Privilege not Salvation

I have worked in a number of different education environments often tutoring or teaching minority or economically disadvantaged students.  Frequently in these situations I am one of only a few non-minority individuals and often I am one of, if not the most, traditionally educated individual in the room.  These are facts.  Another fact, the number of times I have been mistaken by teachers and assistants as a student without proper ID and in the “wrong” location is actually quite amusing.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I have been asked to fill out my name and student ID on the detention sign-in form when I walked into a room (the detention students walked through the same entrance as the tutoring students for the after school sign in in several of the schools I have worked in).  Pretty much every time I walk into a school they ask to see my student ID or directed me to the late for school sign in desk if I walked in during school hours.  I was even threatened once with a detention while walking down a hallway because the individual thought I was clearly ditching class.  This says something about how young I must look to people and potentially how I dress.  Although dress apparently doesn’t matter because I have had these assumptions made when I was in a tailored suit and when I was in dirty jeans and T-shirt.  I think it also says something about my attitude toward the world.

I have read a number of articles over the past few weeks from different perspectives talking about privilege and how individuals with privilege often come in trying to “save” those without privilege.  How we don’t listen.  How we come in with our own ideas and don’t respect the community.  How we take over the spotlight and speak on behalf of others without thinking what message that sends.  And I was confused.  Not because I have never walked into a situation with ideas - I almost always do, but because I have never thought about anything I do as me being a “saviour”.  I have saved a few administrator’s backsides because I did jobs that other people wouldn’t do, but I have never “saved” another person.  That just never occurs to me.  Yes I have been around when life changing things have happened for some of my students.  But I never did the saving, the student always did that.  I was just along for the ride.

When I am tutoring or teaching there are students I can help, and there are students that, for whatever reason (and it could be as much me as them), I cannot help.  The students that I cannot help are not flawed or inadequate, we simply do not connect in a way that I can help them so we walk along the same life path for a short time not really interacting and then I wish them well.  The students I can help are no different from the ones I cannot, save for the fact that while we are walking along the same life path we are holding hands or talking or even carrying (or in some spectacular cases dragging kicking and screaming - this also goes both ways) each other along.  I never walk in the door seeing anyone as anything other than another bundle of the same atoms from the same universe made sentient walking along the same path as me.  I might not be able to “save”, but I can “teach”.  I can “guide”.  I can “listen”.  Yet, as much as I do these things for my students, my students “teach”, “guide”, and “listen” to me.

Even though there is a great diversity in the human race - in ethnicity, religion, values, skin color, eye color, language, body shape, education, sexual orientation, lifestyle choices, and all other other things that have the potential to divide us - we all share so much more.  We can communicate with each other.  We share the same emotions.  We share the same planet, the same sun, the same atoms.  Every one of us is flawed.  Every one of us is unique.  Every one of us has something important to share.  And every one of us deserves to be treated with respect, because in the end every one of us is human.