Power and Privilege.

Understanding our individual and institutional power and privilege is an important first step in identifying how we can best serve our communities.


POWER

Power is the ability to influence others and impose one’s beliefs. All power is relational, and the different relationships either reinforce or disrupt one another. Anti-discrimination includes not only understanding individual relationships but cultural ones. Individuals within a culture may benefit from power that they are unaware of. Power can be used negatively—whether intentionally or not—but it can also be a tool for good.

INSTITUTIONAL POWER

The ability or official authority to decide what is best for others. The ability to decide who will have access to resources. The capacity to exercise control over others.

PRIVILEGE

Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural, and institutional levels and gives advantages, favors, and benefits to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of target groups. In Canada, privilege is granted to people who have membership in one or more of these social identity groups:

Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe that they have earned the privileges that they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and they are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.

Unlike targets of oppression, people in dominant groups are frequently unaware that they are members of the dominant group due to the privilege of being able to see themselves as persons rather than stereotypes.

People in dominant groups in Canada tend to be:

  • Christians

  • Middle or owning class people

  • Middle-aged people

  • English-speaking people

  • White people

  • Able-bodied people

  • Heterosexuals

  • Males and binary gender identities

Understanding Power

Understanding Privilege

Four Levels of Oppression/“isms”:

  • Personal: Values, Beliefs, Feelings

  • Interpersonal: Actions, Behaviors, Language

  • Institutional: Rules, Policies, Procedures

  • Cultural: Beauty, Truth, Right