Lego! Who here played with Lego during their childhood? And how about the women? Did you? As you can see, I didn't. All I wanted was to play with educational toys that could allow me to build anything that books taught me to dream about.
I'm extremely synesthetic, I enjoy hands-on activities. I like to cook, I like to build, I enjoy playing with puzzles. The other day I bought a dining room set that came disassembled. I said, "I'm going to assemble it!" It took me two days. By the end of the second day
I couldn't close my hand from all the screwing. I love it when people visit me, and I say, "You see? I assembled it." So far, no one has fallen off. But, unfortunately, we still live in a society that divides "blue for boys" and "pink for girls." At Christmas, only my brother would get Lego. Back then, I didn't even know what privileges meant. By the way, have you ever thought about the existence or non-existence of privileges in your lives, and how this affects your daily lives and of people around you? Let's do something. I've got a quick game to play with you. Please empty your space so you can stand up. I mean, one of the instructions is to stand up. So remove the tables in front of you to have space. It's going to be quick and I promise it won't hurt. I've got a few questions to ask. If the answer is "yes," please stand up. Then you can sit down again until the next question, and so on. Who here has a health insurance? Please stand up. You can sit down now. Who here studies or has studied in private schools? Please stand up. You can sit down now. Who here has received a car from their parents? Please stand up. Thank you. And just for reflection, who wouldn't be here at this event today if it wasn't for their privileges? I certainly wouldn't. But this certainty that I have now and that I'm sharing with you took a while to hit me. I remember that in 2011, during my last year of Law School at CESUSC, a private university in Florianópolis, I realized that despite not having been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, throughout my life, I've had access to opportunities that many of my family members, friends, and colleagues didn't have. And I remember talking to a classmate, someone I have always admired for her determination, willpower, for being an extraordinary student, and somebody who, just like me, always had a great wish to change the world, to build and leave a positive legacy to society. At that time, I was part of an international organization run only by young people, which has, as its mission, nothing less than to change the world and seek peace. I felt awesome for being part of that organization, having the opportunity to travel the world, to visit different countries and cultures, to do international cultural, corporate, and volunteer exchanges. And I remember asking this classmate, "Why don't you apply to join us? You've got everything they're looking for. You're intelligent, you're determined, you've got a great heart. And you want to do voluntary work in Africa, don't you? Go ahead and apply. It'll be a pleasure to endorse you, and I'm sure you can handle the selection process." And I remember that she looked at me, almost indifferently, and replied, "Yes, Alanna, I'd love to volunteer. But volunteer work demands time. I work in two internships, in the mornings and afternoons, to help pay the bills at the end of the month, and we also have classes at night. Plus, I still have to find time to study in order to keep my grades within the average, which, by the way, is higher than the college average, since I have a scholarship and I can't afford to lose my scholarship." At that moment, my world fell apart! And it did because only then I realized that changing the world requires much more than willpower and a great heart. Changing the world demands resources such as time and money which have never been equally distributed. On that day, I made a personal commitment. To learn more about privileges, to be more aware of my own privileges and what I do with them. For many years I even felt guilty for being a privileged person living in a painfully unequal world. But I went after answers, concepts, stories, examples of privileges and disprivileges. Supported and encouraged by my mentor, my friends and my colleagues, I started to research about it. And whenever I had the opportunity, I would start off a discussion about privileges, wherever I'd go. In 2016, I was living in the United States, and I was part of another international organization which gave me access to an international and extremely diverse network - people from all over the world, from different cultures, religions, ethnicity, and levels of education. And in that environment, I saw the perfect opportunity to talk to those people about what privileges mean. I invited them to participate in a group dynamic which you may have already seen on the Internet, called "The Privilege Walk" - something similar to what we did at the beginning of this talk. It's like a race where everyone begins from the same starting point. After all, we were all born equal, right? But as you can imagine, some people are more likely to reach the finish line than others. The rules are simple: for each question I ask, depending on your answer, you take a step forward or backward. At the end of the dynamic, we all sat together to discuss their experiences. It was such a pleasant and enriching conversation that it made me even more curious. And I wanted to make greater use of my network, which, by then, was not only made up of those who took part in the dynamic, but their network too. I created a simple digital survey and shared it through my online network - Facebook, email, WhatsApp, and so on. This survey had 101 participants from 22 different countries, where 77% of them were women and 23% were men. One thing about this survey is that I didn't limit the type of answers. All the questions I asked, I left them open so that people could answer according to how they feel, how they identify themselves, and how they feel they are represented. For instance, when it comes to sexual orientation, instead of simply adding the options we are used to seeing in society: heterosexual, homosexual - gay or lesbian, and bisexual; there was a colorful universe of every possibility. I learned that 2% of the respondents consider themselves simply as "gender-fluid" or "open-minded." And I found this beautiful! As for the ethnicity, since it was also an open question, I realized how diverse and, again, beautiful, is the universe we live in, when we don't label people and reduce these labels, such as when we apply to college to white, black, brown, and native. That's all you'll probably find. This is the ethnic profile of the people that contributed to this survey. When asked whether they had ever experienced a situation of disprivilege, 56% said "yes." I isolated this group of respondents to analyze each one of their answers. I was looking for the words, the situations that were most repeated by these people who have experienced situations of disprivilege. l learned that the most common situations of disprivilege, according to these people, were related, in this order, to: gender, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. And to be honest, I wasn't surprised by this. In the same way that I wasn't surprised by the 8% of participants who mentioned not seeing themselves as privileged. Folks, we live in a society that's unequal and full of injustice. Believing that everyone is privileged or seeing themselves as privileged would be an illusion, or at least, very naive of me. The surprise came when I started to read the answers from those people who don't see themselves as privileged. Some of them were quite easy to understand once I connected the answer to their profile. Others left me curious. There were people who talked about privilege as meritocracy. "No, I'm not a privileged person. I wasn't born into a wealthy family, and everything I earned was through my own merit." Well, the same for me, Alanna! But I'm aware that if it wasn't for my privileges, I wouldn't have had access to the same opportunities I had and that brought me here today. One concept or definition of privilege that really caught my attention is this which I'm going to read to you. According to this respondent, "Privilege is a left-leaning term, created to divert attention of the substance of arguments from their immediate origin." This is the world we live in! There are people who believe that privileges don't exist. But anyway, here I am talking about privileges, bringing you data, and in no moment have I set up a baseline for this discussion. After all, that's what I was looking for with my research, and that I still keep researching today because I keep talking about it. So, what is privilege, then? The Brazilian Portuguese dictionary Aurélio tells us that privilege is the right or advantage given to someone, with the exclusion of others. Based on the answers from the survey, I created this "word-cloud." The words in bigger font are those that appeared the most in the survey. [Opportunities, people, access, have] So, I thought, "Well, according to these people, privilege is something very similar to its definition in the dictionary. Privilege assumes a relation between at least two different people or two different groups. A relation based on an unequal comparison which usually results in injustice." In my conversations, I learned from Isabel - a young, middle-class white-American friend of mine - that for her, privilege is the fact that she is, just as I described her, able to go out wearing a hoodie, and be labeled, at most, as sloppy. This is not the same reality for Habmatu, her adopted brother from Ethiopia, who by being black, if he wears a hoodie to go out, for many people, especially in his predominantly white neighborhood, he can be perceived as a threat. As for me, I keep looking for answers, concepts and definitions about privileges, I keep talking to people about it. But from all the answers and definitions I've seen or heard, the greatest lesson I learned was at a business meeting where one of my bosses - who is also a teacher in the US and often debates this topic with his students - said, "The concept of privilege doesn't really matter. What really matters is what we do with it." To Daniel, or Danny, as we call him, "the greatest privilege of all is knowing when it is convenient or not to use our privileges." My name is Alanna Sousa and I am a privileged person. And I came here today with an invitation for you, that you may look and reflect upon privilege in a different way, to see it no longer as a synonym of inequality and social injustice. That you can see your own privileges just like this Lego piece that each one of you received here. You didn't choose to receive it. You didn't even know you'd receive one. You didn't have the opportunity to pick its shape, color, or model. You simply received it. And you can do whatever you want with it, including deny its existence and simply throw it away at the end of the event. Or you can build whatever you want, just like with Lego. I leave you with this invitation: to build. Build the dreams you learned to dream with the books you read in your childhood. Build safe spaces so we can have meaningful conversations, where we can learn more with one another and learn how to be more tolerant and respectful of our differences. Build means of transportation that can take us from our comfort zone to other's comfort zones.
Build bridges that allow us to cross the barriers of social inequality, prejudice, and discrimination. Build schools, parks, hospitals. Build our future! Just don't build walls. Thank you very much. (Applause)
