Library Guides: Peace, Justice and Human Rights: What is Privilege?

Privilege

Privilege is the unearned advantages and benefits that some people receive because of their membership in a particular social group. It can be based on a variety of factors, including race, gender, religion, socioeconomic status, sexuality, age, and education level.

Privilege can be experienced on personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels. It's often unspoken and difficult to recognize without its absence. For example, someone may have privilege based on their race or ethnicity, but not have the same privilege based on their sexual orientation due to society's biases.

Privilege is often the result of systematic targeting and marginalization of other social groups. The social, economic, political, and psychological advantages that privileged groups hold come at the expense of marginalized groups.

General Privilege Books from Grasselli Library

The Inequality Reader by David Grusky; Szonja Szelenyi
ISBN: 9780813343457
Publication Date: 2006-08-29
In this new volume noted scholars David B. Grusky and Szonja Szelényi have assembled a compilation of the most relevant contemporary readings on social inequality that is also backed by a select list of the most fundamental classics, all from top names in the field.
Affect and Power by Paul Spickard (Editor); David J. Libby (Editor); Susan Ditto (Editor); Charles Joyner (Foreword by); Sheila L. Skemp (Introduction by)
ISBN: 1578067693
Publication Date: 2005-03-24
In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan published his groundbreaking work White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and opened up new avenues for thinking about sex, slavery, race, and religion in American culture. Over the course of a forty-year career at the University of California and the University of Mississippi, he continued to write about these issues and to train others to think in new ways about interactions of race, gender, faith, and power. Written by former students of Jordan, these essays are a tribute to the career of one of America's great thinkers and perhaps the most influential American historian of his generation. The book visits historical locales from Puritan New England and French Louisiana to nineteenth-century New York and Mississippi, all the way to Harlem swing clubs and college campuses in the twentieth century. In the process, authors listen to the voices of abolitionists and white supremacists, preachers and politicos, white farm women and black sorority sisters, slaves, and jazz musicians. Each essay represents an important contribution to the collection's larger themes and at the same time illustrates the impact Jordan exerted on the scholarly life of each author. Collectively, these pieces demonstrate the attentiveness to detail and sensitivity to sources that are hallmarks of Jordan's own work. David J. Libby, San Antonio, Texas, is the author of Slavery and Frontier Mississippi: 1720-1835 (University Press of Mississippi). Paul Spickard, Santa Barbara, California, is the co-editor of Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence and the author of Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Susan Ditto, Oxford, Mississippi, is the associate editor of Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.