I’ve thought extensively on the education bribes committed by some extremely wealthy individuals. I think the thing to hone in on is how shocked the children were when they learned this news in the national spotlight. How oblivious this is to them.

Imagine, all your life, you were oblivious to the invisible tailwinds propelling you along, and because of your ignorance, you saw the fruits of your successes as a byproduct of your labor, and then had the realization that others helped you along the way by cheating systems, or that systems were built at the benefit of people like you. What you deemed hard work, and certainly, some of these kids might have worked hard, was also the work of entire systems literally creating a path for your success.

There is no better example of privilege in our society than this news, and it’s something I wish more talked about in light of this scandal. Privilege’s wider context is on full display, and we ought draw comparison to how gender and racial identities benefit people in ways that are equally oblivious to them.

There are many people who struggle, and yet work harder than many in my network will know, myself included, yet are kept disenfranchised by systems that were built to not consider them, and in some cases deliberately act against them.

These systems are wrong, deliberate or not, and we should really all look more thoroughly at the people our society consistently leaves behind. Whether it is economic, racial, or gender disparities – systemic disparities in demographic groups exist for reasons far beyond members of these demographics individual actions.

-MT-