Cony Carranza Castro, the feminist and anti-racist educating people of the World Association of Women and Babel, dynamizes workshops on privileges and oppression with the main objective of understanding what white privilege is. When I participated in a workshop of my own, I realized that many of the white participants presented as oppression the discomfort we live in. Thanks to the sociologist Sara Lafuente Funes I have learned to recognize the difference between malaise and injustice, which can sometimes be blurry, because the source of both is structural (that is, the system in which we live). For example, I talked at the workshop about motherhood without big protection networks, but then I realized it's a big frivolity, knowing that the Foreign Law obliges immigrants who are parents to live away from their children for many years.

So what is oppression? Carranza delves into the definition of American activist Peggy McIntosh: “The systematic exclusion of full and equal participation in society”. It is clear that this is not my reality, but it is the reality of many immigrant women. What about privilege? “The invisible backpack we inherited.” McIntosh lists in an article 26 privileges that, being white, carry in that backpack, such as shopping without being persecuted by security workers, or that when he turns on TV, his family's friends are pouring out.

The first steps can be gestures of denaturation or demechanisation; when I travel internationally, I remember that I can do so without worries because I have white skin and European passport. But what do we do with the privileges that we've identified and accepted? Bego Oleaga Erdoiza proposes inmissions in ARGIA: “[COVID19] Input to the third vaccination, which we have received two doses, until vaccination reaches the inhabitants of impoverished countries.” Projects such as “I am not going without a woman” have also been carried out to ask men to stand on round tables, awards, etc. Turning to the first example, I have decided to give up international tourism, because I have understood that non-universal law is a privilege.

Another step can be to silence, listen, work our resistances and take responsibility when the oppressed challenge us to the privileged. In these times when the concept of ally is in vogue, we must be self-critical and learn to recognize in us the malicious processes we identify in others (in my case, in men who work on the new masculinities). For example, being an entrepreneurial target against racism, I am more likely to appear in the media than racists, to participate in paid congresses, to receive praise, etc. So, in recent years, I've been fulfilling the commitment to say, "I'm not without racialized people."

The truth is that we have worked more on the processes of empowerment than the steps towards expropriation. Let us try to demand from our colleague what we ask of him. I encourage you to read the thoughts and questions of Jokin Azpiazu and Leticia Urretabizkaia (in the fields of masculinities and anti-racism, respectively). Empathy and humility can be the raw material for building bridges, so that we become increasingly capable when we have to move forward and backtrack.