ceeboo wrote: ↑Thu Aug 05, 2021 12:05 am
don't think you're comparing apples to apples. Let's imagine you're not a lawyer yet. You're a young lad, you live in Scottsdale Arizona, You have been accepted to Harvard Law School and you are preparing to begin your awesome journey. While still at home in AZ, you enter the Post office to mail something to Harvard. An extremely nice young Christian young man named Ceeboo strikes up a conversation with you and asks you "What are you doing here" - You reply "I am mailing something to my school, I start there next week" - Ceeboo replies "Cool, what school" - You reply "Harvard" - I reply "You mean the one in Massachusetts?" That question is born from being impressed - Like wow. I simply don't buy that the clear meaning of the question (in the story above) is something like, No way are you, someone who has black skin, smart enough to be accepted at Harvard.
Hi, Ceeboo -
Were we continuing via PM, I’d probably have returned the same observations that others have given here. And I have a few others.
First - I suspect that there are some differences in communication style that could explain our postal clerk’s choice of words. Myself, I’d never have used those words, because there is an implied statement of there being multiple ‘Harvards’, which is silly. Likely, a better choice of words may have been, “The
school in Massachusetts?” Marginally better, but it focuses on the location of
the Harvard without implying that there may be more than one Harvard. The difference is subtle but significant enough.
Another thing I’d like to point out is that the local context of this story plays a role, in several ways:
1. The author is asked this three separate times by three separate people,
2. She is asked while carrying packages addressed to ‘that’ Harvard,
3. The same type of confirmation isn’t asked of her friend who was right in front of her (the one going to Princeton).
Last - I’d like to offer that this episode happening to the author within the larger oveall context of her experiences in total, which includes 9 other examples of privilege, shapes her perception. So we could expect that the author has reason to be - if
you would term her so - a bit
jaded.
This is the thing about privilege. It isn’t always egregious in the single instance. But, over time and with an accumulation of similar episodes, it becomes strikingly apparent to the one outside of that privilege… which is kind of the point.
I’ll post another example from the author’s list in a moment that will show a better definition of
privilege.