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| Bernie, Christina, Julia, Caitlin, Ashlyn, Emily L |
I haven’t written a blog post in a
little while, so I’m going to have to do a bit of catching up! A few weeks ago
I ran the Two Oceans Half Marathon here in Cape Town. It was my first half
marathon and I was really proud of myself for completing it. Six of us ran it
in total, but only three of us were registered. Bernie, Christina, and I hadn’t
been able to register in time, but we figured it wouldn’t be a big deal to
blend in with everyone else and just run for fun. However, when we got there
the security guards wouldn’t let us come through the gate because we didn’t
have bibs. We were able to get in by going up to another guard and pretending
that we had left our bibs at home. Luckily for us, he took pity on us and waved
us in. We were pretty excited- we hadn’t exactly expected it to work- but as I
thought about it more, I started to wonder: would the guard have done the same
thing if we hadn’t been young, white, foreign girls? It’s easy to talk about
privilege in very broad academic terms, but we don’t often think about what it
looks like on a daily basis. I began to think about other experiences where my
race and gender might have benefited me. I realized that not only do people
generally trust me, but I’ve also definitely used the “dumb white girl act” a
lot since I’ve been here, mostly to get out of answering uncomfortable
questions that people might ask me. It’s impossible to know what the guard was
really thinking when he let us into the race, but I would have been interested
to see how he might have reacted if different people had told him the same
story.
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| Emily, Ashlyn, Caitlin, Christina, Bernie, Julia having just run the Two Oceans Half Marathon |
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