Diversity Educators Privilege Discussion

The other night, March 29th, I had the pleasure of attending one of the diversity educators meetings. At this meeting, I felt very welcomed by everyone attending, and there was food, which is always a plus.  At this meeting, we all participated in an interactive game where everyone was assigned a card from a regular deck of playing cards. Each card represented a social class where aces were at the bottom of the social hierarchy and kings were at the top. There were subcategories where the lower class consisted of cards like 2-4, middle class was 6's and 7's, and the upper class was face cards. Everyone could see what card you were, but you had no knowledge of what was on your card. We all then interacted, treating each other in a manner that would reflect their status. So, kings were obviously treated fantastically--like royalty--while aces were treated like scum. Once the activity was finished, everyone guessed what category they fell into based on how they were treated by others. 

Now this exercise caused people to behave in a exaggerated way in order to exemplify prejudices, but a point was still clearly made. Many people in society are treated differently based on a single attribute. Additionally, many people are mistreated because of things they have no control over. While this exercise may not have captured the more subtle ways people portray their racism, sexism, and other prejudices, it did still show a variety of ways people are discriminated against. Lower class cards were ignored, ostracized, and even openly ridiculed. Something as simple as someone's tone of speech during this exercise was very indicative of what kind of people they were talking to: you could clearly hear the disdain regarding aces and the respect directed toward kings. 

During this exercise, I was a jack, so I was treated quite well, but it was honestly quite difficult to watch others being mistreated because of a randomly assigned card. This card did not reflect their personal character, but rather, it labelled and defined them simply because the game dictated it to be so. The blatant prejudice in this game echoes that found in American society, which is honestly quite sad. Things like this remind me of why we as a society need to rally together and eradicate such prejudices. People should be judged on their character, not on attributes like nationality, sexuality, religion, etc.