“Check your privilege” has been a phrase not new to the internet. While ‘the first use of it was in 2006, on the social justice site shrub.com, when a blogger calmly wrote about how everyone to a certain extent speaks from a position of privilege and they should take into account that others are not as privileged as them.’, it has been much used and debated over the following years.
From my own personal view, ‘check your privilege’ implies being aware of the privileges and comforts one happens to possess and largely takes for granted; considering them in relation to other people and remaining cognizant of them in understanding the difficulties and plight of others. Checking your privilege is to use a perspective shorn of our inherent assumptions and biases, which are rooted in our privileges, in understanding the state and situations of others, especially when they are riddled with hardships.
Maybe some of us need to check our privilege in a completely Pakistani context too, and so I’ll start with mine:
My experience of privilege has been immense owing to where, how and what I happened to be born as. I am a Sunni Muslim and a Punjabi. My privilege is encapsulated by the statement that I merely fall short of sex from fitting the image of the quintessential Pakistani: a Sunni Punjabi Muslim male. Nonetheless, I was born in a household, which considering the rest of Pakistan, can be categorized as affluent. I happen to belong to a family which, despite social pressures stemming from existing patriarchy, has always been supportive of my ambitions, aspirations and dreams; always had faith in my abilities and talents; and always encouraged me to pursue my potential in hope of my success, self-fulfillment and independence as person, and especially as a female.
While I live in a capacious house of my own surrounded by all kinds of luxuries, those brutally evicted from the katchi abadi in the capital remain homeless and helpless; their evictions having been conveniently cheered on by many with whom I share my class, beating the drum of what Aasim Sajjad Akhtar called “criminality, terrorism and illegality”. While I am free from the fears and threats of being targeted for my faith and sect, there are Ahmadis, Christians and Shias whose lives have been and continue to be periled by the danger every minute, every hour. While I am a Punjabi living in the relatively prosperous province of Punjab, closely entwined with the power structures of Pakistan, and the bustling urban provincial capital, there are those in FATA and Balochistan who suffer in silence only because they belong to the peripheries of Pakistan; a periphery deprived of its rights. While I complain about not getting a certain preferred course during a semester in my liberal arts education, there are thousands of boys and girls who are held back by their circumstances from the mere thought of education; countless girls whose aspirations and abilities were and are stifled before they blossom by the twisted and unjust notions of izzat and ‘tradition’.
From poverty to violence, I have grown up sheltered from the dominant realities and difficulties of life in Pakistan to an extent that cannot be summed up in any number of words; but perhaps the extent and expanse of how fortunate some of us are should not obstruct our realization of it. It is essential that we check our privilege for it is privilege that divorces and distances one from reality; it is privilege that keeps one ensconced in a bubble, which blinds to the struggles of others. And although the good fortune of various privileges may keep us from relating to the myriad difficulties and troubles most Pakistanis face, checking our privilege would help us understand that our experiences of life are not only distinct and not necessarily shared by everyone else, but hardly shared but by a handful among 200 million people. And most importantly, it would, at the end of the day, lend clarity and empathy to our perception of people and their realities, seeped in plight and struggle, by dislodging us from our rosy vantage point tinted by once again, privilege.
