Privilege and Inclusive Practice
The word privilege has a way of making people defensive. I understand why. It can feel like an accusation – as though acknowledging privilege means accepting that nothing in your life was earned, or that your own struggles don’t count.
That’s not what it means at all. And if that’s been your experience of conversations about privilege, I’d gently invite you to set that aside for a moment, because understanding privilege and inclusive practice genuinely changes the way we work.
Let me start with a simple definition. Privilege refers to the unearned advantages we hold as a result of aspects of our identity – our race, our gender, our class, our ability, our sexuality, the language we were born speaking, the country we hold a passport from, and more. These advantages are often invisible to those who have them, precisely because we’ve never had to navigate the world without them.
And that invisibility is exactly why this matters so much in celebrant work.
What privilege looks like in practice
When you sit down with a couple or a family to begin planning a ceremony, you bring your whole self into that room. Your assumptions about what a family looks like. And your defaults around language – the pronouns you reach for, the terms you use to describe relationships. Your sense of what a “normal” funeral looks like, or which rituals feel familiar versus unfamiliar. Your comfort with certain kinds of grief, and your discomfort with others.
None of this is deliberate. Most of it is simply the accumulated weight of the world you grew up in. The ceremonies you attended, the families you knew, the stories you absorbed about how life’s significant moments are marked.
But if your experience of the world has been shaped by privilege, if you’ve moved through life without regularly encountering barriers based on who you are, then your defaults will reflect that. And when the people sitting in front of you have a different experience of the world, those defaults can make them feel, subtly or not so subtly, like their life doesn’t quite fit the ceremony you’re designing for them.
Understanding privilege and inclusive practice together
The reason privilege matters for inclusive practice isn’t to make anyone feel guilty. It’s to make us more aware, and awareness is the first step towards doing better.
When I began exploring this more deliberately in my own work and in the training we offer at the Celebrant Coaching and Training Academy, one of the tools I found most powerful was the idea of the Wheel of Privilege. It maps the many dimensions along which people may hold more or less advantage: race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, citizenship, education, language, body size, neurodiversity. The point isn’t to rank or compare. The point is to notice. To ask yourself: where do I sit on this wheel, and how might that shape what I assume is “normal” or “natural” or “obvious” in a ceremony?
Most of us hold privilege in some areas and face disadvantage in others. I live with a disability, which means I have direct, lived experience of what it feels like to navigate a world that wasn’t designed with you in mind. But I also hold other forms of privilege (being a cis, while, middle-class person for a start) that I need to remain conscious of. This is the complexity that the concept of intersectionality helps us understand. That our identities are layered, and that privilege and disadvantage can exist in the same person at the same time.
What this looks like in your consultations
Here are some of the places where privilege most commonly shows up, unnoticed, in celebrant work:
Assumptions about family structure. When you say “mother of the bride” or ask “who will be giving you away?” you are making assumptions that may not fit. When you assume that the people most central to a grieving family will be obvious – a spouse, an adult child – you may miss the person who was actually closest to the person who died.
Assumptions about language and literacy. Asking someone to read a passage aloud in a ceremony, or sending a detailed written questionnaire, without first checking how they feel about reading in front of others, or whether English is their first language.
Assumptions about faith and belief. Reaching for words like “blessed” or “passed” or “celebration of life” that carry particular cultural or spiritual meanings, without knowing whether those words will resonate or alienate.
Assumptions about ability. Designing a ceremony without thinking about whether every participant can fully access it. Whether there are people present with mobility needs, hearing difficulties, sensory sensitivities, or anxiety around large gatherings.
None of these assumptions come from unkindness. They come from familiarity. From designing ceremonies that reflect the world we know best. Privilege and inclusive practice go hand in hand precisely because recognising our defaults is what allows us to make different choices.
The invitation this offers
Understanding privilege doesn’t mean dismantling everything you know. It means staying genuinely curious about the people in front of you rather than filling in the gaps with what you already know. Asking better questions and being comfortable with not yet knowing the answer.
It means, as we say in our inclusion training, making your learning a continuous practice rather than a completed task.
The good news is that this curiosity – this genuine interest in the person in front of you rather than the ceremony you might have designed for someone else – is also what makes you a better celebrant in every sense. The most inclusive celebrants I’ve encountered are also the most skilled, because they’ve developed the habit of truly listening, truly seeing, and truly designing from the ground up each time.
That’s worth working towards.
If you’d like to explore privilege and inclusive practice in a structured, supported way, our CPD-accredited Inclusion and Diversity module covers this in depth, including the Wheel of Privilege exercise and guided reflection. You can find out more on the website.
If you’re considering celebrancy as a career and wondering whether values-led training is available, I’d love to talk. Book an Informed Decision Session and we’ll explore it together.
Warmly, Dinah
She/Her