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POWERED UP - AN INSIGHT BY THE IN GROUP

Investigo was thankfully quick off the mark – they made our daily lives so much easier. You could say it was an act of generosity. A show of trust. A commitment to supporting us. A privilege, even. But I’m not here to get into semantics.

Assumption’s the mother of all… misunderstandings

Article written by Alex Voskou, Content Specialist at The IN Group.

While attempting to be more understanding and respectful, we need to recognise that using the word ‘privilege’ insensitively can cause problems on many levels. Picture a large family living in a neglected area, barely scratching by on minimum wage. They’re unlikely to take kindly to being viewed as privileged on the basis of other criteria, such as their ethnicity. Now picture the other end of the scale. A person may acknowledge that they’re privileged in some ways and feel a huge sense of guilt about it – which, in turn, is also unproductive. There’s a danger that the word privilege can become a tool of one-upmanship – we might be of the same ethnicity, but you’re more privileged than I am because of your gender, for example – which is not conducive to productive debate and instead creates resentment. Does it distract us from actually dealing with issues such as racism and power? Do we need to reenvisage our use of this word? (link here) . In the last couple of years, there’s rightly been a greater focus on groups who may previously have been overlooked. We’ve seen this in business, the media, the entertainment industry and literature, where some have dismissed the traditional classics as the irrelevant, out-of-touch perspectives of the privileged. However, that isn’t always the case. George Orwell, for example, actively rebelled from his lower-middle-class heritage and chose to experience poverty first-hand, living on the streets of east London in the late 1920s. His work often criticises class inequality and attacks privilege: “Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, oh Lord, give me money, only money.”

A word beginning with P has caused a lot of consternation over the last year or so. No, it’s not ‘pandemic,’ ‘penalties,’ or ‘patriarchy.’ Nor, surprisingly, is it ‘parties.’

The word I’ve got in mind, the word that arouses almost as much annoyance, is ‘privilege.’ It’s become the ultimate abridged character assassination, an assertion that whatever role, rank, or bank balance a person may hold is attributable to who they are and where they’re from. That it’s not truly deserved.

The great leveller?

The social instability of 2020 – I’m thinking George Floyd and the riots up and down the US – really sharpened our focus on social inequality. It made us acutely conscious of people who are treated differently. It made us ask ourselves how we treat our fellow human beings and how we can be more tolerant, understanding and respectful. The pandemic has done the same. In some ways, it’s been a leveller, but in other ways it really hasn’t. There’s been a widely publicised disparity in the effects of COVID-19, with the poorest areas of England and Wales hit the hardest (link here) . While many of us take remote working almost for granted, we don’t all have jobs where remote working is possible. We can’t all afford laptops or broadband. We don’t all work for an employer who can provide us with the tools we need to keep working from home. When organisations issued company laptops to their employees at the start of the pandemic –

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

CREDIT - PEXELS