16 Power and Privilege Framework

In order to recognize how individual identities may intersect and overlap to create unequal opportunities and access power, especially within the university and more broadly in academia, we need to reinforce our understanding of equity, diversity, and inclusion within the framework of power and privilege. This course focuses on the development of an EDI mindset and the incorporation of EDI principles and practices in the research process and when working with other people in the research ecosystem. To this end, we have defined power and privilege below, as well as oppression and marginalization, to ensure all learners are working from the same lexicon.

Note: all definitions can be found on the EIO webpage: Equity & Inclusion Glossary of Terms

Power

Power is unequally distributed globally and in society; some individuals or groups wield greater power than others, thereby allowing them greater access and control over resources. Wealth, whiteness, citizenship, patriarchy, heterosexism, and education are a few key social mechanisms through which power operates. Although power is often conceptualized as power over other individuals or groups, other variations are power with (used in the context of building collective strength) and power within (which references an individual’s internal strength). Learning to identify and understand relations of power is vital for organizing progressive social change.

Privilege

Privilege can be defined as unearned cultural, legal, social, and institutional rights extended to a group based on their social group membership. Individuals with privilege are considered to be the normative group (such as those belonging to cisgender, white, able-bodied and other dominant groups), leaving those without access to this privilege invisible, unnatural or deviant. Most of the time, these privileges are automatic and the majority of individuals in the privileged group are unaware of them. Some people who can “pass” as members of the privileged group might have access to some levels of privilege. Having privilege does not mean that you never encounter hardship, but rather that the hardship that you encounter is not a result of your belonging to a privileged social group.

To learn more, see: “How to Recognize your White privilege – and use it to fight inequality” a TEDx Talk by Peggy McIntosh (2012).

Oppression

Oppression is the systemic and pervasive nature of social inequality woven throughout social institutions, as well as embedded within individual consciousness. Oppression fuses institutional and systemic discrimination, personal bias, bigotry, and social prejudice in a complex web of relationships and structures that shape most aspects of life in our society. As a combination of prejudice and institutional power, oppression reinforces historical and organized patterns of mistreatment that shape culture, society, and laws. These systems of oppression regularly and severely discriminate against some social groups while benefiting dominant ones (e.g., sexism, heterosexism, ableism, classism and ageism).

Marginalization

Marginalization refers to a social process by which individuals or groups are (intentionally or unintentionally) distanced from access to power and resources, and constructed as insignificant, peripheral, or less valuable/privileged to a community or “mainstream” society. The extent to which these groups are marginalized is context-specific and reliant on the cultural organization of the social site in question. In addition, marginalization describes a social process, and does not imply a lack of individual agency. Consider the use of equity-seeking groups vs. equity-deserving groups; here the shift in language moves the responsibility of action from the marginalized group to emphasize that equity should be accessible to all in a just society. Instead of focusing on the individual, the attention turns to the system inequities. The goal moving forward is to name how the system, structures, and policies/practices create barriers and limit equitable access to people from marginalized groups. By naming and clearly identifying those barriers and limitations, we are better positioned to dismantle them.

Microaggression

Microaggression refers to subtle, often unintentional, discriminatory actions, remarks or visual cures in our everyday interactions that communicate derogatory and negative messages, ideas or stereotypes about a group of people, usually belonging to socially marginalized groups (Sue et al., 2007). It involves verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults that reflect or reinforce stereotypes or biases based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, or other aspects of a person’s identity. These actions or comments may seem harmless or trivial to the person perpetrating them, but they can have a cumulative and harmful impact on the targeted individuals, contributing to a hostile or unwelcoming environment.