When You Have a Head Start in Life
Invisible privilege and the inequities of life
The recent events of the George Floyd murder and the disproportionate impact of COVID on the Black and LatinX communities have brought an awareness of white privilege to center stage. For most people, this is something we are aware of, but unconscious of the inequities it has on our lives.
I am not a white person. However, my life was shaped by an invisible privilege that I was never fully aware of growing up.
No one wants to accept that they are privileged. This makes it seem like you received handouts in life and never had to work for anything.
In most cases, this is not true — myself included. When I was a student, I spent several hours a day doing homework and studying. I often pulled all-nighters before an important exam. Once I started working, I sometimes stayed in the office late enough that the lights would automatically turn off and I would eat trail mix from the office kitchen as a late-night dinner. I felt like I worked hard, why should I consider myself privileged?
The reality is, I was privileged from the moment I was born. My parents are immigrants from Taiwan who moved to Silicon Valley in the early 80s as it was starting to become the tech hub that it is known today.
I was able to attend one of the best public high schools in California without even trying. This fed into me going to a private University on the East Coast, which fed into me getting a job at one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the world.
The only reason I had these opportunities is that I was born in the right place at the right time. Even though I worked hard, the opportunities I had were largely available because of this invisible privilege.
When I was in my 20s, my invisible privilege allowed me to travel around the world for 1.5 years.
When I was visiting Angkor Wat in Cambodia, I came across a group of boys who were around 6–7 years old. These boys automatically ran up to the white tourists to try to sell them a collection of local trinkets.
As I was observing from a distance, I saw within a span of 5 minutes that these boys were able to hustle in English, Russian, German, French, and Spanish. I could not believe how intelligent and enterprising these young kids were.
At that moment I remembered thinking about how unfair life is. These kids are exceedingly smarter than I am, yet they will probably spend the rest of their lives in poverty selling useless knick-knacks to irritated tourists. It made me wonder what their lives would be like if they had been born into the same invisible privilege that I had.
When I was in Bosnia, I remember meeting a group of men on a train who was around my age. They told me stories about daily life during the Sarajevo Siege. As students, they risked their lives to go to school as artillery shelling destroyed their communities. They talked about their friends and family who were killed as there was a blockade around their city.
At that moment, I also reflected on my life as a student during that same period. While these guys were risking their lives for their education, I was probably complaining about homework and teachers with my other privileged friends. Life really is unfair.
I have written about how I unintentionally became a millionaire in my 30s. I am not ignorant to the fact that I had a head start in life purely from the lottery of birth. I think about the boys in Cambodia — for them to have access to the same opportunities that I do, they would need a stroke of luck combined with a series of miracles.
A lot of us have some degree of invisible privilege that we are not fully conscious of. Roughly 800 million people in the world will spend their entire lives in starvation. Over 400 million children in the world grow up in an active conflict or war zone; more than the entire population of the United States. Life is viciously unfair.
When you are living in a privileged environment, it’s easy to be ignorant of these facts. This is not something that you would ever encounter, and it does not impact your daily life.
Growing up in Silicon Valley and working in the tech industry, you come across so many people who think they are the hottest thing on the planet. In reality, a lot of them just had a massive head start in life. Some people really are incredibly smart. But there are probably millions of people in the world who are even smarter but were born into a situation where they can never dream of having such opportunities available.
There are certainly a lot of inequalities that exist within the United States, and it’s important that these issues are at the forefront of many conversations. However, it is important to understand that there are varying degrees of privilege. Be humble —if you think you are some big shot, there is a really good chance that you were just born with a big head start in life.
