Overcompensating or overcoming.

Last month, I participated in a workshop that looked at where we experience privilege and where we don't. It was geared to help those with the privilege to be allies for those without. The secondary goal was to show that there are different places that we float in and out group in power. The exercise entailed that I we write down all the categories where we are a part of the privilege subset (the part of society who doesn't have to think about how the can make themselves fit because everything is already geared towards them). On the other side of the paper, we were supposed to write the places where we were not part of the dominant group. When I finished, I had about 7 or 8 places of privilege and only two places where I wasn't. On my privilege side were things like being male, middle class, right handed, Christian, and able bodied. On the other side were two words: Black and Immigrant. It made me go hmmmmmm....like Arsenio Hall (if you don't know who that is then Black History Month was a waste!).


The exercise pointed out to me how much I had to be to overcome the fact that I was also an immigrant Black person. I keep adding categories to the privilege side of my paper everyday in an effort to bolster all the negatives that come with being part of the two subsets on the flip side of the paper. But am I overcoming or overcompensating? It's the popular question of whether we are now in a post racial society and being Black doesn't carry the need to overcome as it once did. I, personally, don't believe that we have. Some of you didn't know who Arsenio Hall was! I think that we're on our way but we are not in the Utopian society that people processed to now exist when Obama was elected, especially since that argument only considers two factions of the country. It leaves out everyone else.


I like where we're going as a nation but not where we're at because right now those two words on the paper trump everything I write on the other side in my world.


These are my thoughts...what are yours?