Adaptation 2.0 (revisiting a concept)

To my dismay, I grew tall young, reaching 5 feet, 11 inches while still in grade school.  It was hellacious at the time; there were no redeeming advantages to being this tall that I could locate, a view I held well into young adulthood.  As a young academic, the tide turned and I discovered that being 5 feet, 11 inches could be very useful. 

Because I was often the only women in a meeting, on a committee, as academe was struggling to integrate women into their structures, this “new world order” was confounding to many men.  I found that being 5 feet, 11 inches, wearing 3-inch heels, I was often one of the tallest persons in the room.  What I “lost” in gender I partially regained in height. I found it was harder to be patronizing or mansplaining to a woman two heads taller than you. Height had become an advantage for me

Advantage is defined as a condition or circumstance that puts one in a favorable or superior position. It does not address the conditions or circumstances; it does not clarify the nature of the favorable or superior position.  I prefer this word to “privilege”, often used as a synonym.  Privilege is defined as a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.  I think it goes beyond the meaning of advantage, and indeed in daily use, often includes an undertow of snarkiness or resentment of the person with privileges.

I never really felt privileged to be tall, I just knew it was an advantage. I could, however, have treated it like a privilege, what tall women can do that short women cannot do, something that made me special.  It seems to me the although the two terms seem analogous, one has a bit more bitterness embedded in both its meaning and its impact. Here I am purposefully reflecting on advantage.

The reality is that if you have an advantage, others are often aware of this, and may be quite specifically so because they do not have the advantage. Some others may have little awareness of this advantage. I was conscious of my height as an advantage on the job; I knew some knew this, I knew many others did not. If you have an advantage and you are aware of it, you also make choices about how you capitalize on this advantage.  There were meetings where I judged that wearing my 3-inch heels was imperative, others where this was not even a consideration.

Interestingly, I never encountered someone who referred to my height or made comments about how tall I was when we were differing with one another; I just knew having to look up at someone one or two heads taller than you shifted the tone of the exchange and I benefitted from this advantage.  If people resented this advantage or hated when it added to my capacity to have an impact, the concerns were never presented to me directly.

This arduous description of my experiences with advantage provides a road map to the human dynamics about advantage. Life, in a myriad of ways, cultures, in a myriad of ways, and human behaviors, in a myriad of ways present conditions and circumstances where one or another person is in a superior position or favorable position in relationship to others. Advantage is ubiquitous.

Those with advantages tend to use them to meet their needs, goals and dreams. The level of awareness of their advantages varies, with many having little or no awareness that they have an advantage; they just “use” it. Some see that they have advantages but have learned to perceive and defend them as earned possessions or birthrights.  This isn’t really true but it does reveal the degree to which we humans want to retain our advantages.  Because I have aged, I am now much shorter and I don’t like it much. I am only 5 feet, 4.75 inches tall.  As you can see, I am not adapting well, insisting on that .75 inches to buttress the tragic 4-inch news. I have lost my advantage.

One of the most compelling discussions I have found about the loss of advantage was an interview conducted with Bakari Sellers, an American attorney, political commentator, and politician. As an African American and former member of the House in South Caroline, he of course has had numerous opportunities to study advantage and its impact.  He notes that when you have an advantage, “you feel equality is oppression”. Losing the advantage is not just a loss; it is an act of oppression from the parties removing the advantage.

There is something stark…and painfully true about this statement.  And I think it helps to reveal one critical source of the chaos we are observing both nationally and globally.  Many people feel that they had advantages that have been taken away.  The push for “equality” does not feel like fairness, it feels like oppression.  If you think your advantage is a birthright, this trauma is even deeper and more primal.

It seems to me self-evident that being born a white male used to be a sure bet in the advantage casino.  This is simply no longer true.  People want to dismiss the depth of reaction to this substantive shift, as if white men should ponder, and agreeably note that they too want the change in advantage distribution that places limits on them (also best called losses).  The old pattern was not one of years or decades; it was one of centuries and it was global. Even a naïve understanding of human behavior knows a centuries old pattern might not shift easily or quickly.

I used to have this fantasy that one of the best possible groups to help the planet struggle through this shift would be “white women” (also called beige women by people like me). It was my belief that we “white women” were better equipped to understand this shift from advantage to equality because we had in depth experiences with both sides of the “advantage coin”.

“White women” had the obvious advantage of being white.  This advantage was considerable though I often felt “white women” were reluctant to admit this fact. Concurrently, we had the status of women both nationally and globally, where equality was a struggle much of the time and gains were often 2 steps forwards and 1 step back, over and over again. We knew how both sides worked.  We were actually experts at the entire dynamic.

I think this fantasy was naïve on my part, and Bakari Sellers observation helped me better understand why this was true. One of the most interesting things about advantages is that you often don’t even realize you have them. 

 I grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, hardly the heart of southern racism, yet African Americans in this city were required to ride in the back of the city buses. As a young child, I occasionally rode the bus to visit my grandmother; I had no idea that I could sit anywhere but some people on the bus did not have that option.  It never occurred to me.

Because we may lack awareness of our advantages, we may simply take them for granted, indeed treating them as birthrights though we may never think this consciously.  If someone decides to define my birthright as not true, threatens to remove my advantage, and gives that advantage to others who I suddenly realize did not have the advantages in the past, it is likely I will not respond well. I may feel “oppressed”!

So white women have something “to lose” in the move from “advantage” to “equality”. Though they know the hardship of disadvantage, rather than responding with understanding and compassion, they may feel the fear of disadvantage, sense the lurking possibility of “oppression” as too troublesome to risk losing their advantage.  Nothing motivates like fear.

I do think every person can study their biography and discover a moment where they thought they had an advantage and they did not.  At the time of my divorce, I had a history of wage earning, had a successful career, and was ready to buy my own house having owned two houses with my former husband.  I made a call to activate the electric service in my new home and was told I could not have it activated because I did not have a “credit record”.

I was incredulous. I explained that everything in my prior marriage had been owned or managed legally with both my name and my former husband’s name A very nervous electric company employee, a woman, explained to me that this may be true, however at the point of divorce, under current law, all credit data accrues to the husband and the former wife has no credit status. 

It was as if I were erased.  The woman explaining this was pained, I could tell, as she listened to me rant and rave. As I slowly defused, she explained a way to solve the problem, which I do not remember even a little, and then quietly told me that she knew this would work because she had gone through the same awful realization and hoped this would help me.

That’s my story of an evaporating advantage. I consider it one of my most valuable life lessons, and am now grateful for the nuanced teaching it provided.  This truncated version I just wrote only tells the raw skeleton of the story; it reverberates. 

I believe advantage, and its disappearance, always provides invaluable life lessons, though often not fun ones. Over time I have learned that thinking your loss of advantage is oppression is one of the most dangerous self-delusions any person can indulge in, and I keep vigil on this insight about a dangerous human propensity.  I recommend we all do so. Maybe this is one way to diminish the chaos of our times.

“All oppression creates a state of war.”

- Simone de Beauvoir -

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