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. Continue reading →