Privilege

Abstract

The concept of privilege as used within both research and everyday activism refers to the automatic attribution of value to particular individuals on the basis of their group membership. This attribution results from living in societies where particular groups of people are seen as the norm. The accrual of privilege to certain groups of people is the product of historical factors that have served to legitimate a particular group of people as the norm against which all others are compared. Privilege is also something that individuals who occupy a privileged social identity are invested in maintaining. As such, understanding privilege involves examining how people living in the present are willing to perpetuate historically unjust modes of distributing social, symbolic, cultural, and economic capital, primarily to their own benefit.