I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few weeks about privilege as a karmic phenomenon, and enlightenment as a pursuit of social justice.

Let me try to define ‘privilege’ in its social justice sense, for those who aren’t used to the term.  Your privileges are advantages you have that most of the time you don’t even see because they’re too ingrained.  If you’ve ever thought “so when I make the account registration page I can just ask people to tell me if they’re male or female”, that’s privilege—for lots of people the answer to the question ‘what’s your gender’ is so complicated and contextual it borders on offensive.  (This can be true for whole cultures, so this statement also is pretty heavily culturally privileged.)  Saying “well I worked hard in school so I got good grades on the SAT” displays other kinds of privilege—class privilege (kids from higher classes display lots of advantages on standardized testing) or ableist privilege (some folks’ mental conditions make standardized testing much more difficult for them).  “I love shopping in classy clothing stores—you get so much respect from the salespeople”—class privilege (I mean, obviously, right?  The word class is right there in the sentence), racial privilege, cis privilege, etc.  (Even the examples I’ve chosen here give you a sense of my privilege ecosystem: technocratic, classist, male, etc.)

So when Andy makes a statement that fellow-traveller Babs thinks is conditional—dependent, that is, on Andy’s position within the world—Babs can say “Andy, you need to check your privilege,” and (ideally) Andy can look back, realize how the the truth of his statement actually depends on who he is (his position, orientation & velocity in the world) in a way he didn’t realize, and think, “oh, right, my understanding is limited and I am now more aware of this and will remember it in the future!”

I think this is a great concept.  Taken in the right spirit, it can help people be aware of their advantages, and live more lightly and compassionately in the world.  But I’ve struggled to roll it into my daily psychology in healthy ways.  I don’t know if other people have this issue, but it’s easy for me to fail over from “I’m aware of my own respective advantages” to “I am fundamentally broken and I should regard all my thoughts, words, and actions with such suspicion that I am reduced to a mute paralytic ball.”  Which smacks, to me, of interpretations of doctrines of original sin that have prompted more psychological pain than good works in the minds of my friends who were raised in them.  So, how to walk the line?

Now, let me try to define karma as used in the Buddhism I grew up with / around, for those who aren’t used to that term.  There’s this World Religion 101 sense that karma is Fate kicking you in the metaphorical ‘nads for something you did in a past life—which isn’t the way that term’s used in the Buddhism I know.  That 101 version of karma says if your life sucks now, it’s your fault and you should just stop sucking so bad in the future.  The version I learned says: karma is social and physical cause and effect through history.  We’re all the products of decisions made before our time—by our parents, and their parents, and the guy who cut us off in traffic and made us pissed so that when we got to work we were rude to the manager who then was a dick to the fry cook who then burned all her orders so everyone got horrible tips all afternoon and Brenda ended the month five dollars short on her electric bill.  And so it goes.  Our every action vibrates off in all directions, affecting people we hate and love and have never met.  Best/worst part?  We are, ourselves, in our identities and in our actions, the product of karma—our every deed and choice is, at root, a response to stuff that’s happened to us before.

The Buddhism I know (and I’m pulling threads of this from Vajrayana and Mahayana and Theravada and Chan, so the notion’s pretty widespread) says: faced with such a crazy situation, our response is—must be—to wake up.  To seek freedom.  To become aware of all the ways in which we are constantly being produced by and bearing karma, the ways we inflict suffering and make choices not because we want to, but because (our background / our current condition / our psychological problems / our own blindness to the true nature of society) made us into a person who makes those choices.  Karma is a state of being unfree—you think you have free will, but actually you’re stuck doing the things karma tells you to do.  When you’re awake to the ways in which your actions are predetermined, you can act as a dampener for these karmic vibrations—when you become aware that suffering is being enacted through you, you can stop it.  You can save people “downstream,” calm the network, and improve conditions for everyone.

See how these concepts connect?  Then you’re smarter than me, because it took me a long time to get this far.

I thought for years that the Buddhism I knew was weak on social justice, because all that stuff about karma and suffering looked very psychological to me.  If you wake up in the way I’ve described, you feel better about your life and you’re nicer to people around you, and what does that change?  Well.  It changes a lot when you think about privilege as a karmic phenomenon.

Privilege isn’t pre-existing.  It emerges from history—infinite vibrations passing through these webs of karmic connection from the beginning of time to now, billions of choices conditioned by animal fear or by other choices made earlier.  We don’t realize that the life we live, the way we think, is oppressive, in part because the oppressions from which we benefit (and which are inflicted upon us) are the result of other people’s actions which themselves were karmically determined.  We don’t realize that we are the hungry ghosts, wandering around devouring one another’s entrails.  Waking up to that reality, we can stop inflicting unthinking damage on those around us, on our societies, and on ourselves.  And we can come to common cause in the struggle to wake up the universe as a whole: to damp the reactive flows of karma, the unconscious infliction of pain, and live a life of freedom and joy.  

I think this means that Buddhist mindfulness techniques can be a huge help in recognizing, and defeating, our own privilege, and in preventing ourselves from inflicting harm on others.  The same metacognition that lets a meditator recognize “this is an emotion” and let the emotion go, or that “I am thinking now” and stop, can be used to wake up to our own privilege and our defensiveness of that privilege, and to stop inflicting reflexive harm.  By being aware of our, and everyone‘s, karmically determined nature, not only in reflection but in real-time (in the middle of a conversation, say), we can meet others as fellow sentient beings rather than as puppets of our ancestors’ fears.

And as we reach for that goal, we can also start to work toward the bodhisattva vow: toward the liberation of all sentient beings.  Which is a big thought, and this is already a long blog post, so maybe I’ll just leave the essay here for now.