Waves lapped against the rocky shore at a riverside restaurant in Montevideo, Uruguay. The honey taste of grappamiel tickled my throat while across from me, a young couple dressed in well-ironed clothes shared a fancy meal as they watched the sun sink down into the rio de la plata.

Why were they here now? I wondered. Sipping wine next to heating lamps? What made them any different from the people who were serving them?

I was 23 and had thought about privilege before— but never as in-depth and all-encompassingly as in that moment. And I recognized this as just one of the many aspects of my own privilege, given that people of color have no choice but to think about it from the day they’re born.

In White Lotus, characters are only minimally aware of their privilege. Themes explored in the show are increasingly relevant to our times, where more recently, many were forced to gamble with their health and psychological well-being throughout the pandemic— while the more fortunate could burrow at home. 

Here’s some of what came up and how it connects to situations playing out in our country today.

1. Customer entitlement.

While Lani works tirelessly through her pregnancy, Shane can have a long-lasting tantrum about not getting the room with the pool. He is among the many (often white) consumers for whom the slogan “the customer is always right,” encourages expectations of royalty treatment (even when the amount they’re paying will provide a below minimum wage to the person providing it). 

As Fang Liu wrote (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.550978/full), “Many service-oriented enterprises believe that ‘Customer is God.’ With the hope to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the service concept of ‘customer first,’ employees are required by enterprises to maintain humble attitudes and behaviors in the process of service interaction with customers, which put buyers and sellers in an unequal position, and to some extent, encourage the emergence and development of customer mistreatment.”

Delivery platforms and the gig economy have brought undoubted ease to the lives of many. We’ve become ever more accustomed to receiving effortlessly, in the form of packages, answers, dates, or whatever else. It’s hard to find the motivation to make a trip to the store just for toothpaste these days. Especially when we can click twice and a fresh tube will arrive at our doorstep a (mere) day later—as if by magic. But from a realistic standpoint, the magic is somewhat of an illusion. Hidden from view are those sacrificing to get us our on-demand chicken tika masala, or to make sushi rolls appear for us with a tap of the keypad. 

2. The effort those with less privilege must put in to conform and suppress their needs.

Belinda hid her devastation about her business idea not working out, because she needed to keep her job. She knew any display of emotionality would likely have put it in jeopardy. In contrast, when Rachel (a white character) was in distress over choosing the wrong man to marry, she neither cried openly nor made much effort to suppress her tears—and Belinda comforted her.

It’s common in the U.S. for people of color to set aside their needs and full range of emotional expression like this. The onus falls on them to conform to avoid consequences such as, in the most extreme of circumstances, violence at the hands of police—rather than on people in greater positions of power to re-train their minds, unpack and dismantle biases, and interrogate unchecked fears.

A passage from Caste highlights a middle-class black businessman, “who would never leave the house in sweats and sneakers that his white neighbors wore without a moment’s thought.  He couldn’t afford to. He took great care whenever he left the house. It took more time and more forethought for even the most casual errand.”

We see more suppression of needs when Lani helps a hotel guest, then immediately after goes into another room to cry in private. Later that day when she gives birth, Armond the manager asks her why she didn’t just speak up and let him know she was pregnant. It’s a question that places disproportionate onus on the underprivileged, disregarding the challenge of doing so in an environment where a skewed power imbalance exists.

In my job as a Spanish medical interpreter for low-income injured Latino workers, I hear about similar situations. One patient said that even though her last company worked the employees like “pack horses,” many still did what they were told— out of necessity.

“They will because they’re afraid to lose their jobs,” she laments. “They need this work. They need it to survive. They need it to keep their families afloat. Their employers know this.”

3. The relativity of privilege.

After encountering her crying in the lobby, Belinda tells Rachel to call her if she needs anything. Rachel takes her up on this a bit later on, the night she realizes she needs to end her marriage. At this point Belinda, burned out from excessive emotional dumping and white people leaning on her without reciprocation, gets up and says “I’m out.”

Of all the white tourists on this show, Rachel has the least economic privilege. She was neither born into wealth nor grew up with material excesses. When her husband and his mom exchanged rich people gripes, she felt alienated and alone.

Regardless, she still carried white privilege, which as Kristin Corry wrote for Vice, “is frequently dismissed on the erroneous basis that ‘privilege’ is something reserved for the wealthy. In reality, there are multitudes of daily invisible acts that count as white privilege, from the ‘for normal hair’ label on a shampoo bottle to not fearing for your life while engaging with the police.”

Many of us don’t notice when we’re benefitting from a privilege, because we’re so accustomed to the treatment.

Similarly, the character Olivia also overlooks (even tries to disavow) her privilege. She does this by pointing out how she has different, even opposing, political beliefs than her family’s. ”I’m not like the rest of them,” she says to her friend Paula, which echoes the now cringey declaration of “I’m not like other white people.”

In some ways she wasn’t; in many ways she was. It brings up the questions, To what extent can we choose to be someone and to what extent will our identity always follow us and color our perception of the world— no matter how far up the woke ladder we climb, how much reading we do, or how enlightened we become?

Many in our country think of racism as an individual characteristic that some possess and others don’t (like brown hair or extraversion) rather than as a system we’re all a part of. What experts in race studies deem closer to the truth is that it’s more like a heaping bowl of toxic soup we’re all born inside. No one emerges completely dry from it; It takes years of unlearning to towel off.

 Yet insistence on belief in the former definition shows that too many would rather continue holding tightly to the star-spangled towel of all-American denial than unravel themselves from it.

4. How “psychological” and “emotional” are also privilege categories.

So much of who and what we are has come from other people, whether we like to admit it or not. No newborn emerges from the womb entirely self-sufficient. We arrive dependent, with unique needs and temperaments that a combination of our home lives and the community or culture we’re born into either fosters growth and acceptance of, or discouragement and rejection of. And needs run the gamut from the concrete and material to the more abstract and less visible (but still equally important) emotional ones.

Tanya had her material needs more than met, but her emotional needs remained unsatisfied throughout her life. Her character showed severely anxious attachment, relational trauma, emotional wounding, and feelings of chronic emptiness. And I don’t believe it was just the ennui and vacuousness inherent to the life of the wealthy that brought this on, but likely genuine trauma, gaps in parenting, and lack of consistent attunement.

Granted, though what they may have gone through is tragic, and recovery can be a long and non-linear process, it’s also true that Tanya and other wealthy traumatized people have access to unlimited healing modalities. Resources like therapy. Top-notch treatments unattainable to others (through no fault of their own). They are in more of a position to work through these issues than is a person who’s struggling to even pay their rent.

5. How those with less power face punishments disproportionate to the crime.

Even though Shane kills a man, because it’s declared in “self-defense,” he gets out unscathed. Kai, on the other hand, despite Paula’s initial intent being to provide him some form of reparation for the harm done to his ancestors, emerges from the attempted burglary with his entire life and future prospects significantly affected. This micro instance is a distillation of the larger pattern, where nothing changes and the rich repeatedly come out on top. 

Similarly Armond, another less economically privileged (albeit white) character ends up dead as punishment for pooping in a guest’s suitcase. It’s a situation where the consequence outweighs the offense—and this has played out through the history of our country. Numerous studies have shown that black people don’t commit more crimes, but rather are convicted more, and with harsher penalties.

In the 1980s for instance, policies severely punished blacks for selling crack cocaine. The consequences facing white people (who took a variation of the same drug, coke) paled in comparison. 

Across the U.S., people of color are more likely to have fire-arms pointed at them and be detained, searched, and handcuffed by law enforcement. Seventy-five percent of prisoners are African-American (mostly for drug crimes, even though white youth are likeliest of any racial group to be guilty of illegal drug possession). Five to ten years is the sentence for minimal drug offense in the U.S, while six months is the norm in other developed countries around the world.

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Programs like White Lotus will help continue to pull back the curtain on systemic inequality. The show isn’t without its criticisms— some have pointed out the irony of the director being a white man who wrote every episode himself. Whiteness is centered, while the stories of people of color are sidelined. With Belinda, we see this glimmer of a fleshed-out story, of a hope and dream just maybe coming to fruition. It was heart-breaking to see Tanya dash them, blatantly admitting to Belinda that their relationship had been transactional.

The show’s intent was to shine light on how our larger culture treats POC. But as a big-budget mainstream program, mirroring that treatment inadvertently creates more of it by contributing to and perpetuating a reductive narrative. I once felt this way when I used to watch movies where the lesbian always got left for a man in the end. Centering POC stories can be a first step to changing the larger culture, as culture and media evolve alongside each other; shifts in one can also gradually spark ensuing changes in the other.

Take what you will from White Lotus. It personally struck me as the very first tip of an ice-burg that calls for far greater exploring—and hopefully from here forth, created by the people who actually have the first-hand experience of enduring these inequities.