Deconstructing Academic Writing: Continuing a Conversation on Christian Privilege (Personal Perspective) (Report‪)‬

The topic of privilege has been a staple of multicultural education over the last decade and a half, perhaps most famously explicated by McIntosh (1988). Privilege may be an active mindset of intentional devaluation of other worldviews, but it exists most perniciously as a sort of inertia of perceptions, most often analogized as the water within which a fish swims, the fish being unaware that the water is even there because of its very omnipresence. It consists of unquestioned assumptions and unasked questions, of things that 'everyone knows' and upon which 'everyone' is presumed to agree. This establishes a hegemonic discourse that causes many voices to be shut out of full participation in the cultural conversation, as the norms of discourse do not include their perspective and standpoint (Hardiman & Jackson, 1997; Young, 1990, 2002). The privileged assume their own standards as universal and their self-agency as individual, which enables their denial of individual agency (replaced with stereotyping and group classification; see Cortes, 2000; Hardiman & Jackson, 1997) or the legitimacy, relevance, and importance of other cultures or voices (especially voices of critique) that might arise from them (Delpit, 1995; Howard, 1999). It is most familiar as 'White privilege,' but the concept can be (and has been) broadened to apply to other hegemonic groups--males, heterosexuals, affluent classes, etc. (e.g., Code, 1991; Hardiman & Jackson, 1997; McIntosh, 1988).