An Interview with Bob Pease. The questions were compiled by Mark Evans who is a member of Real Utopia’s Outreach and Events Team. We are also exploring the possibility of organising some live talks with Bob on the topic of privilege. Feel free to get in touch if you have any question: https://www.realutopia.org/contact

Could you give a brief biography of who you are, where you live and how you came to study and write about privilege. 

I was born in 1949 in a working-class family in Sydney in Australia. I left school at 14 and worked in factories and timber yards for the first five years of my working life before meeting someone who became a catalyst to rethink my life. I went to ‘night-school’ at a local technical college to complete years 9 and 10 of high school equivalent and saved sufficient money to support myself through an intensive 9 month course to complete the equivalent of years 11 and 12 of high school. I later went to university as a mature-age student, benefitting from a free university education during a period of a progressive Labour Government in Australia. I studied Environmental Design and Social Work and worked as a Community Development Officer in the fields of housing, health care and unemployment for a number of years before undertaking a Masters thesis on radical forms of social work, and then a PhD thesis on men who supported feminism (during my early years of lecturing in social work education).

In social work, I was part of the radical tradition, exploring Marxist, feminist, anti-racist and decolonial approaches to social work theory and practice. While teaching critical theory in social work education, I was also involved in seeking ways for engaging men in challenging sexism and men’s violence. So I started out being interested in men’s complicity with patriarchy and how to challenge the deeply internalised sense of entitlement and male privilege that so many men exhibited. I started thinking more broadly about privilege when I attended my first conference on critical studies of whiteness and I noticed many parallels of white people’s defensiveness about white supremacy and men’s defensiveness of patriarchy. Also, at the time, all of the radical and critical social work books were focused on challenging oppression and empowering the oppressed. So, at one point, I had one of those ‘light bulb’ moments when I pondered: why don’t we interrogate privilege. So that was the motivation to write the first edition of Undoing Privilege in 2010.

How do you define privilege?

I usually start with a definition by Alison Bailey, who defines it as ‘systematically conferred advantages individuals enjoy by virtue of their membership in dominant groups with access to resources and institutional power that are beyond the common advantages of marginalised citizens’. I see it as the ‘flipside’ of oppression. So for every group that is oppressed, there is another group that is privileged. It’s always easier to focus on ways in which we are disadvantaged than ways in which we are privileged. I talk about it being often invisible to people who have it, how people in privileged groups feel their lives are normal, how it is constituted as ‘natural’ and how it is internalised as a sense of entitlement.

When the first edition of my book was published in 2010, there was very little published writing about privilege. However, when I worked on a second edition, published in 2022, there was considerably more awareness of privilege. However, as the concept of privilege moved more into the mainstream, it became deradicalized and individualised. Privilege checklists and individual testimonies of having a particular form of privilege took attention away from the systemic injustices that underpinned privilege. So I talk now more explicitly about complicity in structures and processes that perpetuate systemic privilege as distinct from possessing individual privilege.

Can we think of the concept of privilege as a synonym for injustice? If so, how do you think that helps?

Because it arises from ‘systemically conferred advantages’, that are unearned as Bailey puts it, it is by that definition a form of injustice. I think that it is useful as a concept because it encourages people who are in principle opposed to injustice to recognise their complicity with that injustice because it benefits them. So many social and political activists who oppose oppression fail to see the ways in which they perpetuate the very oppression they oppose.

Where does privilege come from and how is it maintained? 

All forms of privilege come from systemic structures of dominance through the forms of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, anthropocentrism, and other systems of domination, that serve the interests of some groups of people at the expense of others. It is perpetuated through systems of governance and dominant ideologies and imaginaries that are internalised by people who perpetuate it, sometimes against their own self-interest.

Most Leftwing analysis focuses on things like discrimination, oppression and inequality. In contrast, you focus on privilege. Why do you think that makes sense? 

While I think that all concepts, including that of privilege, can be co-opted and deradicalized, for me, privilege allows us to focus both on the systemic and structural dimensions of oppression and inequality and the personal investments that people have in perpetuating those systems even when they oppose them. However, while I think it’s important to interrogate privilege from within, I do not think systemic change will come from within privilege. It’s rather that when people organise necessary social movements from below that challenge privilege, those in positions of privilege can aspire to forms of allyship or what I would now call becoming ‘accomplices’ and ‘co-conspirators’, to support them.

What do you think are the main forms of privilege in the world today that need to be addressed.

When I published the first edition, I focused on six different dimensions of privilege, Western dominance, class elitism, white supremacy, patriarchy, institutionalised heterosexuality and ableism. Of course, they were not the only systems of privilege and readers and activists took me to task for not addressing anthropocentrism, adult-centrism, cis privilege and religious privilege, all of which I included when I wrote the second edition. Some of these forms of privilege are more systemically embedded in institutions, structures and ideologies than others and this varies as well between different geo-political contexts. So, in some contexts, it will be more important to challenge capitalism and class divisions. In others, challenging patriarchy or colonialism may be more important, while at the same time recognising that all of these forms of privilege are interconnected.

How do those forms of privilege relate to each other?

We can’t untangle them. Capitalism is gendered and raced. Patriarchy is classed and raced etc. So, for strategic reasons, we might foreground a particular form of privilege but we have to continually ask ourselves, for example, What are the gender issues involved in this particular campaign against white supremacy? Whose class interests are implicated in this particular campaign against men’s violence against women? And so on.

Is organising to negate privilege enough? Or do you think we also need to propose a positive alternative to it? If so, what do you think that alternative is?

I think that we need to have a vision of an alternative form of society where everyone is able to flourish equally, where we all recognise our interdependence on each other and our entanglement with nature and non-human others. This will involve finding ways to prefigure different forms of relations with each other that foreground an ethic of care as an alternative principle. I think that the recently published Care Manifesto provides a good alternative model of how care ethics can inform politics, kinship, communities, states, economies and the world. Those who hold multiple forms of privilege, that is, white upper-class men in the global North, will find it most difficult to embrace vulnerability, emotionality, embodiment and a relational sense of self that is necessary to embrace such an ethic of care and solidarity.

The Left is in crisis. Do you think that clarifying and focusing on privilege could help to address that crisis?

I think that we need to create a new imaginary of a world beyond violence, domination, privilege and oppression and then work out what stops us enacting that in our lives; and what inhibits people we work with from being inspired by that. Recognising our complicity with various systems of privilege, and dealing with the distress that might raise for us, is useful I think in encouraging us to form better relationships of solidarity with those who are most disempowered.

Is there anything else that you would like to add before we finish?

I tend to think that it is useful to acknowledge the theoretical, political and personal dimensions of our activism. If we want to change the world, we need to get our theory right, we need to consider the political implications of the work that we do and we need to reflect on our own personal stake in the changes we advocate.