Welcome to the new quarter! After a process that spanned many weeks, we decided that for the next three months we will be focusing on privilege. As a group of teenagers, the team felt that it is important for people our age to be thinking more about our own privileges. But I think there is a specific message of what privilege is when it is highlighted like this by institutions. We want to acknowledge that white privilege in particular, but also privilege in wealth and gender, are often the only aspects of privilege that the media tends to focus on. However, we are not the media; we are not marketed to a group of middle-aged adults stuck in the corporate struggle and managing debt and soccer games. We are young compared to the rest of the world, and we carry an incredibly different perspective and have more potential for listening and empathizing with others, which frankly is not something adults are great at.
Throughout the quarter, we will be focusing on a lot of different types of privilege. There are privileges we can examine in nearly every interaction we make with other people. In elementary school I remember feeling bad for the one or two kids who couldn’t or didn’t bring in the ten dollar field trip fee, but none of us really understood that context behind it. We just knew that our friends were destined to spend a day hanging out in the office with the dreaded vice-principal. In fourth grade, we tried out instruments for band class and half the kids borrowed beaten up instruments from the school and the other half toted in shiny instruments rented or borrowed from a music store a couple times a week. It wasn’t a big deal, it was a choice that everyone’s parents made, or maybe it wasn’t. At the beginning of the school year, some kids would bring a giant pencil case full of fancy new mechanical pencils and some kids would bring in a handful of yellow #2’s. My point is, we’ve been interacting with privilege for as long as we’ve been alive, and if you don’t agree, I ask you to think again. Privilege is power, and we’ve all been in scenarios where we’ve been the ones with and without the power. First day of school at a new school? You definitely don’t have the privilege of familiarity; everyone around you probably already knows what’s going on, while you’re completely disoriented.
Obviously there are more well-known scenarios, taking public transport home and having to switch buses or trains because you feel unsafe. The school discussions about diversity when white kids look to kids of color for forgiveness for their unchecked biases. These are situations that can’t be thoroughly understood unless you’ve experienced these interactions before. We at WriteCause are not professionals in this field and therefore we are not qualified enough to accurately educate people on privilege; however, we are able to voice the opinions and the experiences of the youth.
This quarter, we hope as always, is going to get your gears spinning and ideas you may or may not be comfortable with might pop up. Accept them and greet them with curiosity instead of contempt, examine your day-to-day. Most of all, write about it. For yourself or for us, get your thoughts out there and flesh out your ideas and inner dialogue. And if you feel comfortable, talk about it. Find a group of supportive people where you feel safe to share personal details and discuss. We prompt you every three months not just to get us all writing, but also to get us all thinking. We hope you get some good thoughts in this quarter, and really do try to get them on paper (or Word, or Google Docs, you know the metaphor drill). And submit! Happy writing!
Pumped for the new quarter! Keep writing!