Privileged- it’s almost a dirty word. It’s one of the things that we try to avoid in civilized conversation. We avoid it as though it’s something we don’t acknowledge, but why? Maybe because, unlike race or gender, it’s a classification that one can’t obviously see. But, really, you can see this classification, because it becomes evident in how many scuffs are on someone’s shoes and what name brand is written on the tag hanging out of their white shirt. It shouldn’t be important, but it is.

I recently watched an extremely thought provoking video that put this into a visual. Imagine there are fifty people lined up in a race to win one hundred dollars. Then, for every read fact that applies to you, you can take two steps forward. Step forward if your parents are still married, you grew up with a father figure, you never had to help your parents pay bills, you always knew where your next meal was coming from. By the end, there was a group of people so far ahead, it became obvious that one of them would win the hundred dollars. For the group standing in the back, not having taken any steps forward, that was just tough luck. It doesn’t mean that they’re out of the race, it just means some of them were handed a head start, while others had to race twice as hard just to have a hope of keeping up.

What also became apparent in this scenario was the people that were fortunate enough to have a head start. This head start was given to them not by anything they had done, but by the circumstances they were lucky enough to have been born into. For the people ahead, the majority of them didn’t realize how far ahead they really were until they looked back. This was how I felt while participating in a community service project this fall. While helping out in an “underprivileged” school, I caught a glimpse of the library. If every student wanted to check out a book, there wouldn’t be enough. In contrast, the library of my elementary school growing up had the same amount of books that made up this entire library on just one of our many shelves. Each student that went to my elementary school could probably check out two or three books and there’d still be enough on the shelves.

In the end, being privileged means that at the end of the day, we can leave what is their reality. We can come and go as we please, doing our community service, eating at the best hole in the wall restaurant, but while we can walk away, and come back as we please, this is their life, and this is their every day. What really kills though is that unless the people with their head start look back, they will never notice what they are. They will never notice the extreme luck and fortune and chance that they have quite literally been given. They will never notice what it means to be privileged.