The color key is the following:
Blue - Social identities are privileged by oppression of others.
Red - Forms of privilege by oppression.
Yellow- Social identities that are targets of oppression by unearned privileges granted to others.
Green -Forms of oppression experienced by the targets of oppression.
And here is my first word cloud, containing all of my answers to these questions:
Then, I proceeded to divide this word cloud into smaller ones, according to my relationship with the words on the clouds. First, these are the identities and forms of privilege/oppression I have never experienced:
These are the identities and forms of privilege/oppression that I have experienced in Chile:
And then, there are the identities and forms of privilege/oppression I have experienced in the U.S.:
Some Reflections...
As I reflected on my own identity, as well as how privileged and/or oppressed I am, I realized how much these issues depend on the context you are situated in, which in turn reinforces, for me, the idea that identity is nothing but a social construct that can change, for instance, with a plane ticket.
In Chile, I am a privileged member of the society. There, I am the white heterosexual male from the upper class who has always have access to most of the privileges the country has to offer. I went to private school and was taught that I could achieve anything in life (unlike what is taught to children in public schools), I followed the path designed for someone from my social class and entered college, and, even though I studied an art-related career (filmmaking) in a poor country with very little resources for such activities, I managed to get both teaching and film-editing jobs even before I graduated. Ever since I left high school, and as I progressively left the social circles (bubbles) I grew up in, I became increasingly aware of how privileged I am, and how absurd the idea of my accomplishments being mine alone is. Not only have I had help from particular people in my path, but I had (almost) the entirety of the economic system supporting me by oppressing others, both at home and abroad (considering that, in a capitalist system, what a country has is what other countries do not).
When I came to the U.S., however, this situation drastically (and also not drastically) changed: not even my skin color (a physical trait that I assumed would not be subject to much change) morphed as I stop being considered "white" and began to be seen as a person of color (although a few times being light-skinned has made people think I am a citizen from a rich country). Moreover, I even became -quite literally, in the official government's language- an alien. "Alien" is a hard word to be described by, because it somehow implies you are essentially not even a human being. As I spent time in this country, I quickly realized my identity here was far away from the privileged man I was in Chile. Here, I am an alien, someone who speaks a strange language some people are upset just by hearing, someone whose visions of the world are absent from the public sphere, someone from a country only heard of because of its massive earthquakes (and good wine), and someone for whom a simple mistake could lead to an escalade of misunderstandings and end up in trouble with the law-enforcement forces (a constantly scary thought in a country in which there is a high level of police brutality against non-white people). This last issue is one I never thought much about before: in Chile, poor people and indigenous people fear the police, while I never had before. I might have known this intellectually, but now I believe I understand a little more how oppressive fear truly is.
While the transition between being privileged and being not made me realize how fragile and fluid identity is, I also can still recognize the privileges I have in the global scale (I have somehow become more aware of this while in the U.S.). In the global setting, I feel that to even use the expression "non-privileged" is somehow embarrassing for me, considering I am a Ph.D. student (only about 0.8% of the world's population has such a degree) in a U.S. university which sits among the world's top-50 higher education institutions (the best Latin American university is ranked around the 400th place), and while my income here might considered to be rather low, I have never had to work in sweatshop, a mine, or any sort of assembly line where people do not even have the right to go to the bathroom every time they need (not to mention wages). Also, even within the U.S., a Ph.D. immigrant student usually holds a different status than an illegal immigrant, or a legal one who has had no access to good education and is somehow likely to remain inside the cycle of inequalities of this country. In that sense, the possibility to emigrate back to privilege is a privilege in itself as well.
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