privilege
Vulnerability – is it a condition we find ourselves in? A state of being we choose? Let’s keep it very simple: it depends on the approach we take to defining it. In the former approach, we are ‘done to’, while in the latter we are consciously ‘doing’.
For so long, private has meant a place that I was forced to create, claim and carve out to hide away from the public violence. And if I’ve been allowed to further wallow in it then I don’t want to – thank you very much.
I felt naked in front of everyone when I first came out, and I can’t stress enough how much my male privilege has helped me out here. I don’t even know if people found it serious enough to consider it my identity instead of ‘a mere sexual preference’ or ‘a phase’ (always a classic dismissal).
In our mid-month issue, Amit Timilsina writes about the role class plays in the decisions that young people make, and what he himself, as a young person and a youth leader, had to do to gain access to resources and to professional acceptance.
Often, we take certain things for granted, forgetting that there are certain privileges and power dynamics which we benefit from even if we don’t realise it. Though, sometimes, there are other benefits that aren’t available to us, social or cultural factors that do hinder us in some ways, we may still have areas in which we’re more advantaged than others