My Master’s thesis was born, like a
phoenix, in a fire. A fire that
did not, directly, consume anything in my life, but took rather the worldly
possessions of two good friends of mine. Including, in the case of one friend,
all of the documentation that proved that he was, in fact, who he claimed to
be. There are all these
interesting moments in life that offer a chance to suddenly confront an aspect
of privilege that had heretofore been obscured. The loss of a friend’s ability to politically appear,
however briefly, was such a moment.
The privilege that I carry with me in my wallet filled with plastic and
paper and my name and my picture and a host of other numbers and letters that
are somehow me-as-I-am-politically, or digitally, was not one I had thought of
before. I was never worried that
the systems of politics that arch over everything we do as a community would be
unable or unwilling to recognize me.
Realizing that such a lack of recognition could be possible left me
wondering about identity and the construction of the person by the state. (We might ask how much of this precise
thought was rolled into my actual
thesis, but let’s not)
The text message I got this morning
was of a similar kind of privilege check.
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