshman year. I ended up enlisting in the Navy because they would guarantee that I could be a hospital corpsman and I wouldn’t have to sacrifice my moral beliefs that killing was wrong for any reason. (I did use a bit of my privilege there.) Four years as an enlisted man didn’t really help to lose the privilege.
Later I made a more radical attempt. I picked peppers for a season. The crew boss told me the first day that he had never seen anyone who wasn’t a Mexican last more that three days on his crew. But he saw that there was something unusual motivating me, so if I could make to the fourth day I might be able to become part of the crew. I worked beside migrant workers, documented and undocumented, through the heat of the day. But in the evenings and on Sundays I still lived in my privileged world. When the season ended in the fall I got my bonus for making it to the last day and I went back to my old life with the stain of privilege still there.
I am privileged in ways too numerous to count and I can’t lose it’s stain. But I don’t have to use it to get ahead of someone else. And I don’t have to defend it or wall myself within it.
A book I picked up this week helped me to get a better focus on this: Mindset, by Carol Dweck. Here’s a brief summary of the two mindsets the author describes:
- Fixed Mindset (intelligence is static): Leads to a desire to look smart and therefore a tendency to avoid challenges, give up early, see effort as fruitless, ignore useful negative feedback, feel threatened by the success of others.
- Growth Mindset (intelligence can be developed): Leads to a desire to learn and therefore a tendency to embrace challenges, persist in the face of challenges, see effort as the path to mastery, learn from criticism, find lessons and inspiration from the success of others.
It seems to me that these two mindsets can apply to other privileges as well as intelligence, privileges applying to race, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, as well wealth, education, and class. Although I have no research to back this up, I think of these as the Status Mindset and the Mobility Mindset.
- Status Mindset (my privileges are rightfully due me): Leads to a desire to defend my privileges and therefore a tendency to avoid challenges and risks, to blame others for my challenges, to see my effort as a justification of my privilege, to minimize the effort of those without my privilege, to ignore people who are different from me, to feel threatened by the success of those who desire to share the privileges I enjoy.
- Mobility Mindset (a better life can be earned): Leads to a desire to achieve a better life and therefore a tendency to embrace challenges, to persist in the face of challenges, to see effort as the path to a better life, to learn from criticism, to find lessons and inspiration from the success of others in improving their lives.
Which mindset dominates a person’s thinking is not dependent on the amount of privilege that person has. A rich white, highly educated, heterosexual man can share the same mindset as a poor hispanic lesbian high school dropout.
Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. (Philippians 2:4-7)
The differences in the current immigration debates reflect the difference between these two mindsets. Immigrants to the United States, almost by definition, tend toward a Mobility Mindset; they desire a better life, embrace the challenges, persist, and expend tremendous amounts of effort to achieve that better life. Those who oppose immigration seem to tend, though not as strongly, toward a Status Mindset.
In her book, Carol Dwerk encourages people to move from a Fixed Mindset toward a Growth Mindset. I do as well. But this post is really an encouragement to move in the direction of a Mobility Mindset, no matter where your mindset is right now, and no matter how much privilege you currently enjoy, even if you can never be free of the stain of privilege.
