The calculator is a useful tool that can help people understand their positioning among the various indicators. This is important because when people know their positioning, it may be easier for them to understand that being privileged is not one dimensional. It encompasses a lot of the factors that can affect our personality,  like our level of education, religious affiliations, and more. Conceptualizing this web of privileges easily debunks common counterarguments to white privilege like the notion that if white people were so privileged, then there wouldn’t be a poor white person in sight.

According to the calculator, I am 63% more privileged than others. While I did not have an initial guestimate of my score before taking the quiz, I feel it’s generally correct. I often forget about the privileges I possess, like being able-bodied and being of cisgender. Moreover, for me, it highlights the need to be educated about these topics and understanding the contexts in which we think about them. I know that when I would think about what cisgender meant as I left high school, I did not think anything negative about it, but I did think cisgender was simply something ‘normal’. Yet, my time at Dickinson has taught me that this positioning is wrong because it inherently means that transgender is the opposite, abnormal. Relearning how to talk about how we conceptualize things like sexuality, gender, race and these other privileges are critical if people outside of these specific identities are to understand the role they play in either challenging or propping structural problems.