How do you define privilege?”

I tap the pencil to my lips as my brain mulls that question over. My professor asks it again: How do you define privilege?

“Freedom from categorization,” I say.

Freedom from categorization. Freedom from labels. Freedom from social constraints. Yup. That’s what privilege is to me. But who has it? Who is privileged?

When Hillary Clinton was criticized for her tears on the presidential campaign trail, it truly showed the privilege Hillary Clinton didn’t have. She wasn’t a male.

Rewind the clocks to Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007: one day after a two-day crying spree from then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Did Romney face scrutiny for his tears? Yes, but certainly not much.

Adam D. Probolsky, manager of Romney’s campaign in Orange County, quickly dismissed such incidents, saying, “When he’s president and there’s a natural disaster, I’m pretty darnn sure that he ain’t going to be breaking down into tears and looking for his blankie. He’s going to be making things happen and getting things done. But when you’re running for office you sometimes show more of who you are.”

But for Hillary, showing more of who she was turned out to be not such a good idea. Heralded as an ‘ice queen,’ Hillary suddenly became either a) a calculating woman who turned on the waterworks to gain support or b) a dangerous woman whose red tide would surely engulf the nation in a mighty swath of wrath greater than any tsunami imaginable.

Search for reactions to Hillary’s crying and you’re likely to find plenty similar to those found on petitionspot.com, which hosts a “Keep Hillary Clinton out of office in 2008” petition.

“Bonny” asks, “What if she gets PMS and decides to nuke Canada?”

“Glow” also chimes in, saying “Hillary is a nightmare — her body reaaaallly makes me sick.”

I’m not sure when women officially became completely incapable of managing themselves during menstruation to the point that they would drop an atomic bomb on a neighboring friendly country, and I sure as hell don’t know what a person’s body has to do with government qualifications.

But I know that Hillary’s a woman, and when it comes to gender, women aren’t privileged.

When you hear the words “gender studies,” what comes to mind? Women’s studies, right? Heck, let’s just shorten it to gender. If there’s something being discussed about “gender” in class, it’s usually women who come up in the conversation.

Men are privileged. Men don’t think about gender like women do.

And it doesn’t end with the differences between men and women, by the way.

How about race? What comes to mind? When you read that word, was it a white person who came to mind? Probably not, because we’re not accustomed to thinking of whites as a race. Whites simply are.

I always ponder this situation when hearing about “foreigners” and the xenophobia aimed at them. When talk of “immigrants” comes up in conversation, I ask for examples. Particularly because what people tend to really mean and what they point out is the Mexicans.

Yes, immigrants from Mexico made up 30.7 percent of all immigrants to our country in 2006 according to the U.S. Census, but that still leaves 69.3 percent who didn’t come from our southern neighbor.

So why is it Mexican descendants who face the scrutiny and not our European cousins? It is this columnist’s assertion that it is because of race. Whites are privileged, and so the attention turns to those entering this country with a tan.

Go down the list, people. There’s a million privileges out there, and some of us know all too well which ones we don’t possess. Gender, race, age, sexuality, class, religion, nationality, disability — you name it. If you can slap a label on it, you can apply privilege to it.

So many times we classify people and we don’t even realize it. In Iowa so many of us fit the privilege of being white and middle class we don’t stop to think how diverse the world really is. We don’t realize how we treat people who are really no more different to us than we are to them.

People are who they are, and should be seen as individuals. People shouldn’t be lumped into categories of privilege. People need to be aware of who they are. Which raises the question:

Who are you?

 — Sophie Prell is a junior in pre-journalism and mass communication from Alta.