When reading a book I did not love, Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald, I landed on a sentence that lit up in bright neon before my eyes. I read the sentence over again thinking, this can’t be.
There it is on page 210. Fitzgerald is writing about a conversation he had with a hair stylist named Drew, who, while cutting Fitzgerald’s hair, starts talking about old friends back home in Boston. Fitzgerald writes, “Drew said he’d been discussing privilege with his white friends back home, but hit on using the word ‘blessings’ instead.”
Let me be clear on this from the start: privilege and blessings are not identical and should not be used interchangeably. Privilege is benefits bestowed on some, blessings are spiritual gifts available to all.
Drew, the hair stylist cited by Fitzgerald as substituting “blessings” for “privilege,” represents a way of thinking that continues to hamper honest conversations among white people about racism. White people still, in 2025, often need to be eased into conversations about race and white privilege with euphemisms like “blessings” that are inaccurate and damaging.
White privilege is white privilege — the unearned advantages, subtle and overt, that are given to white people every day invisibly, relentlessly, without their asking, and without being acknowledged by the recipient.
How long must we tiptoe around white people who refuse to acknowledge or address their unmerited advantages in a society where systemic racism is pervasive? How long do we have to sneak around the topic, avoid the topic, or replace watered down terms for the real words?
These are the real words: white privilege, unearned advantage, unmerited benefit, and unwarranted advancement. Occasionally, I hear references to: a strong tail wind, rigged outcomes, and the invisible leg up.
Critics say Robin DiAngelo’s widely read 2018 book White Fragility , which explains white privilege page after page, is now tired, her concepts have become worn, her message obvious. Well, apparently not. Maybe more white people need to read her book.
DiAngelo writes, “Though white fragility is triggered by discomfort and anxiety, it is born of superiority and entitlement. White fragility is not weakness per se. In fact, it is a powerful means of white racial control and the protection of white advantage.”
DiAngelo’s second book, Nice Racism (published in 2021), would also be useful for white Americans to read. In that book, DiAngelo describes with meticulous detail how white people, including progressive white people, inadvertently but continuously, perpetuate racial harm in their failure to address their privileged status directly and accurately.
In both books, DiAngelo encourages white people to talk openly and truthfully about race and racism, and to work through the uncomfortable feelings that the terms “white privilege” and “unearned advantage” generate.
The answer to dismantling racism is not to soft-pedal the concepts and sidestep words like white privilege; the goal is to grapple with the reality of a society that gives social, political, and economic advantage to white people each day.
Blessings are totally different from privilege and, as a minister, the idea that these two words could be swapped one for the other demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about the meaning of blessings and the nature of privilege.
Blessings are moments of grace that you cannot earn but simply receive. Blessings are gifts of divine favor or increased abundance from a higher power. To receive a blessing is to receive a spiritual offering.
Blessings can be showered on all people — believers and nonbelievers. There are no qualifications, no vetting process, no conditions, prerequisites, or stipulations. Unlike privilege, blessings are not given to some and withheld from others. Blessings are part of the mystery of divine energy that flows around us and are received with awe and gratitude.
In his book To Bless the Space Between Us, theologian John O’Donohue writes, “The word blessing evokes a sense of warmth and protection; it suggests that no life is alone or unreachable. Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else. Though suffering and chaos befall us, they can never quench that inner light of providence.”
O’Donohue aptly identifies the reality that blessings evoke a sense of warmth and protection and that our inner light — the quiet place inside that receives a blessing —cannot be doused.
To use blessing and privilege interchangeably is to misunderstand privilege and cheapen blessing. As an anti-racism educator and a pastor, I have strong feelings that these two terms need to be kept apart.
We will not tackle the pervasive and ongoing scourge of racism that continues to hold this country by the throat if we avoid difficult conversations or use platitudes, evasive language, or indirect and imprecise terms.
As bestselling author Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum writes in her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, “Racism is not only a personal ideology based on racial prejudice but a system involving cultural messages and institutional policies and practices as well as the beliefs and actions of individuals. In the United States, this system clearly operates to the advantage of whites and to the disadvantage of people of color.”
So let’s start there, with Dr. Tatum’s explanation of racism and move forward with white people talking frankly about privilege — and how to dismantle racism and the rigged system that unjustly benefits whites.
And let’s leave the mystery and beauty of blessings to the realm of divine grace, showered upon all of us saints and sinners.
The Rev. Andrea Ayvazian, Ministerial Team, Alden Baptist Church, Springfield, is also founder and director of the Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership.