How blind are we to privileged?
How can you not see your privileged?
How do you go through life not seeing that your house is bigger than that of your peers?
How can you walk right past your brothers and sisters that are out on the streets begging for money?
How can you eat and throw away half your food knowing how many people out there are dying of hunger?
How can you not see the bitter reality?
These are all great questions but the real question is, what happens when we do realize how privileged we are? Do we change the way we live to reflect our newfound knowledge? Do we go out and give change to every homeless person we see or just a couple? Do we keep reminding ourselves about our own privilege or do we talk about it for a couple days and then forget about it? After we leave our social justice class or our elite schooling classes do we go out in to the real world better understanding our privilege and how we can help others or does it all go flying out the window as soon as we step into the hallway?
People of color, like myself, have lived through life being oppressed; beat down, harassed, persecuted, and preyed on. When we talk about reproduction of elite we are talking about institutions like Colby. We are those students that come from underprivileged neighborhoods and backgrounds that we talk about in class. We are those kids who have had all odds against them from the beginning yet we have had to adjust and grind in order to get to where we are. We know how privileged we are to be at a place like Colby. We know how we are being taught to be elite and how to handle that title of elite-ness. The difference is that if you ask any of us what we plan on doing after Colby you will see that we plan to go back to the communities where we came from and bring more of our “kind” out of the shadows. We will use our elite-ness to bring forth a change in this world. We will not stand by idle and wait for someone who is considered “old money” to bring this change for us. We will take our cumulative knowledge and go out to change the world around us. The issue with the world is that sometimes we are not blind to our privilege but we ignore it. We rather turn the other way around when we see a homeless person begging for money. We rather not think about how some kids out there will never make it out of middle school. We focus so much on ourselves that we never really open our eyes to the real world. Sometimes we need to step back and look at the broader picture and bring about that change that is desired by thousands, if not millions.
