Disadvantages Of Privilege In America

540 Words3 Pages

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, privilege is "a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor." To me, has to do with someone having a clear advantage of another. One example of an advantage of privilege would be to be able to afford college while the ones who cannot go to college are at a huge disadvantage. When it comes to society, privilege tends to be a very mixed opinion on what it actually means and to some, if it even exists or not. The biggest problem with understanding privilege is that it is not black and white and can vary drastically change between person to person. One person may think privilege only has to do with only race while another one may think it has to do with gender. While both people …show more content…

It took America hundreds of years for African Americans be freed from slavery and to have some of the same rights as the White American had. A major problem with fixing privileges and making them available to everyone is that people are resistant to change. People like having a pattern or routine for their life and do not like the new unexpected things added or changed to their life. Another major problem is that those with the privileges are not willing to easily give them up. People like having the privilege as it is a sort of power over those who do not have it and humans crave power. For example, White Americans had African Americans as slave and while today we consider that to be very morally wrong, back then they did not see a problem with that as they liked having the privilege of people doing their work for them and having power over them. One thing about privilege that is hard to overcome is when it has been a way of life for over hundreds of years. Throughout history, men were the ones who were in charge, had land, could vote, etc... Women were not able to do these things because that's just how society viewed the matter. They felt that men having those privileges and women not having them was the norm. So, when women wanted to right to be able to vote in the early to mid 1800s, the men thought it was wrong and even extreme radical. It wasn't for another hundred years before women gained the right