I’ve always had people in my ear telling me how privileged I am, that I should be grateful, never pout. I never saw the point in remarks like these because it would be coming from people who I occupy the same space as. The thing I’ve come to learn is that when these remarks are coming from those with whom you share a community, it grows to be a subjective matter on what privilege truly looks like. In this, I hated how looked down upon it’s made me feel because if I have as much privilege as people say I do, where are the effects of it? I don’t have a whole lot more money than anyone else, I don’t excise people based on their purpose to me. What are the markers of privilege and why does it make folks uncomfortable to talk about?

When I think about it, privilege has teeth. It’s a tangible animal, usually preying on weaker. This isn’t correct though. Perception of what privilege is versus what it actually means for the people who have it can feel like life is biting at you. In our culture we’ve grown to endure hardship and covet rewards for hard work, but come to witness that hard work does not always equal a reward. Some of the hardest working people I know live simple lives because they’ve worked so hard to even get to the point where they feel okay on a day-to-day basis, and that ambition is code for a will to live.

Hard working people don’t fight to be seen as hard working, they just are. Privileged individuals get caught up between needing to feel like the work they do proves important while also not feeling deserving of the things they have because they are privileged. There are different people in privilege who are humble about their circumstances, and there are some who choose to make it loud. I dated this guy once and he let me in on the fact that he actually did enjoy telling the people he dated that his family had money. It was one of our last conversations; he actively would give me frivolous indicators on how he could spend his money, but was simultaneously very watchful of finances. He would look up how much it would cost to Uber from Brooklyn to his house in Jersey just to end up taking public transportation.

This is also a means of the culture pervading our relationships with one another. In our society, humble bragging is a norm that’s been cultivated and globalized. It’s by no means a new thing though. Think of “evil eye” or nazar. People have coveted for as long as evolution has existed because it’s a means of telling you what you think will aid your survival, your prevalence. The culture has developed so much that it’s begun caving in on itself by way of hyper consumerism meeting this very normal human trait. The American way is that we push the message of working hard for results while the people with the most favorable results for the most part, did not work hard, and in fact exploited the people who do work hard for their own benefit. It’s even gotten down to Americans themselves spreading this rhetoric when the entire time, their hard work has more often than not been exploited for the sake of oiling the machine.

So now, above all, as we’ve progressed as a society and a race, it’s gotten to the privileged coveting, and even obsessing, over the disenfranchised. That’s why we see public figures and celebrities and their arm-outstretched association to Blackness. There’s intrigue in people who haven’t had things handed to them, there is beauty in fighting back or even choosing to go against a system that has tried to force its way around you and winning. I believe that in the attempt to commodify this level of work ethic though, the social consciousness has had ample opportunity to comment on the society that they actively participate in.

This is why people can critique when something feels inauthentic. When a behavior is authentic, it sells. If someone hasn’t worked for their spot, what’s the point in them having a spot? Great creationists are only great because they have the correct mix of talent and marketability. If you can be marketed and you have little to no talent, you may sell, but there is only the capacity to have a cult following because there is little to no impact on culture. If it’s generic, what is there to buy into? There’s low risk and low reward for people who are generic in this way, which leads me to my point.

Discomfort of the privileged is based in a lack of ingenuity. Little impact to the overall culture, nothing new to add to conversations. Privilege is safety, safety is privilege. Some of the most privileged people I know crave a lack of safety because it’s all they’ve ever known. This ties into another point that I have, that of the people who have only lived in means of safety and privilege, the creative among them wish to brush elbows with danger and disenfranchisement because they feel it informs their art.

The change in social media for example, from LA influencers to NYC influencers, or “creatives”, is a marker of this cultural destiny swap. If we think about it, America has no one common culture widespread inside of it besides individualism. When the culture is urging a way to make something of oneself, it buckles down under the fact that it’s also been promoting a monoculture of individualism, or pseudo culture as I’d like to call it. This is indeed propaganda as this undermines how anything actually gets done. Things only change when there is a wide array of people who congregate and make themselves useful. This is why people feel like their dreams can come true in New York City, but we see the actual effects, like homelessness, poverty, hunger, drug use and abuse being glossed over by transplants and their dreams.

Daring to dream in a world of terror is radical. It’s brave, it’s strong. I don’t we should hold people in contempt for dreaming, rather, I think we should hold into contempt the amount of people who dream of their own success and not the success and welfare of those around them. People want to live in places that are up and coming, we yearn for communion, belongingness. If someone plans on moving to New York City, their complaints about the culture and the underserved populous will always fall on deaf ears. If you contribute nothing to the culture, benefit from it, and exploit it or complain about it rather than understanding it, you are the discomforted privileged.

More often than not we let our misunderstandings or past experiences shape our future judgements, good and bad. To say privilege is an inherently bad thing is a misnomer. Privilege shouldn’t exist — period. Its existence proves to be an indication of social imbalance. While it’s no one person’s responsibility to uplift communities in that sense, we are all collectively responsible for acknowledging and acting upon what we directly contribute to the culture, alongside our commentary on it. That also shouldn’t make it an uncomfortable thing to do.

Learning how to correctly fit into a culture can be a hard thing, but acknowledgement is the first step to building relationships, not barriers.