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It's a strange sensation to discover that you - a Black man in America, with all of the connotations that label brings with it - are privileged. This realization is as profound and disturbing as when you first discovered that you grew up in a system that places you in a caste without privilege.
As a child growing up in Georgia, racial inequality confronted me at an early age when a close friend's mother told me that she did not want me playing with her son as we had reached the age when people had to "stick to their own kind."
Besides race, my socioeconomic group also tended to remind me that I lacked privilege. More people in my family have police records than college degrees. If privilege means having the odds to succeed in your favor, I felt like I was running a race with shackles on my feet.
When I began to read the writings of Black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, I started to see what I was up against more clearly. With the help of philosophical and liberationist lenses, the alienation and double consciousness forced upon me by my position under a system of uneven privilege came into focus. By the time I enrolled in Morehouse College, I was ready to rebel against the superstructure, to demolish the tower of power and privilege that held me prisoner in its basement.
Despite my ability to identify every case in which I pulled the short straw of privilege, I would typically fail to acknowledge those moments when I was actually more privileged in relation to other people. I could concede that some others had it harder than me, that some others had to fight more for what they wanted. For instance, I was aware that a kid growing up in a Mogadishu, Somalia, slum was disadvantaged on a scale much bigger than my own. However, this was purely empirical knowledge; I could not appreciate the profoundness of these experiences of others, and I could not empathize.
Paradoxically, my first year at the malecentered cosmos of Morehouse College, an all-male historically Black institution, threw feminism in my face. At first, I didn't know how to deal with it. The...