You know the kind of internal agony that you experience when remembering something you did that was embarrassing or inappropriate in a social situation and you just want to curl up and make a pterodactyl screech internally (or into a pillow)? C’mon, I can’t be alone in that. I felt that kind of agony acutely on the drive home from a workshop/training/informal conference recently.

Okay, real quick, context first. The workshop was comprised of people ages 19-65 from the Asian American community in the greater Los Angeles area. Some have worked in the legal and medical field providing resources to the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Many also spoke English with heavy accents and unconventional grammar. Most did not attend college in the States.

We were discussing gender based violence and male privilege which is familiar grounds to me, ya know, considering I attend Scripps. I’m very used to talking about these things in the classroom and with politicized friends using complex sentence structures, multisyllabic words, and theory specific vocabulary. But let’s be real: outside the Claremont bubble very few niches of people talk like that. However, I totally neglected the fact that relative to most people in the world I enjoy tremendous education privilege (which by the way is very much correlated with economic class privilege). I made several comments about how society systematically disenfranchises women and is rather ineffective in dealings with gender based violence. And by comments I mean paragraphs that some might call tirades. Here is something I don’t like to admit: I can be pretty long-winded when I talk about things I’m passionate about because I’ve thought about it, because I’m passionate about it (and being an egocentric creature I think you should be, too #sorrynotsorry). It also doesn’t help that I naturally talk without periods.

There is nothing wrong about what I said but the way I said it was inappropriate and seriously problematic given the context. I can talk in this way because I enjoy incredible educational privilege, because for about nine months I’m in an environment where we have the opportunities to engage with theories on social justice critically and intimately. We have the privilege of being able to code switch. Code switching is when you adopt a different way of speaking depending on different contexts. I don’t go home and talk to my mother about social constructs, heteronormativity, and hegemony. Even if I do, I don’t use that set of academic vocabulary because it seriously hinders communication for obvious reasons. The fact that I have a different set of vocabulary to describe, classify, and analytically dissect my experiences is, in and of itself, a manifestation of my education privilege. The workshop that day was a situation in which code switching was necessary in order for everyone to feel safe to participate. Demonstrations of privilege hinders communication, silences experiences, and removes agency from the same group of people we are trying to empower. People are perfectly capable of talking about their own experiences and opinions in their own words. A friend of mine said once that theory never takes precedence over experience. Words relaying real experience is far more valuable than a series of academic words strung together in the most eloquent way to describe experiences.

I was the youngest and one of the least experienced people in the room that day. And because of my education I inadvertently made the space uncomfortable for people to voice their opinions and experiences. No, I don’t have statistics to prove that certain individuals didn’t talk because I spoke out the way I did. But I can tell you that privilege influences speaking patterns in discussions whether it be workshops or classroom discussions. Seriously, people who stay quiet in discussion are very frequently women and people of color whose voices have been silenced and whose experiences have traditionally been marginalized. Fluency in English is a marker of respect (probably because it’s correlated with privilege). An eloquently worded response in English changes dynamics in discussions and social gatherings. I immigrated to the U.S. and English is not my first language. I know how unsafe it feels to talk with imperfect English. I know how broken English can be a source of pain, self loathing, how it can subject one to microaggressions and blatantly racist acts, and how frequently comments are ignored if a person delivers it with less than fully fluent English. I remember the sheer terror and shame of being in a classroom of fluent English speakers back when I tested below basic on the English standardized test. Even now I occasionally overhear adults talk about their embarrassment interacting with their children’s teachers, coaches, or friend’s parents in their “broken English”. And yet, there I was forgetting about my status as a privileged person in the space—about the pain of the wound that left the scar. The way I spoke is a manifestation of my privilege. It makes people uncomfortable and has a very real potential to silence people. I’m supposed to be serving this community. I know how to code switch.

I knew better.

This litany pounded in my head and it hurt because I knew better. How could I have asserted myself in the space like that? We talk about the importance of acknowledging our privilege all the time. But we don’t talk about what that really looks like in real life. How does the acknowledgment of our privileges inform our behavior? Experience is a damn good teacher. This is how I learned. I wished I would’ve learned this sooner.