Tonight, I had a really good conversation with my housemate, about privilege, and more specifically, my privilege as a rich person. I've thought alot about what being trans* and deaf has meant to me over the past two years, and thoughts about patriarchy, heterosexism, and white supremacy has meant - but very rarely, what class has meant. What it means to be rich, and add that along the laundry list of my identities of how I move through out the world that is full of classism - a world that I have not felt, just can rattle of numbers and theories and more, but not feel. And that's not enough to really show up and grow and transform: to transform myself, and to be a person that's really committed to transforming the world.
And it's not about making myself not a rich person, finding ways to escape and deny it; it's not about self-flaggelation and pity-me-I'm-privileged bullshit. If I do it, call me out. It's about trying to be authentic, as scary as that feels sometimes (like right now).
I am rich. I grew up in a really wealthy family, and have gone to private schools my entire life, leading to alot of educational privilege, and alot of thinking about the correct theory - rather than doing things and figuring them out as I go along. I have grown up always thinking, and believing, that I have options - and that things will work out, particularly financially - and they do, with the support of my parents. I've lived part my life as a crusty anarchist punk boy. I do organizing, and I'm funded by my parents. I get burnt out, but it's never for long, and I don't face any financial repercussions for it. I live my life with a sort of lightness, and maybe some of that is my youth, but I know of working class folk my age who are activists and organizers and they don't move the world in the same way that I do. I don't feel the weight of what it means, the same way I've felt the weight of ableism has felt in my life and what the weight of transphobia and cissexism have felt.
And since I'm really frustrated with the world and my friends for not getting it, for not feeling the weight of what ableism or transphobia means to me, and as many workshop facilitators have told me: it's time to get from the heady part of this to the heart. To try to feel what the reality of being rich means for me - and what's really important to me is to try to sit with the ways that class impacts the identities I'm figuring out how to navigate. I am figuring out how to live and honor these identities, build power within them, build community with similarly-identified folks.
And I know that I'm not in the same boat as alot of people I know and care about. I’m searching out finding the kind of trans* healthcare that I would most prefer, and knowing that I’ll get the funding for it from my parents and maybe their insurance. My question is not "How do I access this without insurance", its "What does my insurance cover?". It means that I’m not worried about employer healthcare, or finding other ways to figure out how to pay for it. It’s going to happen – because all of my other healthcare has been paid for by the wealth and insurance I have access to. I can explore deafness, but with the privilege of knowing that I can put my speech processors back on and hear – then pass as a hearing person: passable speech, hearing people when they talk to me for the most part, etc – and that is a direct result of the wealth I have, and have had, access to, the doctors, and the insurance. Being someone who walks and doesn't have MCS, it means I can enter and exist in inaccessible spaces. All of this is privilege within a context of oppression or marginalization or something. It means that I deal with some trans* issues, and some deaf/disabled ones – but often, it means that I’m not loaded down with the deep intersections between class and queerness and disability and whiteness and citizenship/settler privilege in my psyche and spirit, and that I’m not directly faced with the very many ways of violence, exclusion, isolation, that a lot of my friends and community members are experiencing in their lives.
And that’s a clear line of difference that defines me from many people that I am in community with; and that this notion of trans*/queer/crip solidarity is messier than it initially seemed – I grab at these identities because they make sense, they help define parts of my world, but my other identities define those as well, and I haven’t been as clear on that as I’d like to be, or as I want to be. Because I know what I personally need or want in terms of resources and support, but will that actually help out most queer/trans*/crip/deaf kids? Probably not. And I have to sit with that, I need to feel that when and if I speak. Those of us with privilege have to sit with that. Feel what it means to be who we are, in the world that we’re in; what our relationships are to the other identities that we inhabit.
I’m learning to be uncomfortable with the fact that I don’t have answers for all this stuff, but just sitting with what’s here in my life. I feel like I either try to fumble for answers for privilege or what it means, or be silent about it, not making moves either way. I am grateful for the ways that my friends and community push me to grow, push me to feel, for sharing their experiences and thoughts when they’re tired and have had long days, long years, long lives; because often its in these conversations that I learn.
I’m sure solidarity doesn’t work until the heart strings are involved, not just minds and bodies, but hearts. For privileged folks like me, I know it’s not the same feelings that people who aren’t privileged, who are oppressed and beaten down, feel. But I guess a call to myself, and to others, we gotta try to consistently move between our heads and our hearts; to not just have the right theories, or come up with the perfect options; but be able to grow the capacity of ourselves to sit with the tough parts of this fucked up system, with people who are our friends and in our families, who live in our communities or claim similar identities or parts of who we are. I know that’s often what I want when I deal with, or experience, the reality of when I feel oppressed, or beaten down, or tired from the world that feels inaccessible or that feels like I’m not supposed to be here. I gotta grow that too. Every day, with practice.
