Privileged - Viewing Poverty from the Inside Looking Out

I am privileged. I am a white, middle class, heterosexual man who is comfortable in the body of a man. I've always found it easier to talk about big issues than about myself but in this blog piece, I am going to take an autobiographical approach and put myself under the microscope. Anyone reading this who knows me well will know that my life has not been an easy ride the whole way through and that I'm no stranger to personal tragedies but this has no bearing on the fact that I am still privileged. I am not writing about myself because I think I'm special, quite the opposite, I believe my lived experiences to be for the most part very typical. I hope that I can encourage other people like meto view their own lives looking through a similar lens. Even as I'm writing this, I'm worrying that I will come across in the wrong way and offend someone without meaning to. In a confusing time where a lot of people from my demographic are hesitant about saying anything, I want to try to say a little something, honestly I would feel guilty if I just sat back and said nothing at all; so here it goes.

It seems right for a blog piece all about my personal perspective, I should start by recounting my experiences in childhood and my reflections on them now. I was born in the UK in Saint George's Hospital and grew up in Wimbledon, it is a beautiful area of London full of suburbs, trees, hills, and parks. I regularly had space to play and be in the outdoors, it was a safe place to grow up whilst still sating my childhood need for exploration and adventure; there was little traffic on my small road and I often played with the other children on my street. Our neighbours were mostly white middle-class families whose parents worked in city professions, although my parents were certainly not poor, my Mother working as a counselor at a school and my Father as a civil servant, we were less wealthy than most of the people in our area.

There were a few families on our street who had come from other countries, India, Jamaica, Pakistan but they were certainly a minority in the area. We had a neighbour who was much older, from the first generation of immigration here to London, we children always saw him as a grumpy and suspicious man who saw us with distrust. My parents explained to me while I was growing up that he was suspicious of white people because he had lived here in a time when England was very racist. It still had not fully dawned on me at the time what he meant, the others in this family were very friendly and I remember helping the mother home with her shopping bags once and so it was difficult for me to understand this sense of division.

I studied with and had friends of many different backgrounds throughout my entire life in education, thinking about it now I count myself so lucky. How could I have been whipped up into prejudices and believed stereotypes when I had seen the truth in my own experiences. In my primary school, I remember two black boys in my class who could not have been more different in personality, one was sporty and competitive and got angry a lot but the other was book smart and thoughtful to others and never got into fights with anyone. I was aware of what racism was and I knew that it was wrong but I don't ever remember seeing it with my own eyes. I was lucky not to be exposed to this at an early age however it would mean that I was less aware of my privilege at the time.

                               
                               The house I grew up in - on a residential street in Wimbledon

Something that I definitely recognised fairly early on in life was differences in class. Especially when I went to secondary school, it became very clear to me that I was posh and that many of the kids I went to school with came from homes very different from my own. I would code switch, speaking different words and in a different voice depending on whether I was in a school or home environment, I remember my father not thinking well of most of the kids at my school, describing people as chavs. I remember a mutual friend I had met from my old friend in Wimbledon describing my school a jungle in comparison to his private school, it seemed like they viewed us as barbaric, like they had been told all these stories about what it was like in local comprehensive schools and assumed that's what daily life was like.

I felt like I lived in two different worlds, I probably wasn't the only one, when I visited friend's houses I saw a wide variety of differences in how many people lived their home lives, how much space they had, how their parents behaved, how big their family was, how tidy they were. Not everything should be immediately equated to class but it was something I started to acknowledge. It didn't affect how I viewed my friends, I was more concerned with if they liked the same things as me or were not rude to people and myself at school. I consider myself lucky that I had an always engaging relationship with my parents, always discussing things, always asking them questions, always surrounded by an abundance of books on all kinds of information about the world. I used to take that for granted but now I see it as some of the most important gifts my parents gave to me.

At home, I was always expected to go to university, it was a path laid out for me by my parents and by my older brother who went to LSE to study law. One time when I was about 13 years old, someone came into our science classroom to have a brief talk with us about university opportunities and the benefits of going to university. He asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to go to university and I remember the feeling of surprise when I realised that I was in the minority of people who raised their hands. No wonder other kids talked back to the teachers here or repeatedly forgot their homework or missed classes, there was no end goal in sight. For them, education wasn't a meaningful pursuit like it had always been built up to be under the culture of my family.


                                           

An unsurprising graph showing that people from higher social class have better access to higher education

Two parts of my privilege which I have failed to mention until now are my gender and my sexuality. It was very clear to me that I liked girls but I grew up in a home of three boys and my experience in talking to members of the opposite sex was limited to my cousins and my mum. My friends were almost all boys early on in life, I was steeped in a culture which I recognise now as toxic. This is what Robert Webb in his book How Not to Be a Boy described as 'the sovereign importance of early homophobia and the paramount objective of despising girls because if there's one thing worse than being a girl it's being a gay and only gays play with girls'. I have a vivid memory of walking across the playground in primary school holding the hand of my friend and being discouraged by some other boys because two boys holding hands were considered gay. I was afraid of appearing gay to my peers before I really even fully understood what being gay meant. The word "gay" was synonymous with "uncool" "unfair" "lame". I did eventually realise how stupid this was at age 15 and I tried to flip the whole thing on its head and at school, using the word "gay" to mean "cool" or "great" or "awesome"; it never really caught on though...

I think of all the prejudices I have held in my mind throughout the years, the strongest prejudice was sexism. It was the hardest to fight off because I had been shown examples of men essentially claiming ownership of women in all sorts of media and even in my own life. They were either some mysterious force of beauty or some hysterical witch, it took me a long time to really start viewing women and girls as just people like anyone else and for that I am ashamed. I would also say that if I had grown up with a healthier understanding of the opposite sex, I think I certainly would have had more success romantically as a teenager. Fortunately, the arguments of feminism were not lost on me and by the time I finished my A-levels I was describing myself as "first a feminist, second a socialist, third a liberal".

                                  
Star of Peep Show Robert Webb's autobiography which I am reading at the moment has a strong focus on the concept of masculinity and how it can damage people's development and relationships

Above what I read in books and saw in films and television, something that educated me about my own privilege that I am lucky for were my experiences traveling the world. The first was a school trip in which I visited the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and got a chance to hear the story of a 93-year-old concentration camp survivor who had been a member of the Polish resistance under Nazi occupation. It was during this trip that it dawned on me the sheer willpower and resilience it must have taken so many people to simply return to a normal life after something so traumatic. My next traveling experience was when I was training and working as an English teacher in Thailand, based in a village whose people today are still shaken by the traumatic events of the Boxing Day tsunami 2004 which killed half the people in that village.

I was shocked by the damage which still existed 9 years later which never had funding for rebuilding because of corruption. I was equally shocked by the incredible generosity of humanitarian organisations who raised money for tsunami relief and built a huge home for many children who were orphaned by the tsunami or by social circumstances. It was through this orphanage that I had the honor of meeting former Senator and lifelong activist Prateep Ungsongtham Hata. Prateep is the founder of a charity foundation and a revered figure among educators in Thailand, but she came from humble beginnings and had to fight against the government for her education and others' rights to education. The same education that had been given to me for free simply because of when and where on this planet I was born. Here I was on the other side of the world, welcomed and appreciated and valued by the locals I met all thanks to the fact that I am a fluent English speaker, and everyone who wants to succeed wants to speak English. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations' official language is English, I was surprised by one local who told me that he wished Thailand had been colonised by the British just because the country would have better levels of English language. It was finally beginning to become clear in my mind that the world was skewed in favour of people like me.

                                               
Prateep Ungsongtham Hata - The National Treasure who one charity worker once described to me as "The Mother Teresa of Thailand" for her dedication to people in poverty.

This awakening to the huge inequalities that exist in the world was reinforced by my time in South Africa, visiting Robben Island and other museums depicting the history of Apartheid. I didn't need to go to a museum to see the scars of Apartheid, they were right in front of me. I lived in an apartment 10 minutes down the road from beautiful bayside homes and golf courses and 10 minutes down the road in the other direction to a township of Xhosa people who had always lived here but were forced to make their homes and businesses out of shipping containers and corrugated iron for lack of any financial support. People right now are living their lives in metal boxes that are boiling in the summer and freezing in the winter with next to no opportunities to bring their own people out of the impoverished position that colonialism and white supremacy has put them in.

Throughout my young adult life, I have made mistakes. I have been a slow learner in many ways, failing to maintain a stable career doing something that's important to me. Every time I have fallen down, every time I have been paralysed by my depression, I have had support from people around me. I have had many chances given to me to rebuild my life. I am indebted to the world for what I have received that that's why I'm determined to make helping others less fortunate that me my life's work. I don't have some kind of hero complex anymore, I simply want to make whatever small impact that I can and make the world a more just place.

Throughout this blog piece, I have used the word 'lucky' multiple times and I want to highlight this because that's all I am. I'm a pretty regular person who has been elevated thanks to how lucky I am, when I was born, where I was born, what family I was born into, what race I was born as, what gender, what sexuality. I didn't earn any of these things, I was born with them. What can I possibly say about the suffering that I have watched from the inside looking out that isn't obvious to those people who have to live it every day? The world doesn't really need another white man blogging about their lives, I'm not treating this as some kind of virtue signaling performance, I'm just trying to open up and be honest, for my own peace of mind.

Despite that feeling of guilt that I have, the point of this blog is not to bring myself down but to encourage a world where more people are brought up. Imagine the great things that we lost out on because so many people throughout history have been deprived of an education. Imagine all of the inventions and art and progress that could have been made if everyone had been given the things I had. We need to stop investing in products, resources and brands and instead make way for investment into human beings; invest in their futures. Many people out there just like me need to stop obsessing about ourselves or our immediate circles and try our hardest to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. There will be no denying that, yes, we are privileged. No, that doesn't make us bad people but it does place a responsibility on us not to forget, and to do what is right on behalf of those who never had the same chances we had.

Thanks for reading
Much love


                             
                             A township home in South Africa where children are growing up