Fifty privileges

I was on a flight this past December on the “nerd bird” from Seattle to San Jose. All around me were white and asian men, every one with a laptop, and almost every one writing code. I was just about to pull out my laptop when I realized just how privileged each and every one of us was to be on this plane, with these devices, working these jobs, likely all with an immense amount of comfort, stability, and success.

How did we all get there? What had to be true about our parents, our country, our schools, our cities, and our genetics that allowed such a homogenous group of people to all be going to the same place, doing the same tasks, and all for so much money?

Instead of pulling out my laptop, I pulled out my notebook and began to brainstorm each and every privilege that led to that moment. When I got off the plane, I resolved to elaborate on each one briefly daily, sharing each with my Facebook friends, to see if I could understand more deeply which parts of my personal and professional success were due to me and which were due to my environment.

Today was my last post. I’ve had many friends ask if I’d share the posts more publicly, hence this blog post. Below you’ll find all fifty posts, unedited, in the order that I posted them.

You might notice that some of the early posts are sparse. I learned over time that the posts were more interesting to me and friends if I remarked on the privilege and linked to more information.

#1: I’ve never heard gunfire from my bedroom

#2: I’ve always had access to food when I wanted it

#3: Police protect me rather than suspect me

#4: I never had to learn to protect myself on the street (or the playground)

#5: I had two parents raising me

39% of U.S. children have only one or even zero parents actively engaged in their lives.

#6: My public schools were able to attract nationally recognized teachers by paying professional grade salaries

Until Oregon’s measure 5 gutted public education funding in 1996.

#7: Most of my peers were college-bound, and 98% of them graduated from high school

I knew college was not only an option, but expected of me. In many U.S. public schools, the graduation rates are as low as 60–70%, with less than 5% college-bound. For students in those schools, college is a fantasy.

#8: When people see me on the street, most don’t have an immediate fear response

Many of my fellow Americans with darker skin don’t have this luxury, and move through the world knowing that everyone around them is scared by their presence. This includes police, who, seeing a phone, sometimes assume it is a gun or knife, and shoot.

#9: I was lucky enough to grow up in an era and in a state where smart poor kids like me could get grants, scholarships, and part time jobs to cover most of my in-state tuition and fees, and leave with less than $10,000 in student loans.

Most kids that are in my position now look at the price tag and don’t even consider college, or if they do, spend four years stressing about the next thirty years of massive debt. The result is that most of the kids I teach at UW are from the middle class or higher socioeconomically, or the best and the brightest from other countries.

#10: For some reason, my high school allowed a community college student to come to our high school at 7 am to teach about ten students (including me) computer science

He gave us his homework assignments and asked us to complete them, then told us he’d grade them once he got them back from his teacher. He also gave us Ska mixed tapes.

#11: I could play on the street in my neighborhood(s) without feeling in danger of cars, kids, gangs, or police

For many American kids, being on the street is about protecting your body, not play.

#12: In high school, I didn’t have to work to help my family pay the bills

In many families, teens need to work part time jobs to keep the lights on and food on the table, meaning less time for homework, play, and personal development.

#13: Because I was a boy, my teachers gave me more frequent and more constructive feedback

They also were encouraged me to contribute, whereas they expected the girls in class to be more compliant, only speaking when spoken to. All of this probably gave me more confidence and aptitude than some of my equally prepared female peers.

Frawley, T. (2005). Gender bias in the classroom: Current controversies and implications for teachers. Childhood Education, 81(4), 221–227.

#14: All of family and my friends’ family had jobs if they wanted them, setting the expectation that having a job was feasible, expected, necessary, and supported

Many American children, particularly those in poverty, have parents who are chronically un- or underemployed, creating an environment of worthlessness, survival, and hopelessness. These are not the conditions in which children thrive.

#15: My skin is white(ish) and my nose is thin(ish), so white people don’t other me (much)

I did nothing to accomplish this, and yet benefit from it greatly.

#16: Because my voice is louder and deeper than most womens’, I have a biological advantage in obtaining positions of power.

I didn’t earn this, but benefit from it greatly.

#17: When I was a boy, people treated me as future professional problem solver, rather than a future parent, spouse or friend

How did that shape my identity? How did it shape the skills I chose to develop?

#18: Because I’m taller than the average male and female, I was much more likely in life to receive more social esteem, more leadership skills, higher income

It’s also probably no coincidence that I’m short among my my high performing male colleagues.

Judge, T. A., & Cable, D. M. (2004). The effect of physical height on workplace success and income: preliminary test of a theoretical model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(3), 428.

#19: My parents took me outside my home town, state, and country, and so I was able to see (even if only a small glimpse) the vast diversity of how people behave, live, and relate

Most Americans have never traveled outside of America, and a quarter have never even left their state, usually because they don’t have the money, time, or desire.

#20: I am a native English speaker

#21: I was born in America

Yeah, I know, that can sound somewhat nationalistic and exceptionalist, but I don’t mean it that way. I mean it in relation to the human and civil rights we take for granted. We have so many freedoms, so much wealth, so many safety nets, and so much equity relative to so many other countries in the world. It’s easy to forget just how much our laws and birthright create our conditions for successful, fulfilling lives.

Take, for example, people with motor impairments who must use wheelchairs to get around. Buildings in the US have to be accessible by wheeled chairs. This is amazing! Compare this to a journey I made to the Jade Buddhist temple in Shanghai back in 2006, where many tourists come to pray. Across the street from the temple were hundreds of homeless physically disabled Chinese. They were there to beg for food. Most did not have wheelchairs. Some were missing as many as three or four limbs. It was clear that most of them lived on that street, surviving only because of food and water offered by able-bodied tourists as they exited the temple. In some cases, I couldn’t tell if they were sleeping or dead.

This privilege we have in America, this right to survival, is precious and not to be taken for granted. This could have been me living on the street without mobility, food, or shelter, had my Chinese grandparents not moved to America, and had I been born without all four limbs. But I wasn’t.

#22: I can breathe the air around me without getting sick, short of breath, or poisoned

It’s a weird thing to say, but hundreds of millions of people in China and India are greatly disadvantaged by having to stay indoors. It’s one of many things that take attention away from growing, learning, and thriving, and instead to staying alive.

#23: My city contained both wealth and poverty

Most people in America live in more class segregated settings.

This class diversity gave me was perspective. The most visceral example of the visible class divide was the parking lots in my high school. The rich kids took the upper lot, where they parked their Mercedes and BMWs and hung out before school. The kids who bussed, and the kids who saved up for a junker and parked on the street, were down the hill, walking further to school.

It was very clear that some kids could access whatever they wanted, and others were in families just trying to survive, but these differences in wealth were not correlated at all with intelligence, worth, or identity. This helped me understand that ability was not about money.

These class divides were, however, strongly correlated with access. I remember, for example, being surprised to find out too late that there was an honors and AP English class, and that was a thing one should take to improve one’s chances of getting into college. When I asked my peers how they found out about it, they all said it was their parents. The upper class parents knew that these things were necessary and helped their kids and each other access those resources. The lower class parents barely knew anything about college, let alone the choices a student has to make to access it. Experiences like these helped me see that knowledge is power, and that wealth and stability provides access to knowledge.

#24: My parents could afford to send me to pre-school, which provided me broad and substantial benefits in life

Most families with net incomes below $60K can’t afford it, which causes lifelong inequities.

#25: My parents talked to me a lot when I was a baby

The disparities in this are huge, with many poorer families talking to them infants a quarter as much. These dIfferences have dramatic effects on language development and academic success.

#26: I have full use of my limbs, voice, eyes, and ears

About 20% of Americans don’t, most with mobility, sight, or hearing loss. And yet, the 80% of us without disabilities tend to act, vote, and design as if every American has the same abilities, which creates a vast range of inequities in access to information and infrastructure.

Fortunately, there is some fantastic research in the world that designs systems based on individual ability, rather than fixed assumptions of ability. For all you taxpayers out there who give a few pennies a year to the National Science Foundation, you’ll thank us later when you join the 20% later in life.

#27: I have access to the Internet

And this is a privilege that grows larger and larger every day, as many critical services move from brick and mortar, cash-based commerce to digital, primarily web-based services. Take, for example, Seattle’s public transit access card, the ORCA card. In 2009, the cards were rolled out, allowing customers to carry a balance, use it on any of the Puget Sound transit services, and have it auto-reload when the balance depleted. No more worries about exact change, faster onboarding, and automatic transfers. This is great stuff, right?

Unless you don’t have access to the internet. The easiest way to get a card is to buy online. If you can’t do that, you can have it mailed to you. Homeless? In downtown Seattle, you have one option: go to the Bartell Drugs on 3rd Ave. Except they recently stopped selling new cards and now only refill cards. And this is just for now: the list of participating retailers keeps growing shorter and shorter, as the vast majority of users purchase and refill online.

Once retailers stop selling new cards, the only choice is to get a reduced fare card directly from King County. Except the only way to find out how is to — you guessed it — go to their website.

Increasingly, access to the Internet is required for access to anything. Amazingly, we’ve flatlined at 84% of Americans having access, since there’s very little market incentive to offer access to rural, poor, or homeless citizens.

At what point does access become a right instead of a privilege? And how do we operationalize that right, when access requires a device and electricity?

#28: I was taught to read

An astounding 1 in 7 high school graduates in the U.S. can’t read, and this hasn’t improved in a decade.

My own experiences learning to read demonstrate just how privileged I was. I remember one night in particular from 1st grade. We had just been given a reading book. I remember this book, because it had a really cute bunny on the front, which reminded me of all of the books I’d loved as a toddler. I wanted so much to understand what was inside, and to show my teacher that I did. The first night I received the book, I remember laying in my bed with the light on, working my way through the sentences, “This is a bunny.”, “This is grass”, “The bunny is fast”. Eventually, I stumbled upon a section of the book with the sentence, “He was laughing”. Lag-hing? What’s lag-hing? I ran downstairs to ask my mom, “Mom, what is lag-hing?”

She could have yelled at me to go back to bed. She could have said, “That’s not a word, what are you doing up?” She could have discouraged me, signalling that reading was not important, that not bothering her was important, that curiosity was irrelevant. But, being the 2nd and 5th grade teacher that she was, instead she said something incredibly powerful: “That’s a really good question! Ah, yes, that’s the word ‘laughing’. It’s confusing, because ‘gh’ doesn’t look like it would make an ‘f’ sound. But you’re going to see those letters together in a lot of words, and they’ll always make a ‘ffff’ sound. English has many of strange rules that there’s no way to guess, so ask me any time you get stuck.” She sent me to bed, not only supporting my eagerness to learn, but actually providing me English reading knowledge that enhanced my ability to learn.

Most readers in the world don’t have a primary school teacher as a mother. I did, and I had a wonderful 1st grade teacher, and I had a whole community of people helping me to enter the world of knowledge through literacy. The rest of the world should have these very same privileges, and even in developed countries like our own, we’re nowhere close.

#29: I am healthy

50% of American adults have one or more chronic health conditions (e.g., heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, arthritis) and 25% have two or more of these, many of these eventually leading to physical disabilities. If you’re healthy, you know what it’s like to be sick. You have less energy, less motivation to work, less hope. Can you imagine being sick all the time? What effect would that have on your daily life? Each one of these diseases has its own experience, I can’t imagine any of them. That is privilege.

I have health. I try to exercise (and mostly fail). I don’t smoke. I try (and also fail) to eat fruits and vegetables. I’ll try to avoid chronic conditions for as long as I can, but with my family history, I’ll have at least one chronic disease eventually.

(I edited the above to be less patronizing. It’s probably still patronizing. These things are really hard to write about!).

#30: As a teen, I had the unconditional love and support of my family

For many teens, the love of their parents is highly conditional. This is especially true of LGBT identified ones. One study estimates that up to 40 percent of LGBT homeless youth leave home because their families rejected them (either kicking them out of the house or creating such an unwelcoming environment, the teen leaves). Worse yet, once homeless, many shelters reject them because of their religious ideologies, leaving them on the street.

This unconditional love from my parents was a huge part of the stability in my life as a young adult. It made me feel safe to explore myself, my interests, my dreams. It ensured I had food, shelter, safety, and access to information. All of these things are so easy to take for granted, it’s easy to forget that many Americans start their lives with nothing, not even the love and support of their parents.

#31: Because I’m male, throughout my life I’ve been judged more by my accomplishments than my appearance

This shaped my self-concept in very specific ways, meaning I focused more on learning, skills, and ability than what I was wearing or how I did my hair.

It’s hard watching the opposite happen to my daughter. We talk about this a lot. She says that because she’s still searching for her identity, and doesn’t have a lot of self-confidence, her appearance (her makeup, her clothes, her hair) fill that void. And it fills that void easily, because she gets immediate positive feedback for how she looks. She says gets hardly any positive feedback about her intelligence or her personality (other than from her family, which we all know for a teen doesn’t count). She’s hopeful that as she gains more confidence in other aspects of herself that this will change, but for now, her self-worth is tightly bound to how other people feel about her appearance.

#32: Because of my income, I can mostly live where I want

In a time of rapid gentrification in cities, and rising costs of living in even suburban environments, most people have much less control over where they live, when they move, where their kids go to school, and what types of services are available to them.

When my parents divorced when I was in grade school, I almost lost this privilege, since my parents couldn’t afford to keep our house. Both of them thought that where we lived was important enough to maintain that they made big sacrifices: my mom commuted an hour to work for a decade, saved like mad, and bought a small house in the lower income neighborhood in our town. My dad took on a lot of debt to pay rent and bills and eventually went bankrupt. But my brother and I were able to stay at our schools, keep our friends, and have a sense of stability. Most of the time, this level of sacrifice wouldn’t have been enough.

#33: I have leisure time

I know, I know: I’m a professor, and to my professor friends, they’re thinking, “What??? How in the world do you have free time? I’m working 80 hours a week and can barely get everything done?” And my non-professor friends are thinking, “Typical lazy academic, teaching three hours a week. This is what’s wrong with America!”. Of course, the truth is in the middle: in my job, I have the luxury to decide what constitutes full-time effort. Long ago, I decided this was 45–50 hours per week, leaving enough time for me family, my friends, and my hobbies. And Facebook posts like these. That I have this choice is a privilege.

For most people worldwide, how long they must work to make a livable wage is not up to them. If they’re a salaried professional, they have a boss that has expectations. For hourly workers, every minute they clock in means less debt, more savings. About 5% of America works two jobs, some by choice, some by necessity. In many developing countries, people work seven days a week. People in Mexico have longer work weeks than Americans and make a fifth of the money. Time to live, to enjoy life, and to make it what you want is partly our choice, but partly circumstance.

#34: I have access to clean water

And it’s more than just clean water, I have an abundance of clean, cheap water, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, allowing me to take long showers, flush the toilet indiscriminately, and procrastinate far too long about leaky faucets.

About 1 in 10 people in the world lack access to water they can safely drink. Much of their day is spent boiling water, traveling to get water, saving up for clean water, testing water, and worrying about whether their water is clean. Flint, MI is an American tragedy that will have lasting consequences for hundreds of thousands of people, but it will be resolved swiftly. The rest of the developing world will be waiting and working a lot longer before basic access to clean water is a right and not a privilege.

#35: I have the time and income to vote

An increasing number of Americans can’t afford the time off, can’t afford the required identification, or can’t make it to a place to vote. In one of the world’s oldest democracies, this inequity and its downstream consequences is ridiculous and un-American.

#36: I live near a grocery store.

Many people in America live in what the USDA calls a “food desert”, where affordable, nutritious food is more than a mile away with no public transit in cities, or ten miles away in rural areas. About 4% of Americans live in one of these food deserts, including about 125,000 people in the Puget Sound region.

Why does it matter? Distance to a grocery store with fresh food is an independent predictor of BMI. The further away someone lives from fresh food, the less of it they eat and the more they eat fast food. And there’s not much one can do about it: to increase access, there either need to be more grocery stores (why would a store open in a poor neighborhood over a rich neighborhood?) or better public transit to the existing grocery stores.

#37: I had access to computing education in high school.

The vast majority of Americans still don’t, with only 1 in 10 U.S. high schools offering a computer science class and only 22 states allowing computer science to count toward high school graduation. This is despite the fact that a full half of STEM jobs are expected to involve computing in the next few years. Not only is computing education scarce in the United States, but it’s also extremely privileged: the vast majority of schools that offer it are wealthy and white. Of AP CS exam takers, only 22% are girls and only 13% are black or latino.

My own experience with computing education in 1994 was unique. My high school didn’t offer a course, but an enterprising community college student decided to offer a zero-period computer science course starting at 7:30 am. There were about 10 of us that enrolled. There was no curriculum; our teacher-student just brought in the assignments from his community college programming courses and challenged us to complete them. (I think we were doing his homework!). By the end of the year, there were only a few of us left, but I was excited enough by the topic that I decided to take the AP CS exam. I was the only one in my high school who ever had. I remember sitting in a janitor’s closet for three hours writing Pascal on paper, still clueless about what computer science was, but eager to find out.

In case you hadn’t heard, President Obama just announced CS For All, an initiative bring together over twenty years of computing education research, policy, and teaching efforts. The initiative is huge: $4 billion for states to train and fund K-12 CS teachers, $135 million in NSF funding for research and program development, policy efforts to allow CS to count for high school graduation, and broad participation by industry and code.org to facilitate training. Many of my colleagues’ research, along with some of my own, will be at the foundation of these efforts.

As this policy effort unfolds, support it with everything you can. Make sure your state lets CS count for high school graduation! Elect politicians that bring computing to K-12! And if decide you want to help, be sure to read the research: there are many, many unhelpful and even harmful ways to teach computing that can leave learners with a lifelong distaste for computing. Ask me for pointers if you want advice on doing it well.

#38. I’m not depressed

But I have been. And so have 15% of people in the US at one point in their lives, and some chronically, making almost everything about life feel difficult, pointless, and hopeless. It is not a state of mind that generally leads to prosperity, growth, or self-improvement. More often it leads to the loss of friendships, jobs, and sometimes lives, through suicide.

My own experience with depression was acute and was probably inducted by my separation and divorce back in 2007. It was unfortunately timed with the middle of my dissertation writing and my academic job search, which was just about the most difficult time to be depressed, given the immense pressure to write and travel to a dozen universities and research labs to be an exciting, interesting, high-energy public intellectual. For two years, by the advice of my therapist, I put on an elaborate act, creating a persona that would allow me to finish my Ph.D. and land a job. I was a high functioning, highly depressed person.

Meanwhile, on the inside, I was rapidly decaying. I let friendships lapse. I stopped talking to my family. I was a fragile, broken father, too often leaning on my poor toddler for comfort. Most of the days I wasn’t interviewing, I only managed to write a sentence or two of my dissertation, and spent the rest of the day staring at a wall, ideating suicide. The only thing keeping me going was my daughter: she deserved a father and a financially secure future. What little motivation I had I aimed at getting my mood to a place where I could promise her that.

I survived because I had community. Grad students I barely knew reached out. My therapist was a constant source of empathy. And my daughter made me laugh. In a way, interviewing for jobs even helped, because it thrust me into the world to meet hundreds of fascinating faculty across the United States, full of new ideas, new possibilities, and new futures. I faked it and I made it.

Many people with chronic depression don’t have the privilege of community. They may be jobless. They may lack community. They may lack friendships. They may have real, substantive reasons to not have hope, such as poverty, discrimination, or a lack of daily personal safety. That I have all of these things helped me survive depression, but also helps me prevent it every day.

#39: I believe my intelligence can be developed through practice

This belief, which researcher Carol Dweck calls “growth mindset”, is a powerful one. Students that believe this do better in school. Adults that believe this do better at work. People who believe that their capacity for skills is not fixed, but changeable, through deliberate practice, are much more likely to develop the skills they want to develop.

Part of why this is a privilege is that I grew up in a community of teachers that knew to foster my growth mindset. They didn’t say I was smart, they reinforced the process I used to arrive at correct answers. They didn’t tell me to work hard, they told me to work smart, always reflecting on how I solved problems to find a better, but never perfect way. And they didn’t just tell me these things, they modeled them for me. My mother would say, “I’m going to learn how to do this right now, do you want to learn with me?” When my dad shifted from food science to optics, he dove in head first, and talked every day during is training and education about what was hard to learn, how he was learning smarter, and showing us the progress he was making.

Not every child is fortunate enough to grow up surrounded by developmental theories of intelligence. Many kids learn early on from their parents and teachers that there are “smart” kids and “dumb” kids, and quickly learn which one that others believe they are. This stops them from learning new skills, which only reinforces their fixed intelligence self-concept. Probably the worst example of this is in the widely circulated achievement gap metrics: when we show these to black and latino kids without explaining what’s behind them, we only confirm their fixed theory of intelligence.

#40. I grew up near a high-density city

I know, cities aren’t all that. They have more crime, more people, more pollution, more noise, and more stress. But recent evidence shows that they also are associated with an order of magnitude higher upward mobility than low-density rural or high sprawl areas. Economists speculate about many reasons for this huge difference; the most likely appears to be greater access to information about opportunities. The theory goes that the higher density a child’s “opportunity exposure” (knowledge, knowledge of jobs, knowledge of skills necessary for jobs, etc.), the more likely children will accumulate the benefits of those opportunities over time. All of this is despite class segregation: lower income groups see the same benefits, even though they face other barriers.

Growing up near Portland, the opportunities were abundant and apparent. My parents took me to OMSI (our science museum), showing me a broad world of opportunities in science and learning. I learned of a wide range of internships at local businesses. And even when my parents and I weren’t deeply connected to the opportunities in the region, my peers were: I heard about their parents’ jobs, their career ideas, and all of the different places they were applying to college. This doesn’t compare at all to some of the stories I’ve heard from friends who grew up in Chicago, LA, San Francisco, or New York, but it was a stark difference from my cousins that grew up in rural areas.

#41: I can access any business’s services without discrimination

I remember when I was eight or nine going to the gas station with my dad in our small town of West Linn. In Oregon, gas station attendants have to pump your gas, so we had the attendant fill it up.

When my dad reached for his wallet, he realized he’d forgotten it at home. He asked the attendant if he could just run home to get it, then come back and pay, which seemed reasonable. We lived in town, we’d come to the gas station hundreds of times and had our gas pumped by the very same guy. We lived 5 minutes away.

The attendant said no. My dad, a bit flustered, asked politely, “What do you want me to do?” The attendant asked for some collateral, and pointed to me. I looked at my dad, he looked at me, and said, “I’ll be right back. Just 10 minutes. I sat in a chair inside the attendant’s booth, sitting silently, awkwardly, while I waited for my dad to come back. When he returned, he paid the attendant, and we went about our business.

My dad didn’t know what to make of it, but he talked to me about it. Was it because he was Chinese? Would he have done the same thing to a white man with a white kid? My dad didn’t know. I didn’t know. I don’t even know if the attendant would have known. But something about it just didn’t feel right.

#42: I feel safe walking home at night alone

I might feel unsafe occasionally, but I’m sure it’s nothing like women (especially transwomen) feel, or even young boys in rough neighborhoods. When I first learned in college what it was like for women and the real danger that they were in walking home alone, I became much more aware of my own impact on their feeling of safety. And monitoring my impact on their safety is hard: I’m a fast walker, and so I regularly come up behind people at fast speeds, so when I see someone up ahead, I usually cross the street or take an alley just to avoid having to pass them. If there’s nowhere else to go, it’s even creepier to slow down and stay behind them, because then it sounds like I’m following them. Instead, I’ll often just sit on a bench and wait it out.

I don’t know if any of this makes a difference. But I know I didn’t earn the safety I feel and it’s so my job to use my privilege to help others feel safe too.

#43: I have high job security

In the past ten years, the rate of job hopping has increased to once every 1 or 2 years. And this isn’t always to find a better job, it’s because the last job is gone. For younger people, this instability might be viewed as opportunity, but for people with families it can introduce a lot of financial uncertainty, anxiety, and stress.

I didn’t pursue academia for job security; tenure was a perk, and something I still view as protecting me from the politics and ideologies of the day. It’s something that frees me to pursue truth wherever it takes me and however unpopular it is to my colleagues, my students, my board of regents, or my country. That it also happens to provide a massive form of stability to my personal life is a huge bonus. But it also removes me from the world in a way that makes it harder to empathize with everyone else, who must constantly be on the hunt for the next position, especially those in groups that face discrimination.

#44: The world designs for me

It designs for people of my (average) height, for people with ten fingers, for people who can see, for people who have money. It designs for people who have leisure time. It designs for people for speak English. It designs for the middle aged adult with a full time job and kids. It designs for the dominant attributes of society, because that’s where most of the money is.

When I teach design I try to fight this inequity. That means, in part, that I try to help students understand that they need to understand the needs, desires, and lives of who they’re designing for, especially when those groups are underserved. And it means that when I counsel students on startup or project ideas they have, I remind them that not everyone in the world is a 21 year old college student.

Even when I succeed in this, there are other market forces at work that incentivize them against this. Venture capitalists don’t want to invest in small markets or poor markets. Their obligation is to provide returns to those middle aged adults with full time jobs, kids, and retirement accounts. Product designers don’t want to design for populations that are hard to reach: it’s a lot harder to find blind users to test with then it is college students with smartphones. Sales and marketing folk don’t want to join companies where they can’t show huge progress; that harms their ability to land the next job.

The result of all of this is that the products and services in the world work better for me than they do most other groups.

#45: I have access to paid paternity leave

(NOTE: as my colleagues have informed me, I actually DON’T have access to paid leave)

No, I won’t be using it any time soon. But as paltry as my benefit is, both for mothers and fathers at UW, it’s luxurious compared to the 21% of organizations in the U.S. that offer it to mothers and the 17% that offer it to fathers. America, we are an embarrassing pro-birth, anti-quality of life nation.

When I became a father, I was lucky enough to be a poor college student. We didn’t have a lot of money, and the only responsibilities we had were finishing our final year of college. In many ways, this made it easy. We needed to pass a few courses. We were already basically broke, so there was no quality of life to maintain. We had the stress of applying to graduate school, but that was more work than passing East Asian history. And after Ellen was three months old, we both enrolled in highly informative Psychology classes such as Language Acquisition, Developmental Psychology, and Abnormal Child Psychology. It was like one long year of parent training and graduate school applications, subsidized by federal student loans (which, in effect, was paid maternity and paternity leave). As hard as it might sound to have been a 21 year old father finishing school, I actually don’t remember a less stressful, more peaceful time of life. (Kit Ko might disagree).

#46. I was born with outsized ability to concentrate

I can focus on a task for hours. I can take a list of things to do and burn through it without a moment’s distraction. This power has always allowed me to be productive at nearly any of time of day.

But there is nothing “normal” about this ability. It’s just one of many diverse forms of human attention, and it happens to be one that society values greatly at this point in history. Decomposing and accomplishing tasks is only one particular type of work, and it happens to be the one that is rewarded most. I did not earn these rewards; they were a genetic birthright.

My attentional surplus also has its downsides. When I’m engaged in work, I forget to eat, drink, and relieve myself. I don’t notice when I get injured. I have to see blood to know that I’m hurt, and even then, I have to tell myself, “you’re hurt, you should do something about it.” I have trouble enjoying the present moment because I’m always thinking about what’s next. I see the world as a big to do list instead of a rich ecology of opportunities. I struggle hopelessly with open-ended time, especially on vacation. I miss the beauty in the world.

As much as my attentional abilities are valued, I envy the people in my life with attentional “deficits”. They see things I don’t see. They savor the present in ways I can’t. They make connections between ideas I’d never make in my productive tunnel vision. They literally protect me from harm while I’m off in my head, working through a problem, structuring an argument, planning whatever’s next. I need them as much as they need me.

There’s nowhere this privilege is more apparent then in schools. Our dominant educational paradigms (lectures, classrooms, exams, etc.) were designed for people with minds like mine. That’s why I thrived in school. There’s very little room for other types of minds, and very little recognition of the value and necessity of distraction in learning and enrichment.

The same value system pervades capitalism, with its focus on efficiency and productivity, rather than beauty, connection, and meaning. So many Americans look at our society and wonder why they don’t seem to fit in. It’s not that there’s something wrong with their mind; it’s that it wasn’t designed for their mind.

#47: I am never asked to speak for everyone of my gender or race

Many people, just because of the color of their skin or their gender identity, are asked to represent women, Black America, Hispanic America, and so on. And this is, of course, ridiculous. People aren’t their race and they aren’t their gender. They’re much, much more. Why aren’t White people asked to represent all of White America? Or men asked to represent all men? Because putting everyone in an identity group into a single box is reductive and ridiculous.

One of the odd reasons why I’m rarely asked to represent my race is because no one really knows what race I am by looking at me. It’s only once people who know that I’m Danish and Chinese that they start asking me to represent. And it’s never, “As an Asian American faculty member, how do you think our Asian students view this?”, because they would never feel comfortable calling me Asian American with my obvious whiteness. But there’s definitely a steady stream of references to my Chinese lineage, and a probing curiosity about how some special understanding encoded in my DNA.

Note that I’m never asked to represent my Danish ethnicity. No one ever asks me how I feel about Danish racism, the Danish cartoons, vikings. Because Danish is white and white isn’t a race. After all, it would be ridiculous to ask a human being to represent the perspectives of a whole ethnic group, no?

#48: Students think I’m a better teacher because I’m male

I hate that this is true. I hate it not only because asking for student’s opinions of our teaching is fraught with problems, but also because it’s not really fair to anyone of any gender. Female teachers are at a disadvantage, especially when these scores are used in merit reviews, and male teachers miss out on meaningful opportunities for feedback. Who knows what kinds of biases exist for gender queer instructors.

Worst of all, the bias that’s embedded in these assessments may stem from a very real difference in who students actually listen to. This might mean that my instruction might get more attention just because I’m a man, and this attention might lead to better learning. I want instruction to be valued on its merits, not on its messenger, but it appears that gender (and probably race) is a huge part of it.

Authority emerges from strange elements bound up in history, culture, reputation, height, speech and a whole host of other factors that have nothing to do with actual expertise.

#49: I’m living in the 21st century

In my last 48 privilege posts, I’ve discussed a lot of problems in the world. Race, gender, education, health, access, literacy: there are so many inequities, it can sometimes feel like there’s no hope.

In this second to last post, I’d like to focus on how lucky I (and we, humanity) are to live in the time that we do. In the past hundred years, women around the world gained the right to vote. The United States passed Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. We cured syphilis, diphtheria, measles, polio, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and smallpox. We invented radios, air conditioning, airplanes, cars, film, insulin, photocopiers, televisions, oral contraceptives, computers, pacemakers, video games, MRI, cell phones, and the internet. Life expectancy went from an average of 50 to 80 years. We learned to treat mental health in additional to physical health. We’ve begun to map the origins of the universe and the human genome. And more people live in democracy and therefore freedom than ever.

It’s easy to forget just how much easier we have it then our parents, our grandparents, and the rest of our ancestors. More than ever, we have food, we have shelter, we have safety. We have never been more free to discuss ideas about our future as a species.

#50. I am human

As much as I love science, technology, engineering, and math, I am a humanist at heart. I believe in our capacity to build, to create, to love, to share, and ultimately to discover truth. When I’m lucky enough to meet a new person, especially one that doesn’t have the same privileges as me, I try to remember this shared reality, searching for the humanity in them that’s also in me. And when I do this, they usually reciprocate, because they too are human. These moments, where we find common ground, come together, and reshape and understand our world together, are what I believe is the purest expression of humanity.
Because these moments are fleeting, I believe it is possible and even common that we lose our humanity for long stretches of time. We forget that we have the power to change things and give up. We forget that we have the capacity to understand each other and begin to distrust. We forget that we can create and begin to destroy.

When we lose our humanity, it’s rarely our fault. In fact, it’s often because we lack sufficient privileges for expressing our humanity fully. When you don’t yourself have food, shelter, safety, hope, trust, and love, it’s difficult to provide food, shelter, safety, hope, trust, and love to others.

This is why it’s so critical for those of us that have privileges to use them to be as human as we can be. Take that free time that you have because of your wealth and find a way to bring someone stability. Use the safety you feel on the street to make someone else feel safe. Use the abundance of social support you have to connect with someone isolated. Being human is one of the few privileges we can earn outright, with hard work over a lifetime. It’s also one of the few privileges that can’t be given or granted: it’s solely up to you to find it in yourself, despite all of your stress, fear, and instability. And when you do, I think you’ll find that others will be attracted to that humanity, and help grow and reinforce it.

(And thank you for tolerating this series of posts. I know Facebook isn’t really the place for such serious talk, but if not Facebook, where? I’ll be posting a blog post with all of my privilege posts soon, to make it easier to share outside of this walled garden.)