Diversity – Activity 2

Understanding privilege A

Activity type:
Cognitive method -(Self-) awareness

Learning Goal:
The participant will be able to identify and understand the influence of culture, age, gender, religion, and social class on identity, needs, and emotions in someone’s life and how these can be of advantage or disadvantage in a given time or place.
Privilege is a key element in perpetuating oppressive systems; “a right, favour, or immunity, granted to one individual or group and withheld from another.”
Specificities: Individual activity, but can also be implemented in groups for the reflection part. The learners can go through the privilege list alone and then come back in one group to reflect upon their experience over the activity.

Duration:
1 hour

Material needed:
“The privilege list”


Instructions

You will be presented with a list of privilege statements. If you don’t identify with the statement or feel like it is not true based on your experience, you will click on it signifying that you don’t identify with that particular privilege.

It is proposed you could work in a group after having marked all your answers. (2 or more persons to see the differences among your answers).

Questions for reflection:
  • How did you feel doing this activity?
  • How was it to consider the number of non- privileges (don’t identify answers)?
  • How was it to notice the non-privileges of others in your group while for you the same statements exist as privileges? (in case you worked in a group)
  • What does it feel like to have or not to have certain privileges?
  • What does privilege mean to you? How does it affect you?