If Privilege Was Visual, It Would Look Like This

Originally published on Lefty Cartoons and cross-posted here with their permission.

Privilege can be near-invisible to those who have it. Without a conscious, deliberate effort to be aware of it, it’s almost never on our radars.

And because of this, being told that you benefit from systematic social favoritism can be hard to accept at first. It’s not uncommon to feel that people are telling you that your life is simple and that you don’t work for what you have.

But privilege is more complicated than that. This cartoon provides a useful visualization.

For more information on this topic, check out the following:

• Privilege 101: A Quick and Dirty Guide
• How To Talk To Someone About Privilege Who Doesn’t Know What That Is
• What Is White/Male Privilege?

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Barry Deutsch is the Portland-based author and cartoonist of Ampersand, a political comic with a generally progressive sensibility. A new Ampersand comic appears in every issue of Dollars and Sense Magazine. Barry attended Oberlin College in Ohio in the late 1980s, the School of Visual Arts in New York City in the 1990s (where he took classes from comics legend Will Eisner), and graduated from Portland State University several years ago. While at PSU, his political cartoons won the Charles M. Schulz Award. His current comics project is my comic book Hereville, a fantasy adventure comic about an 11-year-old Jewish girl. Check out his blog and follow him on Twitter @barrydeutsch.