During my junior year in high school I was very involved in FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America). I had become the secretary of our local chapter and wanted to run for the District Treasurer.
I knew I needed to be creative and make my campaign something that stood out if I wanted to win. My mom (a stay-at-home-mom) jumped in to help. Before the internet was a thing, she somehow figured out how to make fortune cookies so we could embed a "fortune" in them: “Janet Morrison for Treasurer."
I got to school before sunrise that morning and boarded the bus to go to West Plains, Missouri (40 miles away). It wasn't until we had gotten off the bus in West Plains that I realized I had left the fortune cookies at the house! Panicked, I frantically called my parents and BEGGED them to bring them to me (bailing me out was not something my parents usually did). About 45 minutes later, my dad showed up, fortune cookies in hand.
Because my dad was self-employed, he didn't have to ask a boss to release him, nor was he an hourly wage worker who might have lost his job or, at the very least, lost a day's pay over his child's forgetfulness. He had a car, so it wasn't a question of figuring out how he would get there. We always had money for gas so the 80-mile round trip, though an inconvenience, wasn't an impossibility. All to bring me fortune cookies. All so I could win a political campaign.
It wasn't a landslide, but I did win. And in my mind, that meant I was the better candidate.
The reality was that I had advantages. I had parents who had the luxury to make all of that happen. Had I not had all of those luxuries and that domino effect of a mom who didn't have to work outside of the home, a dad who could leave his job, a family who didn't worry about hourly wages, a gas tank that was always full, the end result would have probably been different.
The other person may have only lost because they used the resources they had...and maybe those resources were simple markers and construction paper that weren't as flashy as homemade fortune cookies. Or maybe they had a working parent who couldn't take off to drive 80 miles to deliver their child's supplies that they forgot...not because they didn't want to, but because they didn't have a car, couldn't afford to take a day off without pay, or might have lost their job had they tried.
"Privilege" is our bootstraps that we like to think are due to our own hard work. "Privilege" is what helps us get ahead of our opponents and makes us think we earned it.
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