How I Learned Privilege Exists

This essay was originally written and published in 2019. I've made slight edits in 2025 for clarity. My understanding of privilege, race, gender, and sexuality has evolved since this original post at age 24, but I stand by the lessons I learned at the time of writing. Perhaps the perspective in this essay will help someone else.

Peter Fenton, a boy who is both very white and very male

Before I really get started, let’s call out the elephant in the room that, as a white man, I’m probably not the best candidate to offer a wholesale lecture on privilege. At no point have the difficulties in my life come from the fact that I am white nor the fact that I am male. Most institutions here in the United States, especially the evangelical circles I grew up in, were made for people of my demographic to be the ones holding the most power. So with that in mind, I simply plan to offer my story of recognizing my own privilege and some of the ways my perspective changed.

It was October 2013 and I was a bright-eyed freshman at Wheaton College. For those of you not in the know, Wheaton is a private evangelical Christian liberal arts college that has produced many of the great Christian thinkers of the 19th and 20th Century. One of my professors was the mother of the creator of VeggieTales and I took most of my classes in a building called the Billy Graham Center. Another Wheaton alum also happens to be creator of Nightmare on Elm Street Wes Craven. These days, I'm much more on the Wes Craven end of Wheaton alum.

Anyway, I had one public speaking project standing between me and my very first Fall Break: to give a 10-15 minute presentation summarizing the arguments of two sides of any controversial social issues topic of my choosing without giving away which side I favored. Classmates had chosen topics such as abortion, gay marriage, war, et cetera. I recall #BlackLivesMatter had just emerged in its earliest iteration as a movement the previous summer and a classmate presented on that and laid out the reasons behind the organization and why some (white) people were taking issue with it. All of these were topics that fit the bill.

A week before the presentation, we had to go into our professor’s office and talk her through our proposed topic and outline for the two different sides of the issue. At the time, I considered myself a complementarian and was really into the ideas of “strong biblical manhood” and “biblical gender roles”. For those not fully in the know of American Evangelical speak, a complementarian (as opposed to an egalitarian) believes that God made men and women to serve different, complementary roles. The man is the spiritual leader of the relationship and is allowed to preach, the woman tends the home and raises children.

I don’t recall what exactly my plan was or how exactly I framed the topic, but I really wanted to do a presentation specifically about Men and Male Friendships. I walked into my professor's office and laid out my case for whatever “controversial topic” I tried to create about “the Male Experience” and she said to me, “This is not controversial. This is a project for nobody.”

Eventually, she guided me into a better project idea related to gender: I ended up outlining the cases for and against women being allowed to preach (I also ended up with an A on my presentation, not that you asked). But I left my meeting with this professor pissed off.

Why?, I thought, Why is nobody talking about white men like me? Why are my struggles in life not as real as women and people of color and gay people? (Yes, I do feel gross writing that question out now. And no, I wasn't fully out of the closet at the time I posted this essay in 2019). I never really asked that question out loud, but I really wanted to know the answer. That had to wait about a year.

Peter Fenton in 2014. Still very white and very male

It was now August of 2014 and I had just turned 19 the night before. I was a little more jaded than I was the previous year, but I held most of the same views. My first day of sophomore year had arrived and my very first class of the year was COMM 223: Gender and Communication with my new academic advisor, Dr. Emily Langan. Emily Langan was something of an anomaly within the evangelical Wheaton College faculty. Namely, she is a thoroughly career-minded woman who never married and never had children. While she is hardly the first person to ever exist in that category, if you will, she was one of the few on the Wheaton faculty in my time there. She earned my trust right away as someone authoritative to speak about communication and gender.

As the class went on through the semester, Dr. Langan would sometimes bring her own personal experience into the classroom to illustrate points. I was thoroughly surprised to hear the ways that she had been “other’d” within the evangelical church – and she had a lot to say about white men and how they hold power. You see, since I hadn’t considered myself to be sexist or racist or homophobic, I had never thought about sexism, racism, or homophobia being actual things women, people of color, and LGBTQ people experienced. Up to this particular semester, it had just been an annoyance to me, a white male, when someone would bring those things up.

I understand how the world works, I thought, and in my view of the world, of course nobody is actually racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. But why did Dr. Langan seem so right? It was a strange cognitive dissonance I felt for a while, that I could be both annoyed by things I didn’t think were real, but when Dr. Langan described them they sounded like she had a real perspective. Things finally started to click when I was taught Standpoint Theory.

“Different locations within the social hierarchy affect what is seen. The standpoints of marginalized people provide less false views of the world than do the privileged perspectives of the powerful. Strong objectivity requires that scientific research start from the lives of women, the poor, the LGBTQ community, and racial minorities.”

-Retrieved from A First Look at Communication Theory

Above is the sort of logline for Standpoint Theory, developed by Sandra Harding and Julia T. Wood. When Dr. Langan taught it to my class, she likened it to looking at the Eiffel Tower. If you’re standing inside the tower, as you’re climbing up, you don’t really see how the whole thing looks. You don’t get the external shape or the sense of how far up or down you are, you just sort of see the inside of the building, and you’re privileged to see the pretty view from where you stand.

A pretty(?) view from the Eiffel Tower. I haven't been inside the tower, so this was one of the first Google results for "view from Eiffel Tower"

So, great. Good for you, you have a pretty view. But you don’t necessarily see what the structure of the tower looks like, how it comes to that narrow point at the top. If you’ve never been outside the tower, you might even think folks are crazy when you hear them describe how the tower looks. So who can see the shape of the tower and speak to what it looks like on a structural level? It’s the people who are standing outside of it and can see everything, from the bottom to the top.

This illustration rocked my world. I had never realized that I was privileged in the ways that I’ve always been before that moment. This was when suddenly, it started to make sense that “Men’s Studies” isn’t a separate discipline in the way Women’s Studies is. Or that there’s no need for White History Month or Straight Pride Festivals. This was when my mind was opened up to consider the fact that I don’t know everything and should do a whole lot of listening to voices that don’t look or sound like my own before I open my mouth about a given issue, especially when it is not an experience I directly have.

This is about the extent of the structure you can see from the inside of the tower. I have no idea where in the tower this is, but that's kind of the point

If you were to ask me what I think men like me (of the white male species) should do to be the best men we could be, I encourage you to consider Standpoint Theory. Listen to the perspectives of the women in your life. Listen to the perspectives of the queer people in your life. Listen to the perspectives of the people of color in your life. If you don’t have those people in your life, find them! Find them for God’s sake. You may learn some things about your own life you had never considered before.

P.S. Another thing I took away from that Gender and Communication class is that people are, on the whole, more similar than they are different. There are far fewer differences between men and women than the shared humanity that we have. I wasn’t sure where to put that in the course of my blog post, but I wanted to include that as well.

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About Peter Fenton

Peter Fenton is a writer and director creating stories for stage and screen that make audiences laugh, think, and occasionally squirm. His Off-Broadway debut, dark comedy Abandon All Hope, premiered at Theatre Row in 2023, and his teen satire Coronation had its world premiere in 2024. His film work, including Night Voices and his directorial debut, Inherently Special, has earned awards on the international festival circuit. Based in New Hope, PA, Fenton works in marketing at Passage Theatre Company and freelances with McCarter Theatre Center and other regional arts organizations. www.byPeterFenton.com @peterfent