The Important Privileged Minority

I just drove into one of the nicest gaudiest looking spots I’ve seen so far in Los Angeles, The Grove. People are attractive, dress well, drive in nice cars, and look happy, like they live ideal lives. I’m driving around with a car that has been shitted on well over 50 times by the birds which hover over my parking spot (and I refuse to pay money to have it washed because I know it’s just going to get shat on again), with speakers that I have to hit whenever I want them to work (speakers are a luxury especially when you can just sing to yourself), and with windows that don’t roll down (I don’t want to pay extra money to get them fixed).Since the windows don’t work I have to step out of the car in order to grab the parking ticket which allows me to park in this 7 floor lot, in the process I hold up the cars behind me for a few seconds until I get back in. O well, they have to wait because I’m a privileged minority.

I was on the phone with my older sister who I haven’t spoken to in quite some time. We were catching up, and wound up getting into a conversation about our lives growing up. Although we grew up in the projects of Spanish Harlem (and my parents still live in the same apartment, having moved only once from the 9th floor to the 10th floor), I explained to her I never felt the pressures that people associate with those who will in areas of lower income. I think that my parents did a good job of not exposing me to any financial family troubles, which did or course exist, or any dangers which were also very real in our neighborhood. In this way, I think I grew up perceiving the world as a perfectly perfect place.

Then I went to middle school and things changed. It was a sharp change, from going to a predominantly poor Black and Latino school (with one White student who also just happened to be the Valedictorian), to interacting with very financially and educationally privileged people (most of who were Asian and White). In elementary school, the world, my comfortable world, was full of Blacks and Latinos and the occasional Asians who owned the fruit and vegetable markets in El Barrio, and White people who were on TV and one who was my 3rd grade teacher, too. Nonetheless, the world I knew was a happy, fun, care-free place.

I didn’t know things were different until I witnessed gaps for myself. The white kids spoke about things I never heard of in my life, read books I never knew existed, knew about things I never learned, lived in 6 bedroom 3 bathroom labyrinth condos with hallways you lost yourself in, traveled outside of the country to places I never knew existed (except for Dominican Republic where they stayed in resorts I never even knew existed- in my own country!) and when their families just didn’t want to leave the U.S.A. they had their country houses, had nicer, cooler, school supplies, went out to classy looking places for lunch, did their groceries at D’agostino (am I spelling this right? I still don’t know), ate organic fruits and vegetables, and did all types of things my mouth still drops at the thought of. So imagine, when our teacher tells us we have to work on a project, and my privileged group mates decide it will be a good idea to rotate at each other’s houses to work on it. I almost shit my pants when I remembered that I didn’t have a doorman, snacks, large open spaces, cool supplies, office space where my parents used for after work, clean elevators (hell! Working elevators). Fuck, my parents shopped at MET Supermarkets! What was I going to do? How the hell would I ever compare to them?

Middle school, was the first time in my life I realized things weren’t as peachy as I thought they were. Through my new found awareness on the existing social disparities, my insecurity, then my anger and bitterness toward my own living situation, then my desire to react and not be perceived as being less privileged, was all born. I wanted to be the smartest, look the best, be liked, to fit in, my new real world, and grew resentment for the old one. I was less fortunate but didn’t want to be considered as such. I was ashamed and disgusted at myself.

Because the realization of this inequality at a young age, coupled with my need to fit in, I believe I placed blame and anger on the wrong group for a good time in my life. I was angry that minorities weren’t able to pick themselves up and fix their own situations, and thought them lazy with the assumption they never even tried. In reality, I should have been enraged that there was a group of privileged people who had established a world with institutions, policies, mindsets, to not only help create a group of less fortunate people, but to keep them down as well.

Then I began to think about the definition of what it means to be privileged. To be privileged is to have some special advantage that not all can enjoy. I realized not too long after, that while there are many hindrances inherent in being classified and perceived as a minority, gay, etc., I myself am privileged in several ways. I am an American male, I was brought up in a fairly stable family with fairly stable resources, I have access to higher education in a community where it is more difficult than many other groups to gain it, I have also met people in my life that through mere association with them make me more privileged than others. I am both more and less privileged. It is for this reason, and for many others, I consider myself, and others like me, to be a very unique and important type of privileged person. I have had the experience of both ends of this spectrum, and even though they may not be extremes ends of the spectrum, I have enough understanding to know these disparities exist. To be your typical privileged person is not enough to fix the maladies of the less fortunate, and unfortunately the less fortunate do not always have the resources required to change these differences. This is why the privileged minority is the most important.

I think the biggest danger to social change is to be privileged and lack the awareness that we are.

However I think it is important to also note the difference between a privilege which is innate and one which is earned.

The space in between those two is where work needs to be done.