Privilege Through the Looking-Glass Edition 3

“Privilege Through the Looking-Glass offers a varied and profound examination of how privilege functions as the underside of power. This is a powerful and important book about inequality, identity, agency, and the challenge of addressing difference as part of a democratic ethos in a time of growing authoritarianism all over the world. Every educator should read this book.”

Henry A. Giroux, Ph.D., McMaster University, author of America at War with Itself

“Privilege Through the Looking-Glass unmasks the casual ‘isms’ that suppress the best aspects of our humanity, by assembling a powerful and honest collection of parables. Poignant and unflinching, the contributors eschew the cloak of objectivism to give the hard truth about privilege as a social ill, and the collective responsibility of the conscious community to confront all forms of oppression. Stimulating to the highbrow, yet palatable to the lay, this book has lessons for anyone with the spirit to explore better ways to be themselves and relate to others.”

Ivory A. Toldson, Ph.D., Howard University, Editor-in-Chief for The Journal of Negro Education

“Patricia Leavy has brought together a group of interdisciplinary scholars who have taken up the formidable challenge of analyzing how their own lived experiences are understood and measured by manufactured norms produced historically by systems of mediation (institutional, cultural, social, economic) and intelligibility that are often invisible and that position them differentially (politically) in a structured series of dependent hierarchies that privilege whiteness over non-whiteness, capital over labor, maleness over femaleness, etc. While it is often a privilege to live in the world of theory, we need to remember that when we scratch a theory, we discover biographies, we find histories, and we find pain. Privilege Through the Looking-Glass is a courageous volume that blends theory, personal experiences, and reflections on contemporary debates over identity. This is a book that is more about the politics of identity than identity politics. It is a powerful testament to the urgency of understanding privilege and deserves to be read widely.”

Peter McLaren, Ph.D., Chapman University, author of Paulo Freire, Che Guevara, and the Pedagogy of Revolution, and Pedagogy of Insurrection

“Privilege Through the Looking-Glass offers readers a reflective and reflexive response to the confounding and corrosive issues that inform, and sometimes govern, people’s everyday lives and identities. In highly accessible and unique ways, this book shines a light on the complexities of cultural life, and in ways that will entice and challenge readers, compelling them to re-think their ways of being with others, and themselves.”

Keith Berry, Ph.D., University of South Florida and the National Communication Association Anti-Bullying Task Force Co-Chair

“To be included in Patricia Leavy’s world is inspiring but to have the opportunity to read her work on privilege, power, oppression and the expectations or freedoms from persons of diverse backgrounds and statuses, well that’s just exhilarating. As a social policy instructor and clinical social worker, I always find opportunities to use Leavy’s work with my students, whose testimonies include their own exhilaration in exploring privilege and power and perhaps even discovering their own unexposed privilege.”

Renita M. Davis, LCSW, PIP

“Marshalling the power of storytelling, Privilege Through the Looking-Glass offers a collection of essays wherein experienced scholars confront, challenge, and explicitly discuss everyday forms of racial, sexual, gendered, and ablest privilege embedded in contemporary social life. In so doing, Leavy and the contributors offer an admirable introduction to the many ways the personal is political, and invisible privileges operating at varied levels of society can be made visible and subject to correction. Well-crafted through combinations of scholarly expertise and personal experience, Privilege Through the Looking-Glass may be an ideal text for sensitizing students to the myriad of social forces operating within, around, and beyond their own everyday experiences and assumptions.”

J.E. Sumerau, Ph.D., University of Tampa

Acknowledgments

ONE
Introduction to Privilege Through the Looking-Glass, Third Edition
Patricia Leavy

TWO
Unpacking (Un)privilege or Flesh Tones, Red Bones, and Sepia Shades of Brown
Robin M. Boylorn

THREE
Men Hug Me at Work: Juxtaposing Privilege with Everyday Sexism
Adrienne Trier-Bieniek

FOUR
The Voice of White Male Power and Privilege: An Autoethnography
Christopher N. Poulos

FIVE
I Am My Grandmother’s Child: Becoming a Black Woman Scholar
Venus E. Evans-Winters

SIX
#AngryBlackScholars: Unpacking White Privilege as Black Females Unapologetically Claiming and Asserting Our Right
to Live Our Dreams
Donna Y. Ford and Tanya J. Middleton

SEVEN
My Responsibility to Change
Liza A. Talusan

EIGHT
Black Here, Borɔnyi There: Differentials in Race and Privilege in the United States and West Africa
Amy L. Masko

NINE
Buying a Better World? The Intersections of Consumerism, Class, and Privilege in Global Women’s Rights Activism
Mayme Lefurgey

TEN
Reflections on Rural: Why Place Can Be Privilege and How “Common Sense” Understandings Hurt Rural Students
Sarrah J. Grubb

ELEVEN
Being a (Gay) Duck in a Family of (Heterosexual) Swans
Tony E. Adams

TWELVE
Swirling Shades of Right and Wrong
Tammy Bird

THIRTEEN
Male or Female?: Everyday Life When the ‘Or’ is ‘And’
Emerson Graham

FOURTEEN
Transcending Gender Binarization: The Systematic Policing of Genderfluid Identity and Presentation
Shalen Lowell

FIFTEEN
Titanium Tits
Kate Birdsall

SIXTEEN
On Not Being a Victoria’s Secret Model: A Critical Analysis of My Struggle With Social Comparison and Objectification
Lisa Barry

SEVENTEEN
The Ephemeral Passport
Jean Kilbourne

EIGHTEEN
It’s a Small World: The Metabletics of Size
Lisa A. Phillips

NINETEEN
The Pen Stops
Nancy La Monica

TWENTY
The Skull Beneath the Skin: Biting Back at Racist and Classist Stereotypes of Chronic Illness
Alexandra “Xan” C. H. Nowakowski

TWENTY-ONE
Responsive Stories: Sharing Evocative Tales from the Inside, Out
miroslav pavle manovski

TWENTY-TWO
Death by a Thousand Cuts: From Self-Hatred to Acceptance
U. Melissa Anyiwo

About the Contributors

About the Editor

Patricia Leavy

Patricia Leavy, Ph.D. is a bestselling author. She has published over fifty books, earning commercial and critical success in both nonfiction and fiction, and her work has been translated into numerous languages. Over the course of her career, she has also served as series creator and editor for ten book series, and she cofounded Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal. She has received over one hundred book awards. She has also received career awards from the New England Sociological Association, the American Creativity Association, the American Educational Research Association, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the National Art Education Association. In 2016, Mogul, a global women’s empowerment network, named her an “Influencer.” In 2018, the National Women’s Hall of Fame honored her, and SUNY-New Paltz established the “Patricia Leavy Award for Art and Social Justice.” In 2024 The London Arts-Based Research Centre established the “Patricia Leavy Award for Arts-Based Research.” Please visit www.patricialeavy.com for more information.