The word privilege is a hot button these days. It has always had an edge to it. Or perhaps better said, a boundary. It comes from Latin through French and was first a legal term that expressed the difference between those to whom the general laws and customs pertained and those who benefited from "private laws."
Add to that history our own "American" story of revolution against the Lords and a King, of economic struggles both agrarian and industrial, of doughboys and GI's (read citizen soldiers) and grandparents with Depression memories saving string and wrapping paper and what you get is permission for every one of us to bristle against the label "privileged."
But it is a sneaky, in some cases poisonous trick that has us recoiling against that truth about ourselves. Since 2012 it has only taken $34,000 per person per year to qualify an individual as within the global 1%. For a household of 4 that amount would be $136,000.* So it is important to understand that income plays the role it plays but there are other factors.
For instance, most of us have a way of recognizing a group of people with wealth greater than our own. We can imagine a middle income space to put ourselves below "them" and above others. The global measures cited above should trigger some caution in our estimations. When roughly 30% of those gaining $34k/year worldwide are citizens of U.S. it's easy to notice how quickly skewed our scale becomes.
As I said there are other factors we must take into account because that thing we call privilege is not simply a function of wealth. The button gets hotter when you add race to the formula. Besides, the word race is it's own hot button. But we can learn something here that should help us understand an effect of those privileges created by income.
Most of us reject labels like racist or privileged because of an internal measure. We don't intend prejudice and from within our own thoughts and feelings read what feels like fairness or at least a polite restraint. I can feel my mother's firm but silent grip guiding me to the "white only" water fountain in 1960 Anderson, SC.
And there it is. Privilege and prejudice are not just private laws that can be practiced by personal pieties or polite mindsets. They are systemic. Every limit or boundary from which nearly all of us benefit puts someone else away. That's what the other side of private means. And because they are systemic, they demand of us -- call us the 30% -- more than a bite of the tongue or a donation to a cause.
There is a world that needs us to do more than that. We are the system just as much as we are its beneficiaries. Our thinking must reach towards justice and stop measuring from within our own private laws/lives those individual "repairs" of privilege and prejudice.
There will be times, there have already been too many of them when we expect our church to provide us a place away from the world. Only if we return with a renewed resolve to sacrifice more of our own lives can the church be our sanctuary. That's our privilege: to find nourishment and rest so that we can turn the arc of our moral universe toward justice.**
* https://money.cnn.com/2012/01/04/news/economy/world_richest/index.htm
**MLK, Jr. paraphrase of Theodore Parker d.1860 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Parker
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