I am a passionate explorer of how power and privilege manifest in daily interactions, deeply embedded within our culture and internalised in our bodies

Ancestral / Intergenerational Transmission – The Passing Down of Oppression and Privilege

Intergenerational transmission explains how the effects of both oppression and privilege are passed down through generations, shaping individuals and communities over time.

• Oppression is transmitted not only through visible factors like poverty, violence, and displacement, but also through less visible impacts such as trauma, emotional wounds, and even biological (epigenetic) changes. These inherited effects influence how people cope with stress, form relationships, and understand the world.

• Privilege is also passed down, though it is often less recognised. It operates through continued access to safety, resources, and power. This leads to stronger feelings of belonging, confidence in institutions, and assumptions that the world is safe and navigable. Privilege can also buffer against stress-related harm.

• Over time, both oppression and privilege can lose their original context. What began as specific historical experiences may become embedded in behaviours, beliefs, and cultural norms.

• As a result, trauma without context can appear as personality, family traits, or culture, while privilege without context becomes the “normal” standard, shaping ideas about acceptable bodies, behaviours, and beliefs.

Overall, the concept highlights how inequality is not only experienced in the present but is continuously reproduced across generations, often in ways that are difficult to recognise.

Privilege Creates a Baseline of Safety

Privilege allows some groups to inherit a felt sense of safety and regulation in their bodies.

• This produces “settled” nervous systems that expect ease, protection, and belonging

• That embodied safety becomes cultural norms like calmness, rationality, and trust in institutions

• These traits are then seen as universal rather than as outcomes of historical protection

Culture begins by reflecting what feels normal in privileged bodies

These Embodied States Become Social Norms

Those embodied experiences of safety and ease then define:

• What behaviour is “appropriate” (calm, controlled, confident)

• What communication is “respectable”

• What environments are considered safe or neutral

At the same time:

• Responses shaped by oppression (vigilance, guardedness, intensity) are misread as deviant

Privilege sets the standard for normal human behaviour

Repetition Turns Norms into Culture

Through repetition, these norms become practices:

• Ways of moving (taking up space freely vs. cautiously)

• Ways of relating (expecting welcome vs. assessing risk)

• Ways of leading (comfort with authority vs. hesitation)

Institutions then:

• Reward these practices

• Select for people who embody them

• Reinforce them across generations

Culture is what gets practiced and rewarded over time

Culture Becomes Embodied and Self-Reinforcing

• Privileged ways of being become invisible and unquestioned

• They define professionalism, leadership, emotional expression, and belonging

• People who naturally embody these norms are seen as competent or “a good fit”

Meanwhile:

• Others must adapt, suppress, or be excluded

Culture becomes a feedback loop of embodied privilege

Cultural norms shaped by privilege

• Expecting safety in public and institutional spaces

• Trusting authority as protective

• Valuing calm, restrained emotional expression

• Defining professionalism through dominant (often white, Western) norms

• Assuming belonging rather than negotiating it

• Moving through the world with ease, entitlement, and low vigilance

 Privilege influences culture by shaping embodied expectations of safety and belonging, which become normalized through repeated practice and institutional reinforcement—eventually appearing natural rather than historically produced.

Most equity and inclusion policy and practices place their focus here. Institutional and structural privilege operates by embedding historically accumulated advantages into systems, norms, and practices, so that they continuously benefit some groups while disadvantaging others—often without needing explicit intent.

• Systems are made of repeated practices. Institutions (education, hiring, healthcare, law) reward and reproduce behaviours, values, and ways of being that align with historically privileged groups, ensuring those already shaped by privilege continue to succeed.

• These systems are built around and reinforce privileged bodies—people who expect safety, ease and trust institutions. As a result, institutions feel accessible and protective to some, while others experience them as threatening or unsafe. This shapes who can engage, belong, and thrive.

• Structural privilege defines what is treated as neutral, normal, and appropriate at a cultural level. Institutional standards (e.g., professionalism, credibility, risk) reflect dominant group norms, making privilege invisible while positioning other ways of being as deviations.

Institutional and structural privilege works by normalising and systematising the embodied patterns, values, and expectations of historically privileged groups. Advantage is continuously reproduced, thought of as “merit” or “fit,” and rarely seen as privilege at all.

In everyday conversations about oppression and privilege many people focus on this dimension, the interactions between individuals and groups.

Oppression and privilege live in the body. Our nervous systems learn social hierarchies through repeated experiences. Over time, the body absorbs messages about who is safe, who is valued, and who is allowed to take up space. These patterns become automatic long before they become conscious beliefs.

People with social advantage often carry an embodied sense of safety and legitimacy. This can look like:

• relaxed muscles and steady breath

• ease in speaking or taking initiative

• assuming welcome or fairness

• interpreting neutral situations as safe

This isn’t intentional dominance, it’s a nervous system shaped by consistent validation.

People from oppressed communities often carry protective patterns shaped by threat or exclusion. This can look like:

• tension, shallow breath, or collapse

• hesitating before speaking

• scanning for danger or disapproval

• shrinking or yielding in conflict

These are not personal flaws, they are survival responses learned over time.

When people interact, their nervous systems respond to each other instantly:

• Privileged bodies often move forward with ease.

• Oppressed bodies often brace, contract, or over‑monitor.

These reactions can create misunderstandings, power imbalances, and unintentional harm, despite good intentions.

Because these patterns are embodied, not just intellectual, they continue to shape behaviour unless they are consciously worked with. Change requires:

• noticing body cues

• slowing down

• co‑regulation and relational support

• practicing new ways of being

We cannot shift these patterns alone; they were formed in relationship and must be transformed in relationship

Internalised privilege is the embodied sense of ease, safety, and legitimacy that develops when someone grows up inside systems that consistently work in their favour. Over time, repeated experiences of access, validation, and protection settle into the body as what feels normal, deserved, and universal.

This shows up as practised ways of being: an unconscious ease in taking up space, expecting entry, and moving toward opportunity. These behaviours become automatic and reinforce a quiet sense of entitlement that rarely feels like entitlement from the inside.

Privilege creates a baseline of regulation, trust, and openness, an embodied confidence that systems will support rather than harm. This allows people with privilege to take risks and move through the world without scanning for danger.

Privilege shapes what feels “right,” “appropriate,” or simply “the way things are.” Personal preferences and comfort zones are influenced by dominant norms, which are then unconsciously applied as if they were neutral or universal.

Because these patterns are inherited and reinforced through media, education, workplace culture, and social feedback, internalised privilege often feels like competence, neutrality, or individual merit rather than structural advantage. Success is interpreted as personal achievement because the barriers others face remain largely invisible.

This mirrors internalised oppression, where people absorb societal messages that diminish them and develop protective patterns that once kept them safe but later limit their agency. Most of us spend a great deal of time and energy trying to overcome our internalised oppression. How much time and energy do most of us spend overcoming our privilege? Both privilege and oppression become embodied early in life, passed down through generations as part of identity, belonging, and self-worth. Both operate beneath conscious awareness and help maintain inequality.

Undoing these patterns—whether rooted in privilege or oppression—requires sustained attention, relational support, and collective effort. These are not changes we can make in isolation.