I recently took Nicole Brewer's Anti-Racist Theatre course (and by recently, I think it was in the summer, because what is time?) and ever since I have been following her on Instagram (highly recommend!)
A while back (again, because whatever, we invented time and inventions sometimes become meaningless), she posted this on Instagram:
When we talk about power, we are talking about your level of protection. When preventing and reducing harm, we need to use our power to protect the most vulnerable communities. How are you currently using your power?
It's another useful framework for understanding what it means to hold privilege or power. White privilege protects you from racial discrimination, from police violence. Wealth privilege protects you from hunger, from exploitation. Male privilege protects you from sexual violence, from gender-based discrimination.
The protection isn't perfect. Men are still victimized by sexual violence and white people are still brutalized by the police. But it does happen less often. It's like an umbrella: sometimes it fails and flips open or springs a leak, but generally, the people holding them are going to be a lot less wet than those without.
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