ABSTRACT
A mentor suggested to me some years ago that privilege is not having to make oneself intelligible to anyone else. That conversation preceded (temporally) and exceeded (conceptually) the recent years of wokeness debates, cancel culture, and arguments over who does or doesn’t have various forms of privilege, whether social, historical, gendered, geographical, racial, or otherwise. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the original claim that has helped it weather through time and trends in my memory, suggesting something of the insight’s durability. And anyone who has struggled to make their concerns or existence intelligible to another who wields that simpler form of privilege is likely to experience something of its confusing futility. Perhaps there are times we ourselves have wielded that privilege as well, so that if something is not important to us, it is not important at all.
