The other day my boyfriend asked me:
Hey if you could time travel to any time period where would you go?
And I laughed and I said:
Nowhere. This is the best time to be an Asian woman.
Dur!
He looked confused for a moment before he realized
Oh.
This made me think about this phrase that has
been circulating in our cultural awareness lately
"Check your privilege."
So check your privilege basically says
Yo. When you're considering somebody else's plight
be aware of the specific privileges that you were born into
so you can set those aside and accurately try to understand
someone else's situation.
So when my boyfriend said
I've never thought about it that way.
I started wondering: what's my privilege?
And I do have some. I mean I was born into a family
that placed a lot of value on education.
All right Honey, I will give you a penny per page
Because I'm greedy as fuck, I had a lot of good incentives to learn.
Your daughter is the first in our middle school
to read the entire section of the Young Adult Library.
Money money money.
My dad was also in the military
so I was exposed to different cultures and countries
and people and amassed quite a few dialects
that are embarrassing now.
When I was a kid, I was in North Carolina.
*speaking Japanese*
Ay brah, we went chase that motha fucka to the parking lot.
Oh em gee. Are you bitches talking about sush sush?
We should totes got to Sugar Fish (restaurant). It's amaze.
And, after puberty, I was considered cute.
Occasionally pretty. Which I'm sure helped me along the way.
Now, as you can see by the graph, the more attractive you are
the more cats a potential partner will tolerate.
Ultimately, I hope that having this kind of awareness makes me a better person
and more able to sympathize with people's struggles.
Like not everybody was born with parents who are still together.
And who support their dreams. Or were in a middle class family.
Or were instilled with a work ethic so young
Or experience the world and got to be exposed to different things.
It's so easy to see someone through your own narrow lens
and to like dismiss what they're going through.
Or write off their struggles as excuses or complaints.
It's a lot harder to try keep in mind the opportunities you were afforded.
Just because of where you were born.
I've definitely been guilty of doing that.
But on the whole, we're moving more towards empathy.
And I love that.
Which reminds me. I asked my boyfriend:
If you could time travel to any period where would you go?
The 1960s.
Cool.
I have no idea where Asian people were in the 60s.
I don't know either.
Where were we?
I'm Anna Akana. Stay awesome Gotham.
Thank you to Audible for sponsoring today's episode.
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I love listening to audio books when I am trekking through the mountains on adventures.
Or simply folding my dirty laundry which takes quite a bit of time.
Right now I'm listening to Stephen King's "Insomnia."
Because I enjoy all of the spooky tales that he writes.
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over at audible.com/anna.
That's audible.com/anna.
*poof*