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The other day my boyfriend asked me:
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Hey if you could time travel to any time period where would you go?
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And I laughed and I said:
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Nowhere. This is the best time to be an Asian woman.
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Dur!
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He looked confused for a moment before he realized
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Oh.
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This made me think about this phrase that has
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been circulating in our cultural awareness lately
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"Check your privilege."
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So check your privilege basically says
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Yo. When you're considering somebody else's plight
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be aware of the specific privileges that you were born into
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so you can set those aside and accurately try to understand
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someone else's situation.
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So when my boyfriend said
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I've never thought about it that way.
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I started wondering: what's my privilege?
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And I do have some. I mean I was born into a family
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that placed a lot of value on education.
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All right Honey, I will give you a penny per page
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Because I'm greedy as fuck, I had a lot of good incentives to learn.
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Your daughter is the first in our middle school
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to read the entire section of the Young Adult Library.
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Money money money.
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My dad was also in the military
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so I was exposed to different cultures and countries
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and people and amassed quite a few dialects
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that are embarrassing now.
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When I was a kid, I was in North Carolina.
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*speaking Japanese*
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Ay brah, we went chase that motha fucka to the parking lot.
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Oh em gee. Are you bitches talking about sush sush?
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We should totes got to Sugar Fish (restaurant). It's amaze.
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And, after puberty, I was considered cute.
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Occasionally pretty. Which I'm sure helped me along the way.
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Now, as you can see by the graph, the more attractive you are
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the more cats a potential partner will tolerate.
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Ultimately, I hope that having this kind of awareness makes me a better person
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and more able to sympathize with people's struggles.
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Like not everybody was born with parents who are still together.
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And who support their dreams. Or were in a middle class family.
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Or were instilled with a work ethic so young
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Or experience the world and got to be exposed to different things.
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It's so easy to see someone through your own narrow lens
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and to like dismiss what they're going through.
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Or write off their struggles as excuses or complaints.
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It's a lot harder to try to keep in mind the opportunities you were afforded.
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Just because of where you were born.
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I've definitely been guilty of doing that.
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But on the whole, we're moving more towards empathy.
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And I love that.
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Which reminds me. I asked my boyfriend:
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If you could time travel to any period where would you go?
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The 1960s.
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Cool.
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I have no idea where Asian people were in the 60s.
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I don't know either.
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Where were we?
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I'm Anna Akana. Stay awesome Gotham.
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Thank you to Audible for sponsoring today's episode.
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Audible.com is the leading provider of audio books
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with over 180,000 downloadable titles to choose from.
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I love listening to audio books when I am trekking through the mountains on adventures.
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Or simply folding my dirty laundry which takes quite a bit of time.
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Right now I'm listening to Stephen King's "Insomnia."
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Because I enjoy all of the spooky tales that he writes.
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You can get that or another free audio book of your choice
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over at audible.com/anna.
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That's audible.com/anna.
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*poof*