How To 'Check Your Privilege' On TikTok

There’s a new ‘Check Your Privilege’ challenge doing the rounds on TikTok. As the name suggests, the challenge aims to promote awareness of discrimination by offering TikTok users a way they can check their own privilege, share the results publicly, and compare them to the results of other people.

The last few days have seen a heightened level of attention on the topic of discrimination, following the death of George Floyd. While the response has led to protests on the streets of many U.S. cities, there’s also been many digital-based movements taking place online to bring attention to the issue. This has not only been at the individual level, but also at the company and brand level, with many companies confirming solidarity on social media. One of the most recent events involved Facebook employees holding a virtual walkout to protest the company’s handling of various issues, including racial injustice.

A new TikTok challenge created by @boss_bigmamma is designed to bring attention to the issue of ‘privilege’ by asking people to respond to a series of statements. Along with the actual video, the TikTokker also created the sound clip, and it is this audio file that can be accessed and used for others to create their own copies, responses and duet TikTok videos to take part in the challenge. While Check Your Privilege is designed to highlight the different ways people are treated by others, it is not meant to demean any particular person (or race) for their privilege level, but simply as a way to highlight the difference in experiences. The challenge has also now started to make its way to other social media platforms, including Twitter.

Check Your Privilege is essentially a variation of the ‘put your finger down’ game where you hold up one or both hands and put a finger down each time a statement that’s read out applies to you. In the Check Your Privilege challenge, both hands are used (including thumbs) to agree or disagree with 12 statements, all of which relate to incidents that often involve some form of discrimination. As an example, one of the statements is “put a finger down if you’ve been followed in a store unnecessarily.” Once all the statements have been read out, any fingers left up are used to highlight the level of privilege.

Since going live on the platform, the challenge has been repeated by many TikTok users, and by many different races. As to be expected, the results have varied significantly, which does demonstrate the point @boss_bigmamma is intentionally making, while also providing users with a way to check how their privilege experiences compares to others. In some instances, users have created videos with people of different races taking the TikTok challenge together, as a means to directly provide an on-screen comparison.

Thank you!