Identity and Privilege: Moving from Separation to Interconnection

While a focus on identity can be useful and empowering, hyper-individualism and the current sacredness of identity can also reinforce our sense of separation with each other and the living world. As we seek to understand that we are interconnected beings in an interrelated reality, we can lean into the truth of being both unique and having an interconnected relational identity. Teaching and learning that seeks to bring reconnection and healing to this world must also acknowledge the privilege and oppression that each of us brings into our interactions in both the individual stories of our lives and the co-mingling and interconnection of our lives as members of the earth. As teachers and leaders, we must find ways to highlight how our dominant systems including hyper-individualism reinforce systemic separation, power, privilege, and oppression, especially within educational settings. I share my own intersecting experience of privilege and oppression through the story of growing up as a third culture kid in West Africa, and explore the commonality of the human experience in being both an oppressor and oppressed.