Today, exactly nine years and 11 months after I began paying off my student loans, I got an email from Cornerstone Education Loan Services. Subject line: "Congratulations! Your Loan(s) Has Been Paid In Full!"
When I graduated in May 2018, I got a six-month grace period before I had to start making payments. By November I'd been in my first full-time job for five months, making not very much but living at home. So when the loan service provider -- it was a different one then, no recollection of the name -- emailed me that it was time to start making payments, I entered into their online form an automatic monthly payment amount that would set me free in ten years.
Since then, I have been continuously employed (except briefly, by choice, in the months before moving to Pakistan), with increasing responsibilities and concurrently increasing salaries. I lucked into an extraordinarily cheap apartment in DC in 2009 and lived there for seven years, meaning hundreds of dollars a month that most of my friends were spending on rent was going into my savings account or 401k. I'm a somewhat cautious and non-impulsive spender, although I've taken some big trips and bought some splurge-y things over the past ten years. And every month, without my thinking much about it, a portion of my salary has gone straight to paying down my student loans. Until today.
There's an exercise called the unpacking the privilege backpack, created in the late 1980s by a feminist scholar named Peggy McIntosh as a way to critically examine the power she gained from being white in a racist society. In reflecting on my newly debt-free status, I re-read the essay she wrote about it. We used something akin to that activity in City at Peace, standing in a line and physically stepping forward and back as we decided whether each statement of systematically conferred (i.e. unearned) power, or lack thereof, applied to us.
I am white and benefit from the conferred power of that fact. Same goes for my cisgendered maleness, my heterosexuality, my native fluency in English, my American citizenship. And my economic status. Most people in the US think they're middle class and I was no different, but looking back I think we were in the top income quintile, at least when I graduated from high school. In any case, my income now places me in the upper quintile of salary earners in the US. My net worth is a little behind that, but relative to other people under 35 I'm way out in front. My income and wealth status are amplified in Pakistan by an order of magnitude or more: in the news recently has been the fact that less than one percent of Pakistanis earn a formal salary to pay taxes on.
Whatever hard work I've put in, whatever good planning I've done, is built on a foundation of unearned economic advantage. Systems of power and oppression are inextricably intertwined: In the City at Peace version of unpacking the privilege backpack, I ended up standing way out in front of most of my peers.
McIntosh concludes the essay about the privilege backpack this way: "Though systematic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching me, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base."
In one way today is a happy day: there are systems of unaccountable financial power and oppression far greater than me or any individual person, and I am free from being beholden to them. That is something to celebrate and be grateful for. But it's also a day for reflecting on McIntosh's challenge. What am I doing with my consciousness of my own power to erode the foundations on which it's built? What am I doing with my arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base? Not nothing, but not enough. Must to do more, and more consistently.
When I graduated in May 2018, I got a six-month grace period before I had to start making payments. By November I'd been in my first full-time job for five months, making not very much but living at home. So when the loan service provider -- it was a different one then, no recollection of the name -- emailed me that it was time to start making payments, I entered into their online form an automatic monthly payment amount that would set me free in ten years.
Since then, I have been continuously employed (except briefly, by choice, in the months before moving to Pakistan), with increasing responsibilities and concurrently increasing salaries. I lucked into an extraordinarily cheap apartment in DC in 2009 and lived there for seven years, meaning hundreds of dollars a month that most of my friends were spending on rent was going into my savings account or 401k. I'm a somewhat cautious and non-impulsive spender, although I've taken some big trips and bought some splurge-y things over the past ten years. And every month, without my thinking much about it, a portion of my salary has gone straight to paying down my student loans. Until today.
There's an exercise called the unpacking the privilege backpack, created in the late 1980s by a feminist scholar named Peggy McIntosh as a way to critically examine the power she gained from being white in a racist society. In reflecting on my newly debt-free status, I re-read the essay she wrote about it. We used something akin to that activity in City at Peace, standing in a line and physically stepping forward and back as we decided whether each statement of systematically conferred (i.e. unearned) power, or lack thereof, applied to us.
I am white and benefit from the conferred power of that fact. Same goes for my cisgendered maleness, my heterosexuality, my native fluency in English, my American citizenship. And my economic status. Most people in the US think they're middle class and I was no different, but looking back I think we were in the top income quintile, at least when I graduated from high school. In any case, my income now places me in the upper quintile of salary earners in the US. My net worth is a little behind that, but relative to other people under 35 I'm way out in front. My income and wealth status are amplified in Pakistan by an order of magnitude or more: in the news recently has been the fact that less than one percent of Pakistanis earn a formal salary to pay taxes on.
Whatever hard work I've put in, whatever good planning I've done, is built on a foundation of unearned economic advantage. Systems of power and oppression are inextricably intertwined: In the City at Peace version of unpacking the privilege backpack, I ended up standing way out in front of most of my peers.
McIntosh concludes the essay about the privilege backpack this way: "Though systematic change takes many decades, there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me if we raise our daily consciousness on the perquisites of being light-skinned. What will we do with such knowledge? As we know from watching me, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems of advantage, and whether we will use any of our arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base."
In one way today is a happy day: there are systems of unaccountable financial power and oppression far greater than me or any individual person, and I am free from being beholden to them. That is something to celebrate and be grateful for. But it's also a day for reflecting on McIntosh's challenge. What am I doing with my consciousness of my own power to erode the foundations on which it's built? What am I doing with my arbitrarily-awarded power to try to reconstruct power systems on a broader base? Not nothing, but not enough. Must to do more, and more consistently.
No comments:
Post a Comment