Viral: Show This Insanely Viral Video To Anyone Who Doesn’t Understand What ‘Privilege’ Means

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In 2017, the concept of privilege was a hot button issue.

Viral: Show This Insanely Viral Video To Anyone Who Doesn’t Understand What ‘Privilege’ Means

In 2017, the concept of privilege was a hot button issue. Yet despite how frequently the term was invoked, many people struggled to grasp it, or to understand how insidious it was to everyday life.

This video should help.

Using nothing more than a field, his class of students, and some simple commands, a college professor educated a group of young kids on the concept of privilege. And now that the video has gone viral, with over 200,000 shares on Facebook, it’s educating a lot of others as well.

In the video, the teacher lined up his class at the edge of a grassy field. He told them they were going to have a race, and the winner would receive a 100 dollar bill. But there was a catch.
Some of the students were going to get a head start.

Before the race began, he told his class that when one of the statements applied to them, they can take two steps forward. Otherwise, stay put.

Patiently and methodically, the teacher began to make a series of statements. Statements like, “Take two steps forward… if your parents are still married,” and “if you grew up with a father figure in the home,” “if you had access to a private education,” “if you never had to help Mom or Dad with the bills.”

Slowly, the students began to separate.

”Take two steps forward if it wasn’t because of your athletic ability that you don’t have to pay for college.”
“Take two steps forward if you never wondered where your next meal was gonna come from.”
As a handful of students start to make it closer to the front, the teacher begins to break down what was happening, instructing them to turn around and look behind them. Then he dropped the hammer.

”Every statement I’ve made has nothing to do with anything any of you have done…We all know these people up here have a better opportunity to win this hundred dollars…We would be fools to not realize we’ve been given more opportunity.”

Privilege is a complicated issue, and it’s not about to be solved by a teacher with a small class of students.
Diverse as the group in the video may be, it couldn’t possibly capture the full range of different ethnicities, class backgrounds, sexual identities and other signifiers that factor into the conversation and add many more wrinkles than simply male/female, or white/black.

That said, the video does a masterful job of communicating how privilege works. Some people, by virtue of little more than genetics and circumstance, simply started life in a more advantageous position than others.

And this is not an easy thing to change. But we can change our awareness of the things that put us where we are. We need to acknowledge that the playing field is not level, adjust our attitudes accordingly, and do our best to use our privilege to boost others.

“You still gotta run your race but whoever wins this hundred dollars, I think it would be extremely foolish of you not to utilize that and learn more about someone else’s story.”

An Oklahoma mom and dad each face a long stay in prison after a jury proposed a sentence of 130 years each following the pair’s conviction for what a police officer termed the “worst case of child abuse” he’d seen.

BREAKING NEWS: 130 Years in Prison Recommended for Okla. Parents Convicted in ‘Worst Case of Child Abuse’ Seen by Police

The 9-month-old twin girls of parents Aislyn Miller, 24, and Kevin Fowler, 25, weighed roughly eight pounds each when they were hospitalized last December and the parents were arrested following a visit with the toddlers to an urgent care clinic, according to records obtained by PEOPLE.

The family’s Collinsville residence had cat feces smeared on the walls and maggots in the girls’ playpen, according to the testimony from an investigator for the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, reported The Tulsa World.

Authorities say a maggot even emerged from a wound in one of the emaciated girls, according to the Associated Press.
Jurors in Tulsa County convicted Miller and Fowler on Friday on five counts of child neglect, and later recommended that each serve 30 years apiece in prison on the first four counts and 10 years on the fifth count.

Formal sentencing will take place Nov. 13.

Steven Vincent, the defense attorney for Miller and Fowler, was not immediately available to speak to PEOPLE. It was not immediately clear if the parents planned to appeal.
The parents told authorities they felt overwhelmed as the working parents of four small children without enough outside help, according to testimony in the case, and Vincent said during an earlier hearing that their request for government aid had been denied since they both had full-time jobs.

Maternal grandparents John and Cathey Miller also were set to be tried next April on allegations they enabled child abuse and neglect, reported KJRH.

In addition, Rita Fowler, the children’s paternal grandmother, faces multiple charges on child neglect counts related to the case.
The grandparents have pleaded not guilty.

“It’s what we would term as shocking and heinous,”

Kristi Simpson, an investigator for the state Department of Human Services, testified during a preliminary hearing on the case, according to the World.
Nurses at the urgent care clinic noticed that both twins had severe diaper rash and bed sores, with feces in one child’s ear and a strand of hair wrapped so tightly around a finger of the other child that the finger had become infected, according to the arrest reports obtained by PEOPLE.

One child was described in police reports as looking like a “skeleton.”

Miller allegedly confessed that the couple didn’t have health insurance, hence allowed the children’s health problems to persist.
Both children were taken into state custody upon the arrest of the parents.