The universe has good news for the lost, lonely, and heart sick. The sugars are here, speaking straight into your ears.

I'm Steve Alman. I'm Cheryl Strade. This is Dear Sugars.

Oh dear son, won't you please?

She has some little sweet days with me.

I check my belly every day. Oh and this sugar, using my weight.

Hi Steve. Hi Cheryl.

So we're going to do an episode today talking about privilege, which I think is something that's always been important.

But I think a lot of people, if I'm speaking for a lot of the white people I know, are waking up to the fact that essentially what's happened in our nation requires us to have a deeper and more intentional sense of consciousness about how we make real change in the world.

Not just lip service to diversity and inclusion, but how we actually think about the ways that we have been ourselves complicit in racism with sexism, homophobia and transphobia and classism and all of the ways in which power is invisible in the form of privilege.

Right. No, that's exactly it. And the way that privilege operates is if you're living in the midst of it, it can be invisible to you and usually is.

And for lots of groups within the United States and all over the world who are marginalized, they are well aware of the power arrangement that we call privilege.

They are the victim of it on a daily basis. What we want to talk about with these letters in this week is how to make privilege visible to all of us and what to do once we see it.

And how to talk about it. Yeah.

So the first time that I clearly understood what privilege was. Yeah.

I was 19 years old. I was a sophomore at the University of Minnesota. I ended up being a women's studies English major. And I took this class with Professor Dr. Jacqueline Zita and she passed around this list that was made by Peggy Macintosh.

Yeah. She was cataloguing privileges bestowed on those who are white. And for the first time in this very accessible list, I could see all of these things that had never occurred to me.

Item five on the list, for example, I can go shopping alone most of the time fairly well assured that I will not be followed or harassed by store detectives.

Number 15, I do not have to educate our children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.

Number 32, my culture gives me a little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races. And this was an awakening for me.

Right.

What I wished for at that 1920 year old self was, okay, I'll learn this and that I'll be a good person. I do have good intentions. I do believe in the values of equality and kindness and all that stuff.

But what I've learned is white supremacy is so deeply embedded in, you know, who we are as a nation, who we are as a planet.

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