Bri Lee on the new age of power and privilege: “if you like the status quo, you’re part of the problem”

Not all intelligence, success and wealth is created equal - and don’t say the D-word.

The author and legal commentator Bri Lee.

“I’m just so suspicious of the D-word,” says Bri Lee. The author and non-practising lawyer is referring to the word ‘deserving’ here — in particular, the stories we tell ourselves about the things we do and do not deserve. “Anyone who thinks they, or anyone else in life, either have or don’t have things out of ‘deserving’ them … that’s such bullshit.”

Why?

“Because there’s a shit-tonne of people out there, who’ve worked just as hard as you and I, who don’t have what we have to show for it.”

The concepts of privilege (and how it is perpetuated in educational settings), ‘deserved success’ and the myth of meritocracy pervade Lee’s most recent book, Who Gets to be Smart. Published in June, the book was met with solid reviews. It’s not just Lee’s ability to distil complex ideas, such as the theory of kyriarchy, into more digestible prose that makes Who Gets to be Smart so effective — it’s her tenacity to do so.

This tenacity is motivated by another of the 29-year-old’s great preoccupations: how do we “get the knowledge out of the bubble” that is academia, and into the hands (and brains) of the people who need it most?

It’s for this reason Lee wasn’t completely devastated when Sydney’s current Covid lockdown forced her to shift much of her book’s publicity tour online.

“Going online has had huge impacts for accessibility — that’s disability accessibility, but also geographic and economic accessibility,” says the author. “We now have this new minimum standard of accessibility, and I think it wouldn’t just be a shame, but almost a dereliction of duty, if people wanted to go back to the old ways of not making speeches immediately available on an accessible digital format, for example.”

She points to the book club she runs, called the B List. In non-Covid times, B List meet-ups are held at the State Library, but for now, they’re being live-streamed online. Lee says she’s received messages of gratitude from people outside of Sydney, or people with kids, who are finally able to tune in.

“Imagine what a dickhead I’d have to be to not want to offer that anymore?” she says.

Who Gets to be Smart is Lee’s third book. Her first book, Eggshell Skull, was published in 2018; a nonfiction memoir that sees Lee, who spent time working as a judge’s associate in Queensland, explore and question the barriers to justice victims of sexual assault in Australia face, Eggshell Skull found Lee an audience of people not dissimilarly intentioned to herself — young, ambitious women eager to poke, prod, interrogate and untangle the existing state of affairs. Women who grew up being assured ‘you can have it all’, only to reach adulthood and the rude realisation that ‘having it all’ isn’t as easy or attainable as it was cracked up to be.

If you’ve read all three of Lee’s books — her second, the extended essay Beauty, unpacks the impossible body and beauty standards expected of accomplished women in the public eye — you’ll have witnessed the healthy scepticism she holds for various layers of the status quo burgeon.

That her radar for unjustness would lead Lee to Australia’s education system, and the gatekeepers who uphold the values of institutions, is no huge surprise. Even if it was a trip to Oxford, to visit her Rhodes Scholar friend, that prompted the writer to investigate the lay of the land back home.

Learning about Australia’s own Rhodes-esque endowment, the Ramsay Postgraduate Scholarship, as well as the disproportionate amount of money the government hands to private schools, especially Catholic ones — “it made me start to question whether or not I did want to worship at that altar,” says Lee.

A notoriously high achiever, she’s the first to admit she’s not immune to the ego stroke that comes with being rewarded by academic institutions, such as the University of Sydney, where she’s currently doing a PhD on the severity of Australia’s defamation laws, and the ways in which they prevent public interest journalism.

“I wouldn’t have done a PhD unless I felt like it had important wider implications. I chose this area of law because it has colossal implications for freedom of speech and for the media to be able to do its whistleblowing job.

“For me, it’s about taking the value you have created within the Academy, and appreciating that what you gain there comes with obligations back to the community. It’s strange to me, actually, that this isn’t the norm.”

The latter half of Who Gets to be Smart sees Lee grapple with the decision of whether or not to pursue further study — she worries that by doing so, she’ll be reinforcing and perpetuating this very Australian ideal of striving for better.

What’s wrong with striving for individual betterment?

“In doing so, we’re wilfully ignoring the fact there are so many people below us, whose lives are not defined by aspiration, but by survival,” says Lee.

“It’s a complex idea that a lot of us suffer from and are responsible for, or implicated in. Australia’s middle class is so invested in trying to give ourselves, and our kids, a higher starting point than we received — which, in one way, is a beautiful thing — but we’re so invested that we’re scrapping and elbowing each other in the middle, as we attempt to climb up the pyramid.”

It is Lee’s belief that rather than creating progress, the scrapping and elbowing that occurs in the middle strata of Australia’s social hierarchy simply keeps the rich rich, and the poor poor. Despite what we’d like to believe — and what we’re told to believe — not all wealth, intelligence and accomplishment is created equal.

Some of us get more than we ‘deserve’, while most of us get much less.

Again, Lee is cognisant of her role in the ecosystem. It’s something she says she thinks about all the time.

“Privilege operates on either side of hard work,” offers the writer. “So, from my position: because of my educational background, because I look like this and talk like this, because I’m in a stable relationship and I’ve never experienced disability, I’ve had, in many ways, a clean run. All of these things make it easier for me to work as hard as I do. And I work fucking hard.

“But also, because of my privilege, I’m disproportionately rewarded for my hard work. It’s part of a much bigger question of: How does anyone with comparable privilege live with themselves in a world that is deeply unfair, in every single way?

“That’s just a function of existence, and it’s for each one of us to decide what good we are capable of doing, and how we live with ourselves, and how we sleep at night.”

Bri Lee will appear at the Sydney Opera House’s 2021 Antidote Festival, on Sunday September 5, as part of a virtual panel discussion called The Myth of the Fair Go, alongside writer Rick Morton and educator Sheila Ngoc Pham.