Privilege or Advantage?

Powerful Positive Privilege Advantage

A dictionary usually defines privilege as a special immunity, right, or benefit enjoyed by a special individual or class.  Examples from history pertain to royalty or citizens.

Examples in our time include residence mansions for state governors.    Privileges enjoyed by elected officials in the federal government include the franking privilege, and exemption from the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare,

Popular use or abuse of the term privilege suggests that some advantages are given only to one or more other groups, based on gender or national origin.  Having read Hidden Figures recently, I have re-read some portions in light of what I perceive as abuse.  Summaries follow.

Hidden Figures (the book) is the factual account of black women who worked as mathematicians at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s.

Dorothy Vaughn was born in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri.  Her father was a waiter whose first wife died when Dorothy was two.  Her stepmother was a charwoman at the train station who taught Dorothy to read before she was of school age, and enrolled her in piano lessons. 

The schools she attended were black. During the Great Depression, she turned down graduate school at Howard University for a teaching degree and the chance at stable work, though two schools she taught for ran out of money.  She worked at a laundry boiler plant in the summer of 1943 in central Virginia.

Dorothy spurned extravagances and banked money.  She belonged to Beulah AME Church, but was the paid pianist for Farmville’s First Baptist Church.

Katherine Coleman Goble was the daughter of Joshua and Joylette Coleman of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.  She graduated from high school at 14, tutored by a black high school mathematics teacher.  She graduated college summa cum laude with degrees in mathematics and French, and, having turned down a chance at graduate school, became a high school mathematics teacher and wife and mother of three.

When her husband became too ill to teach his high school chemistry classes, Katherine Goble applied for the job and got it, in part because she could play the piano.

Mary Winston Jackson grew up in Hampton, Virginia, graduating with highest honors from Phenix High School, a black school.  She graduated from the Hampton Institute with majors in mathematics and physical science.  She managed the financial accounts for the USO, acting as hostess and pianist as well.  Her father was a pillar of the Olde Hampton Bethel AME Church.

After marriage and motherhood, Mary because a Girl Scout Leader.  She decided one day that her charges would never sing “Pick a Bale of Cotton” again because it reinforced negative stereotypes.

These women were given advantages, not privilege, succeeding in spite of a culture of the early Twentieth Century that made life for southern blacks so messy that the re-reader of Hidden Figures is inclined to vomit.

Powerful transmitters of positive cultural advantage (not privilege) pass on more than material wealth to their children and neighbors, and often no material wealth at all.  The powerful hand down good values, skills, examples, and wisdom.

Without wisdom, many beneficiaries of material wealth, such as lottery jackpot winners, find only futility and ruined lives.  Privilege?  Hardly.

Advantage came from ancestors and neighbors who were wise to blessings, and:

• Worked hard
• Sought liberty and opportunity of learning
• Fought bravely against oppression when possible
• Ran from overwhelming oppression when necessary
• Treasured integrity
• Were sensitive to problems
• Controlled themselves
• Forgave
• Stayed married
• Gave time and treasure to needy neighbors

Advantage came from ancestors and neighbors who were wise to snares, and:

• Distrusted human nature and contrivances
• Rejected prejudice and revenge
• Governed for common good
• Overcame social engineering efforts
• Found legitimate employment
• Put people ahead of profit and self-preservation
• Tolerated government
• Identified and outwitted extortion efforts
• Ignored feel-better sales pitches

Advantage came from ancestors and neighbors who were wise for community, and:

• Chose principle over popular culture
• Accepted challenges
• Relocated when other choices vanished
• Accepted occupation challenges
• Shared opportunity
• Supported ostracized individuals
• Asked for help as needed
• Required resourcefulness from offspring

Advantage came from ancestors and neighbors who had solid faith, and:

• Knew the God of nature
• Knew the sin of human nature
• Sought God’s help with personal inclinations to sin
• Accepted the perfect-lamb sacrifice of Jesus for forgiveness
• Studied Jesus’ teaching for life’s decisions
• Prayed daily for a clean heart and other help
• Made family the first church and the first wealth
• Brought church life into family life
• Made time and tools available to put faith into action

Advantage came specifically from

• Parents who married before making babies, and then stayed married
• Going to organized worship with family at least once per week
• Family scripture reading and prayer each night
• Encyclopedias before television
• Games requiring mental and physical dexterity
• Piano lessons, providing discipline and models of fraction, ratio, per cent
• Newspaper routes or other such legitimate business enterprises
• Detasseling seed corn or other difficult hand labor, requiring stamina
• Having friends for play: baseball, basketball, football, croquet, soccer
• Parents who abstained from alcohol and other recreational drugs
• Church family, to share blessings and prayer concerns

…and above all, used ancestral and neighbor privileges to glorify God.

Every so-called advantaged person that I have known (and can recall) had many of these advantages working in their favor.  Not all such persons were Christians.  And (surprise!) some were born and raised in equatorial Africa.

Six uses of fractions in the photo: piano music, ruler, measuring pitcher, clock, fraction parts of circle, coins.