photoMy three-year-old daughter Rose stands in the bathroom, admiring the pigtails I just put in her hair.

“You look beautiful,” I say, and she nods her head.

“You are lucky to have such shiny black hair,” I say.

She shakes her head and stomps her foot, “I NOT have black hair, Mama. I have blonde hair.”

I have blonde hair and my two older daughters have blonde hair, but Rose, who was adopted from China, most definitely does not have blonde hair.

I contradict her, but she resists, “My hair is blonde, like Elsa. Like Rapunzel. Like Mommy.”

Growing up, I never thought much about my hair color, other than to be annoyed when we’d visit my grandma in the summer and she’d comment, “Shelah, your hair has gotten so much darker this year” (which is something she did every year, and I finally realized that if she had been right my hair would have been coal black long ago). Sure, my hair was the same shade as most of the Disney princesses,  Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, a majority of the contestants in the Miss America pageant, and Barbie, but there wasn’t anything inherently better about blonde hair, right?

Yesterday in Sacrament Meeting, our youth speaker was giving a talk about the priesthood.  He said something like, “In order to get the priesthood, all you need is to be a member of the church and to be the right age.” My oldest daughter leaned over to me and said, “And you need to have a penis.”

This thirteen-year-old youth speaker’s comment highlighted how we are often unaware of our privileged state in life until we encounter things to make us aware of it. As a male member of the church, he probably doesn’t spend much time thinking about what it’s like not to have the priesthood. Until I had Rose, I didn’t spend much time wondering what it would be like to have black hair, or thinking about why so many women spend so much money and effort trying to turn themselves blonde. I did bristle when my grandma suggested that I was losing the white hair of my towheaded childhood, but even then I didn’t spend too much time wondering why. But, as I’ve come to see, having blonde hair means I belong to part of the privileged ethnic group in the United States, and even my three-year-old recognizes that.

Now that I have a child who is Asian, I think a lot more about how other ethnic groups are perceived in America. She also has a visible physical disability, and that, too, has opened my eyes. I lived the first three-and-a-half decades of my life completely unaware of my privilege, and I’m just starting to see that as a white American woman who grew up in a stable home to educated parents, I have had lots of opportunities that I didn’t earn– they came to me just because of where and when I happened to be born.

I’m starting to see that being aware of my privilege can help me become more empathetic. I’ve never struggled with addiction, or had a mental illness. I’ve never been attracted to someone of the same gender. But as I’m more aware of my privilege, it helps me imagine myself in someone else’s position, and I hope that will eventually help me to be more understanding in how I treat people who have come to the world in different circumstances than I have.

P.S. If you’re a quiz addict like I am and want to find out just how privileged you are, check here.

P.P.S. For what it’s worth, Rose also insists she has purple eyes. I’m not quite sure what that signifies.

What are the privileges you enjoy? How has recognizing them helped you?

 


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