According to poet and activist Audre Lorde, the “mythical norm” is what a given society understands to be generically human. Writing from the perspective of a Black queer woman, Lorde noted that the norm in the US is typically “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” The mythical norm is an artifact of White supremacy, upheld by racism and oppression. Lorde writes, “As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of color become ‘other,’ the outsider whose experience and tradition is too ‘alien’ to comprehend.” White women are complicit in preserving the normative system, which inflicts ongoing violence—physical, psychological, and economic—on Black people and people of color.
Exclusion from the protective bubble of normativity leads to varying degrees of oppression or inequality. People who embody some or all aspects of the norm tend to treat their ostensibly typical attributes as neutral, invisible, or nonexistent. Being normal seems natural—not a special privilege. It’s easy to say “I don’t see race” when you live inside the bubble of Whiteness.
Indeed, any norm tends to disguise itself and disappear. Thus, a White, heterosexual, cisgender man may ignore the superpowers bestowed on him by the mythical norm—believing instead that his achievements are wholly earned through hard work, talent, and merit. A White woman may feel the forces of sexism while denying her race-based privilege. Although the norms of Whiteness or maleness may appear invisible to people who are White and/or male, they are oppressively visible to those excluded by their bubbles.