Identity and state

Privilege, Memory, and the Stories We Don't Share

I grew up with advantages I didn't earn and rarely noticed. White, male, young, with books in the house and enough food during critical developmental years. A safe neighborhood with a creek and trees. The right teachers at pivotal moments, intellectually challenging parents, and a public education system that invested in me. Through deterministic happenstance, I became good at thinking about a class of problems too few people work on, and market dynamics let me do what I love for more money than I need.

People grant me the authority to speak as expected of males. My skin color goes unremarked. My youth earns forgiveness for brash rejoinders. I'm more likely to be a murder victim, and I feel constant pressure to be resolute and correct. But I've never worried for my physical safety with male companions. I walk alone at night without thought. As a motorcyclist and engineer, I'm never the odd one out. I can enter any building freely, and no one rustles or stares when I board a bus.

I will never know what it's like to be a woman watching male coworkers take credit for her ideas while making $20,000 less than junior devs fresh out of college. To move from Pakistan to the rural Midwest and struggle to learn math in a language not my own. To be told all my life I was White because my adoptive family was darker, then move to New York and be called Black, with no one to teach me how to be Black. To be the only kid from the Rez who went to college, pleading with admissions about a father who wouldn't lift a finger to fill out the FAFSA.

I have different memories.

The Weight of a Secret Identity

I'm chopping zucchini for dinner when my family explains that my friend's bisexual girlfriend is "no good for relationships." I assent, numb, cursing that I was born as the abomination I am. But I'm straight, not one of those homosexuals. Not sinful. I can change. We don't believe in God, but being gay is a terrible sin somehow. We wonder if industrial pollution is creating more gay people.

Months later I kiss a man and hate myself for it. There's a cancer in my brain, and I think if I hurt myself badly enough, maybe that part will die too. That day I hit two of my best friends. Matthew shouts in my face, sees something in my eyes, softens. I can't explain. I just run into the woods and keep going while the night air chars my lungs. It's minus fourteen degrees, a quarter moon in the trees. I lie face down in the snow, waiting to die. I deserve it.

I lie to my dad about a date. "Her name was Anna," I say. Two weeks later I bite the bullet. "She doesn't exist. His name was Eric." He says he's hurt and needs time to think. Dad's coworkers ask where he went wrong as a parent. Long-time family friends cut off contact. My mom, paradoxically, gets closer.

It's winter in Minnesota. An old woman in enormous black sunglasses slows her minivan to a crawl and stares as I walk hand-in-hand with a man. On road trips, we gauge people at gas stations, motels, restaurants. Will they talk. Is it safe. Separate beds, please. Just buddies grabbing a beer.

My boyfriend leaves a wedding in rage and tears. The groom pushed him against a wall, hands on his throat. No two fucking gays will dance at his wedding. "It's his special day," the family says.

In a San Francisco grocery line, a Black woman with a toddler in her stroller screams at me. "Faggot! Pussy cocksucker! I'm going to get my brother. He's right outside. He'll fuck you up real good!" I go back each week, wondering when the next time will be. Two of my gay friends have been beaten unconscious and robbed this year.

I'm normal.

Listening to Other People's Truth

Every trans woman has a story of How Things Were and How She Changed. Each bi man knows the experience of justifying himself to utter strangers and to the people he loves. Coming-out stories unite strangers in the most unusual, intimate way—so strange, and yet so alike. "It happened to me too." I understand you.

I took a course called "The Psychology of Prejudice"—a litany of cognitive psychology studies pinned together in a web of models. Stereotype formation, ingroup-outgroup bias, priming, subtyping. We talked about experiment design, and we shared stories. It's tough to shut up, to hold still the voice in your head that constructs a reason for everything, and listen to someone else's voice. Sometimes we didn't do so well and people got nervous or scared. But mostly they shared stories of extraordinary depth.

A Black freshman says his affirmative-action scholarship is completely unjustified. Another differs: his only shot at college was an endowment for Black journalism majors, and when his family went homeless in high school, he lost the grades for an academic scholarship. Losing your legs means advocating for accessibility standards every day just to get to work and pay taxes. Dating is different when 30% of Black men your age have been incarcerated. Working is different when your average earnings are 77% of your peers, or when you're cited 10-20% higher costs for auto loans or homes. If you're two-spirited, half Mexican, half Native, you may not fit in anywhere—misunderstood or shut out by the very people who should be on your side.

You learn the joy of belonging. Meeting a woman just like you who's a chemist like you want to be. A computer programmer comes to speak to class—he's Lakota, and someday you could be one too. Going to the salon or supermarket where they know how to work with your hair, have the right kind of beans, speak sign language just like you—and for the first time you didn't have to scribble everything on paper. These cultures have their strengths, their diversity, their drugs and violence and insularities, just like yours. You can be an A-list gay torn between a law practice and binge drinking four times a week, or an Oklahoma farmer who hates Katy Perry and isn't sure about marriage—and that's a way to be gay too. Sometimes you can look around and everyone is like you in some way that doesn't really matter, except that it's so rare.

I didn't know any of this existed. My friends—and sometimes, if I listen well, even strangers—share these pieces of their lives, and there's a multitude of questions I'll never think to ask. They're not quantitative. They're not even generalizable. I harp on data and reasoning, but it's not enough. These stories are fucking important.

The Cost of Not Talking

Sometimes my friends shy away. Sometimes I shy away, afraid of asking the wrong question—and I've said plenty of insensitive, hurtful things. Discretion can be a virtue. But when the topic of class comes up, and we say "there's no winning that discussion" or "I'm not racist, but I don't want to say the wrong thing by accident"—we've lost something important. By bludgeoning people with the privilege bat and "hierarchies of oppression," by seeing everything in terms of The System, we've told the people we need most to understand our experiences that they can't even listen. Our language as activists is too different. Or we suggest their stories are less valid because only people of color are truly in the struggle.

When people feel excluded, looked down on, rejected, it's damn hard to understand each other.

If we want a richer society, a culture of equality, we've got to have these conversations more often—as uncomfortable and heart-rending as they are. It's not your responsibility to explain to men what it's like to be a woman, or a Muslim, or intersex. You've got enough on your plate. But I guarantee there are people you know who can come to understand your story if you reach out. We shouldn't assign guilt for who people are; we should seek common understanding.

If you're a member of an outgroup, leave the judgments at the door. Make a safe space. Promise not to get angry, at least for a few minutes—there will always be time for rage. Instead of telling people how privileged they are, share how you feel as someone on the outside. If they say you're wrong, that's OK. Maybe next time. Sometimes it takes a bit to sink in.

And if you're the "normal person"—whatever that means—promise someone you'll listen. Unconditionally. Ask for their truth. Don't tell them they're wrong; you can argue later. It doesn't matter if they're objectively correct, because each person behaves according to their experience. At the very least, seeing through their lens can be interesting.

At best, it changes your life.