How Privileged Are You? [Activity]

In past years, I have used the Privilege Walk activity to demonstrate the concept of advantages.  I grew disenchanted with the activity for a few reasons. The first was that many students had done the activity and thus knew what to expect. The second was that I felt like the underprivileged students weren't surprised to be at the back, but I could sense the emotional toll that standing there was taking on some of them.   I'm all for generating a healthy level of discomfort but I felt like I was somehow using the underprivileged students' situation to create discomfort for the privileged., which wasn't the purpose.   In addition, in a series of tiny rooms that I was assigned to, this exercise was not possible. I still think the "Walk" works well in some situations, but I was able to find an alternative that accomplished the goals and generated discussions. That alternative was actually produced by Buzzfeed!so the students tend to like it.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/regajha/how-privileged-are-you#.vazaNLNnZx

This quiz asks students to answer 100 questions and generates a privilege score.  It's not scientific but it is fairly comprehensive with respect to class, gender, race, sexuality, disability, religion, etc. Instead of doing this in class, I assign the quiz as homework. I ask students to take a screen shot of their results and to write a paragraph about what they think influenced their score the most.  They turn these in at the beginning of  class.  I ask them to discuss in small groups and while they do this, I record all of the answers on a spreadsheet (anonymously),  put them in order, and show the class the range of scores. From here I launch into the discussion  just as I would when the privilege walk ended and people were lined up across the room.  In the quiz version, you actually don't know who scored what - you just know the range of scores in the room. The underprivileged students know where they fell on the scale, but at least they don't have to stand and be gawked at by the high scorers.

It also may be helpful to pair this exercise with this video in class. This video shows other people doing the privilege walk so can be useful in the overall discussion without doing the exercise in class.

PS - One thing I still need to work on here. The high scorers wind up reporting feel "blessed". It's almost if the result is "Wow! I really dodged a bullet" or "I'm lucky" rather than "Wow. Stratification is real and it has given me a leg up and so we should investigate why that is happening ". I realize part of this is where they are in life, how often they have received these messages but still....