By Shazia Majale,
There are lots of blurred lines as far as the world goes. While one may want to believe they’re placed a step higher than the rest of their peers owing to what they have, how they dress, the kind of exposure they’ve evolved into, and so on, there are layers and layers of need to know basis kind of information that they don’t have access to.
Most of us have grown up equating privileges with materialistic infrastructure. To be privileged, though, is to enjoy some special rights or advantages that most people don’t have.
Just as a business mogul’s child stunts business parks and corridors of power sealing deals for the family’s company and is met with no hesitation is the same way a rogue gang collects ‘tax’ from small businesses in a slum without much resistance.
In both instances the business owners know what implications they’d suffer if they don’t do business with these two. Somehow, yet, if these two individuals met, one would think the other less deserving.
Having materialistic privileges is a means to a better end and that has been ascertained enough times, possessing information privileges is a means to making better, informed, fair decisions and life choices that are unprejudiced.
To be able to have a conversation with people from different ethnicities, economic, education, religion, and social backgrounds and not make them feel inferior to one’s own beliefs needs privileged information.
For one to be privileged, too, they don’t have to have been through atrocities that threatened their sanities.
One needs to be open to sentiments from others, to be open to corrections that possibly suggest there’s something you missed from the information that you have.
The same way information is diverse. If one feels the other is speaking from the point of privilege, they can make a point of letting others know without being emotional about it.