PRIVILEGE

I am appalled by my privilege.

Privilege is when you think something is not a problem because it is not a problem to you personally.

I recently read the book, The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.   http://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H73JSTJ/ref=tsm_1_tp_tc  Even though I am a woman of color, labeled a senior citizen, labeled disabled because I have a medical condition that requires the use of oxygen, I am appalled by my privilege. Reading this book I felt sad. I felt outraged. I felt helpless. I felt powerless. But mostly I felt the weight of my privilege. The privilege I enjoy because I was born on the “correct“ side of the border by 40 miles. The privilege that has come to me because my parents, who were dirt poor in their childhood and in the early years of mine, took advantage of the opportunities presented to them and created space and opportunities for me to grow in my privilege.

I know poverty and the violence that comes with it. I grew up with it in my home and it is steeped in my DNA. It was an ancestral legacy passed down from generation to generation. I know trauma brain. I also know abundance because my parents also passed down a legacy of hard work and taking advantage of opportunity. That is a privilege I had because of the work ethic my parents modeled. My parents became in my later childhood years what one would call middle class. And again I was afforded the privilege that comes with that.

I read the stories in Karla‘s book and I am sickened at the cruelty we humans can inflict on one another. I am ashamed of my privilege at the same time that I am grateful for my parents, my husband, my own hard work at achieving a measure of privilege. I am forever changed by this book. It touched me on so many levels. The poverty.  The Love. The cruelty. The Love. The mental illness created by trauma. The Love.

In this era in which we are living where the color of your skin makes you suspect, I have a modicum of fear. But I have a passport. Even if detained I can prove I was born here. I cannot begin to entertain the level of fear endured by those who have lived, worked, paid taxes in this country for most of their lives and yet are expendable.

It isn’t that I wasn’t aware of what has been taking place in this country. And it has definitely been in our face for the last four years. But I must have numbed myself because it was too overwhelming to contemplate this reality for too long. I don’t know really. I can excuse it and say I had a child with a serious medical condition to raise. I was distracted. Perhaps. But I can no longer deny this ugly, ugly side of the American dream.

Karla’s words, the pictures she paints with words, are seared in my brain. I can no longer look away or numb myself.

I want to do more. What can a 66 year old “senior citizen“, brown-skinned woman on oxygen do? I don’t want to just put this book on the shelf and forget about it. I want everyone to read it. I want white people and privileged people of color to read it. I dare you to not be moved by the horror in which we are participating. And we are. For once you know, you can’t unknow, as @Oprah once stated. Read this book, please. Read it with an open mind. Allow it to shift your consciousness so that we may never again be OK with putting men, women and children in cages. That we may never again be OK with separating children from their parents. As Karla states in her book, the trauma brains we are creating will affect generations of men, women and children. We can’t afford to lose the talent that is being obliterated by our unwillingness to see those we have deemed unworthy and expendable.

All people have a right to dignity, respect, acknowledgment. People we are better than this. We are better than this.

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