privilege

I thought it was interesting when Peggy McIntosh said "whites are carefully taught not to recognize privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege". Maybe its because I am neither white nor male, but when I was growing up my mom and dad told me repeatedly to be thankful for the type of education that I was receiving. I had the opportunity to go to an all girls private school from K-12 on a scholarship, and without it I probably would have had to gone to a public school. So my parents told me from a very young age of how privileged I was to be going to this school. When McIntosh was listing the things that she is able to do because of the white privilege she has, I thought about how I've moved to Oregon and by being in Oregon I can be like "nope, can't do that" but if I were in Hawaii, I could see how I could be viewed as being privileged in Hawaii. I do think that people who are privileged don't realize it and often take it for granted.

A good example is the boys of Barack. They weren't privileged and had to go out of the country in order to get a second chance. Couple puzzling questions came to my mind... 1) why do these boys have to go to Africa in order to get a better chance of completing school? 2) Why can't they move to some place in America? 3) Does being away for 2 years really impact them in a way that they are able to complete school in the home town? I believed that privileged or not, all students should be given a equal opportunity to succeed and the United States government should be the one to supply their needs.