Privilege Case

Privilege

Through reading a textbook definition of what it means to be privileged, I am not surprised by how well I match up with the depiction of a privileged person in today's society. I am a female who embraces her gender in a manner which society would deem acceptable as the social norm, I am heterosexual, of an economically stable family, able-bodied, literate, young, an English speaker, pale skinned, a non-Jew and fertile. Although I appear to be Caucasian, I am of mixed backgrounds, yet in society's eyes I am whatever they want me to be. I have lived my life with people assuming that I am Caucasian, and usually it works to my advantage. Often, I find myself in groups of Hispanics wanting to connect with them and share with them my hidden identity. This allows me to connect with both the majority and the minority, which I consider to be both a personal privilege as well as a privilege in the eyes of society. In my eyes, the only thing that made me less privileged than anyone else in the world was that I am a female, and even then I did not believe that this made much of a difference considering the rest of my privileges would allow me to make it to where I need to be and give me opportunities to speak to the people I would need to speak to and give me the chance to prove that I am not a weak female as society would like to believe. I thought that this bias towards women was steadily disappearing as we enter an era where you are who you know, and are judged by the company you keep. With my plethora of other privileges I did not think my gender would prove to be what would hold me back from attaining any opportunities in life, yet it was in my WGSS discussion that I found out I was sadly mistaken. Upon compiling a list of our privileges, I was chosen as the least privileged simply because I was among a group of males. Though they came from different social classes, different ethnic backgrounds and different levels of education, my gender was suddenly the only thing anyone could pay attention to from my once seemingly impressive list of attributes. In this scenario, I suddenly could not win.

Growing up, I never believed that gender had an impact on me. I played the sports I wanted to play and still allotted time to go shopping after. I ate steaks at dinner yet kept my slim figure. I felt as if I had the best of both worlds. My parents allowed me to pursue whatever I wished, and with this I went into the world believing the world was my oyster. I thought the world was everyone's oyster. I went into life thinking that if someone wanted something enough, that person could simply find what it would take within them to make it happen. Because of my blanketed upbringing, I forgot that society had an idea of it's own. I did not take the time to remember that homeless people were not necessarily homeless because they did not try enough in school to get a good education.